A plea for Consciousness

You think i have never been shot in alternate dimensions? I have been shot multiple times. I know what it feels like to nearly die. You can still think when you are dying, you make deals with God until they use 50 caliber.

Not really no. Your consciousness never really changes. Well at least mine does not. I have a distinct experience of being a spectator to my own reality, my voice/body at times, distinctly feels like it is someone else whom I don’t identify with.
I had a near death experience before, my consciousness didn’t really change, it felt the same.
Saying consciousness changes is like saying your consciousness changes when you enter a 711. The stimulus entering your consciousness changes but your consciousness remains the same

Why should they? Consciousness only exists as a first-person phenomenon–you can’t find it by looking for a third-person phenomenon.

I find it dubious to speculate on what some esoteric experience feels like as evidence for the possibility of the mind leaving the body. The only thing that would really challenge a view like mine (that the human mind is irrevocably tied to the brain) is OBEs; so unless this experience of “pure awareness” (whatever that is) is like looking at your body from a remote location, I’d say: why can’t the brain just produce such an experience?

For the record, I wouldn’t say that either. I’d say the body, or the brain, is reducible to the mind–but I still maintain they are inseparable.

You think I haven’t explored to the depths? You think I haven’t thought of everything that can be thought of?

How many of you have the courage to say what needs to be said, how have the courage to put down the dick of science and the cup of mainstream popular tea-logic and the balls to do so and say what needs to be said. I’m not some bible thumper, I have played and toyed with atheism and went to its depths. I have thought about the great sea of nothingness and the cosmos and the universe more than many men. How many of you, day end and day out, thought abut the art of nothingness and the idea of the void? I have thought in many ways and pushed many boundaries and in fact many things have changed because of thoughts like mine.

How many of you, would ridicule, scoff and mock the idea of spirits, anything that doesn’t conform to your self-inflicted limited way of empirical reason, just to feel a girlish satiation and to pat your self on the shoulder as you drink your metaphorical tea? How many of you, really ponder reality and spirituality to the very depths, pushing beyond even the envelopes of the philosophers before you, fearing not uncharted ideas and philosophies? How many of you really self-examine, and can objectively scrutinize and criticize their own philosophy and how many, would abandon their own philosophies at a moments notice, without experiencing any pangs of regret?

How many of you argue just to argue, and not arguing to explore new ideas, but just enforce set ways of thinking?
Think about how you are still here, in this body, in the flesh, and think about the ideas of the multiverse, is it not plausible and possible that there are, alternate outcomes, alternate dimensions, in where, you are gravely injured? And is it not possible that we, are still here, because our timeless consciousness automatically enters the dimension in which we maintain our existence? And when one piles up years upon years of life experience, one can feel deep in their bones, echoes and glimmers of what could have been, one can empathize and understand experiences which did not quite happen, yet, are felt deep in your bones.

Does providing a long and detailed explanation of the mechanical machinations of life, much of which is unproven, actually explain consciousness? It no more explains consciousness that would be explaining the functions of an IBM computer.

As far as OBE’s go, science and society, is unprofessional and needs to get serious about it. Nurses need to do proper, scientific, OBE testing, using playing card technique, in all hospitals

If Richard Dawkins, Steven Hawkins, Neil De Grasse Tyson, and Daniel Dennett were all in a room with me, they would all kneel before me, inherently sensing my superiority, due to my pheromones, as well as their psychic realization in awe of my dominance, and recognition of my greatness

This is not a joke

I have outdebated stronger men, more creative men than they, I have boosted my mental agility with the talk of the best of the best, the Internet is not for the passive or the faint

I believe they are inseparable as well. I made the mistake of confusing “inseparable” from “reducible”.

We must conclude they are inseparable until someone shows that they can be separated. So far I’ve seen no such evidence or reasoned explanation that could account for the idea that they can be separated. That doesn’t mean they can’t be, just that as philosophers there is no reason to conclude that they can be.

I can explain consciousness and mind in clear philosophical terms that anyone could follow, anyone who honestly wants to think about it that is. I’ve talked to many people over the years who believe that consciousness or mind can be separated from the body, but not a single one of them has been able to explain how that can happen, or provide any evidence for it. Basically it comes down to a lot of wishful thinking and some confusions about strange experiences at the limits of our subjectivity, such as hallucinations for example.

Someone gets high or has near death experience and has a kind of subjectivity distortion, hallucination, and then claims “I had an out of body experience!” Really? Or did you just basically have a really weird dream as the brain chemistry in your head was all out of whack for a while?

I’m interested in why people default to believing in things for which there is no reason or evidence. If I dream of flying I don’t wake up and say “I can fly!”, but I bet 10,000 years ago people did just that.

Wyld wrote:

There is no proof of them being inseparable; there is only evidence of them being correlated.

Just because they are correlated, and because we have only experienced them as correlated, does not mean that they are definitely inseparable.
It just means that you have never experienced them as inseparable, that’s it.

A more rational conclusion would be that you don’t know if they are inseparable, but that they are definitely correlated in some way.

And correlation doesn’t, necessarily, mean irreducibility, in either direction ( idealism << >> materialism).

Like I said, all this means is that they are correlated. Correlation does not equal emergence necessarily.

Computers and wifi are correlated, does this necessarily mean that the wifi emerges from the physical components of the computer?
When you punch a hole in your computer screen, the internet may lag and glitch. Again, does this mean that the wifi emerges from the computer?

No

Gravity and mass are correlated. Does mass emerge from gravity? Does gravity emerge from mass?

Nobody knows

We just know that mass and gravity are correlated

So too with consciousness and the brain. We just know that they are correlated in some way.

There is evidence of OBE’s, there are entire books describing spiritual OBE experiences verified by doctors.

But you don’t want to hear it, you want to accuse everyone of being in a giant conspiracy of making books that aren’t real, because “muh richard dawkins”. Secretly I think you worship dawkins because he looks the same as emma watson.

Look, im on the same page as you are, I want OBE’s to be done scientifically. But richard dawkins needs to stop dickin’ around with his infomercials a tell nurse bimbos in hospitals to stop dicking around setup scientific observation of OBE’s using the playing card experiment

But we know you ain’t gonna do it, noones gonna do it because you are all paid opposition, don’t reall care about science, don’t really care about setting up a proper obe experiment in hospitals, just like to dick around and say that spirituality is fake and false and that somehow this is the “default” philosophical position

And you better set up a card with BIG FONT. You all are like a bunch of sluggish bimbos, lethargic and have to be poke and prodded and convinced to help REAL SCIENTISTS to an experiment, with all you naysaying saying how REAL SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS are a waste of time

Its like, the dead dont see too well, use a big font, you should know this on your own, but since you are giving lip and attitude, Im supposed to just be quiet while you subtly botch the experiment on other ways because I should be thankful that the bimbo is finally complying (even though they STILL wont setup the experiment in the proper manner just so when it fails we can waste more controversy and time on how they fucked it up!

That’s the fate of the science industry! Ran by stupid assholes and bimbos who have to be poked and prodded do something, then when they do it they can’t even do it exactly right, then they make even more bogus conclusions based on the fact the experiment was botched due to their idiocy, then its even harder to convince them to REDO the experiment right, because they feel you are wasting their time by asking

Why would you ever mix Richard Dawkins with Emma Watson?

What’s the playing card experiment?

I don’t even like Dawkins. More stupid assumptions from you. Sort of like your stupid assumption that you can say the word “consciousness” and actually mean something. Until you can explain what consciousness is and how and why it forms, you don’t know anything.

As I said, I can actually explain that. But you would rather talk about some book you read one time.

Should have called it a plea for stupidity - i am glad i didn’t because it is in obvious abundance

Face the facts, you’re an auuutist.
Anime nerd much?

Put your money where your mouth is.
You wasted 5 minutes of my life giving me 5 paragraphs telling me the theory of evolution.

If cars were sentient, and asked me to explain sentience, and I just gave them an auto-mechanic guidebook…I’d be as dumb as you.

Prove to me you aren’t a autistic tard like I think you are.

Wyld:

While I agree that we should be cautious in making claims that the two are separable, I also believe that we should be cautious in what VIEW we privilege over the other. Why should I presume that a 1st person, subjective experience isn’t “real” simply because such an experience can’t be verified by 3rd person methodologies?

Why is representational knowledge privileged over direct gnosis? I don’t think we should ever reduce a 3rd person methodology to a 1st person one or vice versa. We should not reduce the interior to the exterior, or the inner to the outer, or the immaterial to the material. Nor vice versa. My subjective experiences are true enough. Just as representational knowledge is true enough. Neither are absolutely true as far as I’m concerned.

But I will say one more thing. Without subjective experience life is utterly void of meaning. Knowing all of the facts in the world will can not give any meaning to ones life. They can only have meaning because the the subject gives them meaning. And the subject does not grow based on knowing facts. The subject grows because it is exposed to new forms of gnosis. A mirror can show us everything that lies in our environment with the exception of one thing: our very selves. Our very subjectivity. And again, it is subjectivity that gives the mirror and all that lies within it, meaning. And NOT the other way around.

Wyld - you’re on the borderline, please rein it in or you’ll get a warning.
UP - you’re over the borderline. Warned.

One problem is that no one has ever, ever, ever, found consciousness in a body. We can chop the brain into a million pieces but we’ll never see consciousness. Only matter.

The second thing is that people have and can experience themselves as pure awareness, not located in any body or any other material “thing”. From this perspective the body not only seems like one object among many, but also it seems like the body is contained inside the mind and not vice versa. Further, this experience feels far more real, pure, natural, etc. then the typical experience of the mind being somewhere in the head/body.

Now I’m not going to outright say that there is not connection between consciousness and the body. Clearly there is. But I can’t say for certain that consciousness is reducible to the body any more than I can say that I am reducible to my car.
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If you get a brain injury, your consciousness changes.

If you ingest brain-altering chemicals, your consciousness changes.

If your body is under stress, your consciousness changes.

If you get a bullet through the head, your consciousness changes.

Basically, consciousness is something that emerges from a certain kind of structure of the brain+body and the interaction of that structure with experiences. To believe anything else is nonsensical, unconfirmed reports of OBE’s notwithstanding.
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Check: michaelprescott.typepad.com/mich … false.html

Consciousness seems to be the electrical patterns of the mind, the sensation of pain seems to be a direct electrical sensation.
Why the electricity enters some bodies as opposed to others is a mystery.

posted by Don Schneider in “Why is Consciousness”

In the conventional Western paradigm, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter in the form of a human/animal brain. In the Eastern metaphysical schools based upon the Upanishads (most saliently within the Hinduism school of Advaita Vedānta and within schools of Mahayana Buddhism (such as Zen and Yogacara), Consciousness (“Brahman” in Hindu terminology) is the fundamental ground of existence which cannot be further sublated. All is a manifestation of Consciousness just as dream characters and ambience are manifestations of brains as mental processes. Thus, matter is an epiphenomenon of consciousness as opposed to the visa versa view of Western materialism.