Lagayscienza wrote: ↑November 27th, 2023, 1:40 am
I am so tired of hearing that science thinks that consciousness comes from the brain
Gee, if consciousness doesn't come from the brain, then where does it from? And how can you tell?
If you want to know where consciousness comes from, wouldn't it first be handy to know what consciousness is? Most people, all of science, and most of philosophy see consciousness as being thought and the rational mind, which comes from the brain. It may well be true that thought comes from the brain, but is it consciousness? If thought, that comes from the brain, is consciousness, then thought is the source of our lives, which would make the Bible story in Genesis true -- first there was the word (thought) and the word was "God" -- so thought started everything. "God" was first. All species that do not have a brain work on reflex, or automatic responses that are dictated by "God", or maybe they are magic, but they are NOT conscious. All ecosystems are dictated by "God" and all of the self-balancing of Nature is dictated by "God" or the Intelligent Designer -- awareness (consciousness) is irrelevant to these processes. This is close to what was believed in the Dark Ages, so we have not advanced much, and I don't think it was the intention of science to promote this kind of thinking.
The above thoughts brought me into discussion with a professor at Duke University, who explained the following. He said, "If you take the greatest thoughts known to man and write them down on a piece of paper, or record them on a disc, then store them for hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of years, what will happen?" "Nothing." "Because thought has no power, so without an active reader, thought is static and incapable of doing anything -- much like thought or knowledge recorded in a dead body/brain. It will certainly not evolve." This sent me on a quest looking for the active components of consciousness.
In my thread, "Pure Consciousness?", I questioned and then broke down consciousness into six main components that make up most of our understanding of consciousness. Three of them, thought, memory, and knowledge, are private and internal aspects of consciousness -- you can not know mine and I can not know yours unless we choose to share the information. These components are digital and can be sorted, manipulated, and accumulated, which is why they are the mainstay of the rational mind. The other three, emotion, feeling (not tactile), and awareness, are fluid, analogue, not private, and are difficult to define as they are not static and tend to flow between lives. They are aspects of the unconscious because they can be felt, but not known, thus they are something that we are not consciously aware of until we see a reaction. The unconscious is predominantly guided by emotion and is not very knowable.
Then I went to a science forum where I had some discussion with a neurologist, who was working on an AI project, I believe it was in Italy. I learned a lot from that person, but had problems believing that the unconscious aspect of mind is a receptacle for excess knowledge that the conscious aspect of mind could not hold -- as is taught by a lot of science. Most people believe that the rational conscious aspect of mind, where we do our thinking, plan our days, and guide our activities, is our consciousness. I don't think so, as it seems that the rational aspect of mind is more likely a product of consciousness. There is too much going on in our minds that we have little or no control over, which did not come from the conscious aspect of mind, is part of our unconscious, and that also keeps us alive. The unconscious is too important to our self-preservation, ecosystems, and to the self balancing of Nature.
So it was time to study the unconscious. The unconscious has at least five levels or "stratums" as discovered by Matt Blanco, a psychiatrist, so there is nothing simple about it. It works predominantly through emotion, so it is reactive, and it ignores time so it is not very logical as we know logic. Most of its deliberations deal with recognizing opposites like same and difference, self and other, which is where our bias comes from and probably what causes the self-balancing of life. Although the rational aspect of mind is generally thought to be internal, echoing the parameters of the brain, there is no such limitation on the unconscious. We have no idea of what the parameters of the unconscious are, but from what we have discovered from hormones and pheromones, it is a player in the game of ecosystems, so who knows. I once saw an article about a theory of consciousness that stated it is much more likely that we are in consciousness, than that consciousness is in us. I suspect that the article was about the unconscious and have no doubt that it is an important component in spirituality. After all spirituality is really just connections.
If you could take consciousness and put it in the form of a sentence, you would find that thought, memory, and knowledge represent the nouns in the sentence, the objects, that give the sentence form and substance. You would find that feeling, emotion, and awareness represent the verbs in the sentence denoting action and state of being. It would take both in order for the sentence to work, make sense, and explain the activity.
ALSO CONSIDER
Let me state that the supernatural, the spiritual, the paranormal, and some forms of mental illness are the same thing. The difference between them is accreditation. The sameness between them is emotion and the unconscious aspect of mind.
Somewhere around 400 AD, Constantine and Augustine established the Western (Christian) Church doctrine, and about 100 years after that, the idea of the supernatural, as we now understand it, was firmly established. (You can look this up in Wiki) Anything that was not accepted as spiritual by church doctrine was downgraded to supernatural. If you are Joan of Ark and hear voices in your head, it is spiritual, for anybody else, it is supernatural or maybe schizophrenia. If you are talking to your dead husband, it is supernatural, unless you live in an area that accepts reincarnation and your husband has been reborn -- then it might be spiritual. If your dead husband is walking around, it is definitely supernatural, unless you practice VooDoo -- maybe. So the difference between supernatural and spiritual is generally what the local religion accepts -- accreditation.
About 100 years ago, Freud, Jung, et al, identified the unconscious and studied it. It was not long before they discovered that some things labeled supernatural or spiritual, were in reality aspects of the unconscious. These aspects became explained as the paranormal. The interesting part, at least to me, was that no matter which of the labels were used, spiritual, supernatural, paranormal, or the unconscious -- all of them work through emotion -- as the unconscious does. Emotion was a common factor. I began to wonder what exactly is emotion that it should have so much power and influence, and so little understanding of what it is and how it works.
Someone here stated that emotion works through chemistry and electricity, which is partially correct. Emotion works between things, and I suspect that chemistry is an important player in that game, but it uses something closer to magnetism than it does electricity. If you are interested and get the opportunity, go to YouTube and look up Richard Feynman's explanation of magnets. He states that they are considered electricity, and then goes on to state that they really are not electricity, but you would have to take his class to understand it. Unfortunately he is no longer with us. But emotion and feeling definitely work between things like magnets, and if you break them down to their simplest forms, they work on attraction/repulsion.
Sorry it took me so long to reply to this, but I was in the hospital last week.
Gee
- By Fried Egg
- By Cathal