But I am quite clear in my mind that if something interacts with matter, then that something is matter and the phenomenon can be studied. My academic qualifications are in psychology and special education. I have not pursued these as a career. but I have enough background to know that thought cannot coour without a brain. If you have seen as many malfunctioning brains as I have you would not be quite as adamant about the "radio receiver" analogy. Brain disfunction is seldom manifested as a weak signal. There are forms of retardation where this might be a tempting analogy, but brain damage and psychotic disorders affect personality in a very deep way.
On a slightly different tact, I think it is quite obvious that many mammal species, including cats and dogs, have an immediate sense of "Iness". Their consciousness is transient and doesn't lead to much complex learning, but it is there, just as certainly as is the consciousness of anyone outside myself.
If you absolutely deny animal consciousness, as some FReepers do, you have an easier time asserting that consciousness is a non-physical thing, because it is a property of the soul (which animals don't have). But if you believe consciousness exists on a continuium, then it becomes synonomous with brain function.
I’m always willing to reconsider analogies when I have new information that tends to disconfirm them. That problem has moved into the background, at least temporarily, while I digest Walker. He did point out in his book that the human brain is bombarded 24/7 by all species of electromagnetic radiation coming from the outside environment. There must be something in the way the mind works that filters out all this noise; for surely if we had to be conscious of it all, at all times, we would no longer be able to think: We’d be on “system overload.”
I do not absolutely deny animal consciousness. I have known and loved too many animals in my life not to recognize that at least some of them could be quite “full of themselves” – particularly dogs, cats, and horses. But I’m not “ready” to consider questions of animal consciousness here except to note that where human beings have free will, animals largely seem to operate according to an “instruction set” – what we call instinct.
I’m more interested in the problem of human consciousness. You don’t have to be a philosopher to be interested in this. Walker, a physicist, clearly is interested.
js1138, you wrote: “But if you believe consciousness exists on a continuum, then it becomes synonymous with brain function.” But I doubt that consciousness exists as a continuum; for there are times when consciousness does not function – during profound sleep, for instance. Yet while I am unconscious, the brain is still merrily chugging away, maintaining the homeostasis of the body while I sleep.
Let’s do a little thought experiment here. Let’s say that I’m hooked up to an EEG machine that is recording my brain waves during different types of unconscious and conscious states. During sleep – when consciousness is not present – the device reads out a steady pattern of brain activity stabilized at the low end of the range: This is the brain doing its bodily-maintenance routines – what I would like to called the “base state.”
Now let’s say I start to dream – presumed to be a form of consciousness. Instantly the trace from the EEG would show an increase in the level of brain activity, perhaps fitful yet at a higher level than that established by brain function during unconsciousness. This would continue as long as I’m dreaming; then fall back and stabilize at the “base level” when the dream ceases, and I fall back into the unconsciousness of the sleep mode.
Then I awake: Full consciousness has returned. Immediately the EEG trace would show (presumably!) a dramatic increase of brain activity, as the “internal dialog” starts up again, and I start to interact with the world about me. The EEG readout would likely show a median level of activity appreciably higher on the scale than that of the “base state” of brain activity during sleep. It would be spiking all around, as thoughts and feelings kicked in and passed away, to be succeeded by others in turn.
So far, we’ve pictured the brain activity of sleep mode, dreaming mode, and normal waking consciousness. We said that the sleep mode represents a kind of “base state” for brain activity that somehow becomes elevated when a form of consciousness is present, be it a dream or a conscious thought.
I’d expect that the EEG would read out different patterns, depending on whether I was watching TV, or just sitting on the beach, taking in the day, or reading, or struggling to resolve some analytical problem, and so forth. With the latter two, I am dealing with words. Words seem to be the “stuff” of ordinary wakeful consciousness; for the internal dialog – me “talking to myself” – is conducted mainly in words.
But there is a conscious state that can be achieved where all thoughts are stilled, where all words “go away.” This is the goal of a certain form of meditation. In this meditation, if successful, the mind is cleared of all thoughts; and all that is then left is a palpable state of awareness that has zero content. What would the EEG read out look like?
I suspect it would show all kinds of jiggles and spikes as I try to settle into the state of sheer thoughtlessness; but then, once “the zone” has been found, it would level out and hold steady – at a rate higher on the scale than that of the “base state” of brain activity.
All this just goes to show that the superimposition of consciousness on the base brain state substantially increases brain activity. But where is consciousness to be found, e.g., during sleep? Is it holed up in some region of the brain? Is it somewhere else?
We don’t know. And the EEG tape can’t tell us. It can register changes in brain function. But it cannot capture any of the conscious experiences that I have had – in dream mode, wake mode, or stilled mode. It also can't tell us "where" consciousness "goes" when the mind is unconscious.
The conscious experience is perfectly ineffable, and cannot be translated from one mind to another. It can be imperfectly described by the use of words, but that is all.
And when you boil it all down, that’s all the EEG read out is –a description. It cannot penetrate the conscious experience itself, nor give us any guidance as to the quality of the experience or even how it arises in the first place.
Do we really have a warrant to suppose that brain and consciousness really are the same thing, when one (brain, whose functioning is captured on the EEG tape) cannot even “explain” the other – which is said to be identical to it?
These are the problems. I’ve tried to demonstrate that consciousness is not a “continuum,” that it is something that is qualitatively different from the physical brain – that it is, in fact, a “thing in itself.” That it has a kind of autonomy (as the process of silencing the thought stream shows). This kind of autonomy is not something the brain has. For if the brain were to cease its activity, we would simply be dead, real soon.
Just a note in passing, I read the essay that PatrickHenry directed me to. I’m running over long here, so just a quick note: Somehow, the author moved blithely from his subtitle, which said “IF,” to the body of his argument, which turned “IF” into “IS.” “IF” was a proposition that had not been validated; yet the discussion assumed it had – a pre-analytical notion has, in this case, been turned into the major premise of the following argument. (There’s a certain dishonesty in such operations, IMO.) What we ended up with were the “qualia” – descriptions of conscious states of thinking and feeling that human beings are said to typically have.
May I note here that these “qualia” – descriptions of experiences consisting of words -- are directly analogous to the EEG tape recording the hypothetical brain activity of the above thought experiment? For they can tell us nothing about what consciousness is, or what my conscious experience was like for me. “Qualia” just look to me like yet another attempt to grind down the authority of human subjective experience, to “reduce it” to the level where it can be handled in terms of symbols that must forever remain distinct from actual experience itself. They represent a retreat from Reality, not an explanation of real things. JMHO FWIW