What makes us conscious?
If you've studied the history of the universe, you are probably familiar with the notion that we are literally made up of the remnants of dead stars. Going deeper, you realize that everything is made up of the basic 118 elements. I'm not sure how to phrase this, but if everything is made up of just permutations and combinations of elements, what makes me me? Similar questions online ask about the difference between us and rocks. That's simpler to answer: we follow the rules of living things. But here's the tricky thing. What makes you you, and me me? Both of our muscles move when acetylcholine is released, both of us are happy when dopamine is released, and both of us feel secure when serotonin levels are calming. That's easy to answer: our bodies simply produce different amounts of a certain chemical or neurotransmitter. I guess what I am really asking is how am I conscious of myself. How do I feel what I feel and wonder about you feel. I think I put out a pretty clear question, but if someone can better explain the question, please do.
Comments (23)
I think you've answered your own question. Each of us is an unique combination/permutation of matter. I imagine this uniqueness defines each one of us i.e. my particular combination/permutation is me.
Conscious makes us.
It is very obvious. All just have to reverse the materialist notion of life and you arrive quickly at the obvious answer to your question - if you can entertain the notion that consciousness creates matter which is far more likely than matter created consciousness.
Yeah it's just so obvious. Alcohol doesn't cause drunkeness, drunkeness causes alcohol. Lobotomies don't cause a destruction of integrative thought, a lack of integrative thought cause lobotomies. Etc, etc.
Isn't this just begging the question, though, by implicitly assuming consciousness is akin to the effects of a physical reaction?
Consciousness isn't really weird, at least not in comparison to the apparent outside world. We at least know what consciousness is like. The "real" world is only able to be ascertained indirectly. It's probably nothing like what we experience it to be, if it even exists in the first place.
Can you explain why it is ''far more likely'' that consciousness creates matter?
What do you mean ''can create matter''? I've never heard of a mind create matter. Are you talking about god?
Which theory is this? Can you elaborate?
So you have changed your claim now? Consciousness no longer creates matter. Instead matter can kill it, yet not create it?
Yet what is happening when physicians prescribe stimulants? And consciousness finds itself enhanced, enlivened? What are the consequences of admitting that matter appears to affect the state of mind in predictable fashion in either direction.
Question: I would have thought that the ability of the mind to heal itself from brain injury, by re-routing its activities to other areas of the brain via 'neuroplasticity', demonstrates the ability of mind to 'rewire' the brain. That is the substance of the book 'The Brain that Changes Itself', by Norman Doidge.
Now, if mind was purely the output or product of matter, then you wouldn't expect that to happen, would you? You would think, if the brain is injured or damaged or diseased, then the mind would have no capacity to compensate if it were a 'slave' to the physical configuration.
That is not to deny that physical changes don't lead to affective consequences, but it is to question the degree to which this is a one-way relationship.
Hah. That's a dreadful book in terms of its over-egged celebration of plasticity.
But remember that my own take on neurology is semiotic. So I don't explain the mind as a material state of affairs. The mind is a system of signs. It is an interactive model of the world. So in some sense, the brain has a distributed or holistic memory of how it needs to be to continue to function the way it normally does. This is how - top-down - it reconstructs itself even after serious insult.
So in the semiotic view, what is important is that the material parts of the machinery are maximally unstable. Life depends on molecules that are always on the verge of falling apart (and equally, just as fast reforming). That is, the hardware of life is the precise opposite of the hardware suitable for computing. Life needs a fundamental instability as that then gives signs, or encoded information routines, something to do - create stability.
So from the get-go - down at the nanoscale quasi-classical scale of material process - "consciousness" or semiosis is giving the biophysics just enough of a nudge to keep the machine rebuilding itself. Proteins and other constituents are falling together slightly more than they are falling apart, and so the fundamental plasticity is being statistically regulated to produce a long-running, self-repairing, stable organism.
The brain then just repeats this basic semiotic trick on a humongously complex scale of organisation. That is how brains can effect repairs - rearrange and regrow to keep doing what they have learnt to do.
Holistically, they have to be able to regulate plasticity the whole time anyway. The half-life of structural elements of neural tissue like microtubules is about 10 minutes. A large proportion of what was your brain this morning will have fallen apart and rebuilt itself by the time this evening comes around. So viewed on the nano-scale, you might say the brain's ability to maintain its identity in the face of the chaotic thermal flux that is the molecular level of cellular machinery is far more remarkable than any recovery from stroke.
Quoting Wayfarer
It is absolutely a two way relationship. But one of sign and matter, not mind and matter.
I guess what I am wondering is these permutations and combinations of the genes and elements cause my body to maybe produce more of one chemical and less of another, just like how programming affects what a computer does. But they are not self-aware. My computer is unaware of itself, as is my phone, they don't know that they are who they are. How can I?
I think that signs imply minds, but admit it's not something that could ever be resolved conclusively.
Quoting dm12
If you're wondering how 'reductive materialism' works - you can relax, it doesn't work. Nobody knows how neurobiology gives rise to consciousness, in fact that is called 'the hard problem', and that is why it's hard.
You are right. Computers aren't self-aware. But I don't see how this leads to us being not self-aware.
To be conscious of something amounts to having one's attention directed towards it.
How a biological organism can have its attention directed towards something is partly explained by the fact that there are things which are interesting enough to pay attention to; typically things which tend to increase the fitness of the organism, such as food, sex, dangers or predators etc. It seems fairly clear how the organism may also benefit from paying attention to itself, its capacities, like the presence of others and their capacities. That's one part of an explanation of how you are conscious of yourself.
The other part would be to explain how all the biology works in terms of synaptic events etc., i.e. how the biological activity of directing attention towards things arises from lower lever biochemical processes. It might require more empirical research but the problem does not seem insurmountably hard as some philosophical dualists would like to have it.