@theocorfiatis8456

3 months ago

Very lively debate and a very diverse field of study. I spent a few years of my life trying to quantify consciousness for the purposes of determining how much anaesthetic should be given to a patient in order to safely keep them unconscious. This debate touched on this subject and a few other related subjects. Anil Seth very skillfully side stepped how consciousness originates and assumed that consciousness only resides within the physical confines of the human brain (Tanya Luhrmann was a little more philosophical about this). Instead they both focused on the physical aspects of consciousness, which are all that any scientist can measure. This is a totally rational way to think, based on the scant information we currently poses on this topic. These physical aspects, give us absolutely no clues as to the nature of human consciousness and its origins. Debates of this kind tend to become very philosophical and go around in circles as one is left to speculate because of the fundamental lack of information. Rupert Sheldrake seemed to me to be a lot more open minded on whether consciousness can extend outside of the human brain and even though he's considered as something of a maverick and heretic by many of his (biologically minded) peers, I like his open mindedness and some of his ideas, which leaves the door open for new ideas. Work on machine consciousness has been progressing for many years. There are various schools of thought on how to give machines self awareness. The problem has been that the predominant school of thought was that consciousness would be achieved by increasing the complexity of the artificial neural networks used to build AI. But with gigantic leaps in the computing power of these artificial neural networks, self awareness akin to human consciousness has not been achieved. So most probably, brain complexity is not the origin of human consciousness. The work of Physicist Roger Penrose and Neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff on human consciousness adds a quantum component to the workings of the human brain, by way of the nano-tubules found within brain cells. This seems to suggest that consciousness could originate from quantum interactions within brain cells. Quantum entanglement of subatomic particles has shown us that space-time is non-local. If this hypothesis of consciousness holds true, it could also lead us to the conclusion that consciousness can reside outside of the human brain. Again, this is hypothetical. There are many other schools of thought on this issue. One hypothesis pointed to by string theory is that we could be living inside a black hole, in which case we could be living inside a 2D hologram which feels and looks like a 3D universe. The interesting thing about holograms is that each element which makes up the hologram contains all of the information contained in the entire hologram. If that's the case then our consciousness might be contained in the tiniest elements which make up this universe ......... pure speculation, but again, we're in the realms of pure philosophy here. The simulation hypothesis is another, where we could be living inside a huge computer simulation, in which case non of what we experience is real and that anything is possible within the bounds of the computer simulation. Or, we could all be parts of some massive universal consciousness which connects everything and could mean that our consciousness does not reside within our physical brain. Such a theory of mind could also tie in with emerging physics hypotheses of consciousness and information theory, where information itself has mass and therefore energy, and that consciousness could be more fundamental than either energy or matter. Again hypothetical, but possibly mathematically provable ? or disprovable ..... The questions these scientists and others are asking are as fundamental as the questions about creation of the universe and life itself. These are the deep questions we have asked for thousands of years, and could take thousands more years to truly answer, if at all..... They will not be answered by biologists. The answers will come by integrating fields such as physics, mathematics, biology and chemistry. Each science describes one small piece of the puzzle.

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