Is consciousness located in the brain?
From here on I'm going to assume that consciousness plays a role human behavior. I think it's pretty obvious that consciousness plays a role in human behavior. Just try to have a normal conversation with someone while they are knocked out. You can't.
Behaviorist psychologists talk about stimulus and response, but by doing so they neglect the mind. They might do better to talk about stimulus, mind, and response. There's something in between the stimulus and response, and that is the mind.
Here's where consciousness fits in to all of this. Consciousness is surely a state of mind, so it fits into the stimulus, mind, and response, sequence. The question: "Is consciousness located in the brain?", is dependent on whether the mind is located in the brain (because consciousness is a state of mind). I think it is, mind and brain are intimately connected, and where else would it be located?
Thoughts?
Behaviorist psychologists talk about stimulus and response, but by doing so they neglect the mind. They might do better to talk about stimulus, mind, and response. There's something in between the stimulus and response, and that is the mind.
Here's where consciousness fits in to all of this. Consciousness is surely a state of mind, so it fits into the stimulus, mind, and response, sequence. The question: "Is consciousness located in the brain?", is dependent on whether the mind is located in the brain (because consciousness is a state of mind). I think it is, mind and brain are intimately connected, and where else would it be located?
Thoughts?
Comments (49)
If the mind really is inside your brain then I don't think you would able to do any of those, at least not with current technology.
I don't believe your reasoning is correct here. Can you point, extract, throw around, all brain activity? No. Does that mean that some brain activity doesn't have a location in the brain? No.
The most useful person to turn to in this situation - as far as I’ve found - is Damasio. The whole body gives us consciousness even if we’re not attentive to it. In terms of behaviorism we ‘feel’ scared; meaning our conscious experience of an ‘emotion’ is ‘feeling’ (muscular tension, sweating, and increased heart rate). The interconnectedness of the brain organ (which is itself essentially a group of separated ‘areas’ we’ve partially created due to physical divisions and archaic maps that were based on a handful of research papers - hippocampus, Wernicke’s area, etc.,.) with various parts on the body and via numerous lines of communication (biochemical and/or via nerve cells) quickly makes the idea of nailing down a specific area of ‘consciousness’ as a little silly. If you think about having your arm chopped off you may still experience pain in the arm that isn’t there, butI can guarantee you won’t experience pain in the arm that isn’t growing out of your back because it never existed - then again ... I imagine some state of psychosis may induce such an experience, but you get the idea ;)
There is a very limited scope of terms in this area. Over the centuries we’ve used ‘spirit’, ‘self’, ‘ego’, ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘ken’, ‘consciousness’, ‘agent’, ‘memory’, ‘subject’, ‘monad’ and several dozen more in hundreds of languages. It’s a minefield for misconception, misunderstandings and misrepresentation.
Personally I just like to say I ‘experience’ and leave it at that. What is ‘experience’? Well, hopefully I don’t need to explain to you the gist of what ‘experience’ is as you’ll be ‘having it’ now. After that the only question I really have is why you’re asking anything more and to what end? Are you pushing a personal agenda or simply flying in the face of an existential type line of questioning?
The question behind the questioning is usually more telling. Questions without their dead parents are kind of in free fall more often than not - I’d say especially so in this case as the terms lack universal application in day-to-day speech. We can at least all agree, well enough, that ‘experience’ isn’t a term we’re going to deny where terms like ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’ create an instant shudder down many people’s spines.
Sometimes i think we all share the same collective conscious. Your consciousness is a subset and so is mine. We are held responsible to some extent for how we carry ourselves out in terms of how we view the world. Perhaps the universe in its entirety is the whole set of all consciousness. I understand this is a common concept in eastern philosophy.
Ofcourse this is all speculation.
All living things show a degree of 'consciousness'. Every cell in your body has 'consciousness'. You are the accumulation of all the cells in your body. Thought is a byproduct of your brain. You identify yourself with your thoughts. You believe you are your thoughts.
According to Demasio, some of the ancients believed the mind was located in the chest, as the heart. The concept of mind can change. Future research will probably theorize the mind as more than a product of traditional solution chemistry happening on a microscopic scale in neurons.
That's probably accurate, science and philosophy identify our minds as our thinking, and we perceive our thoughts to be occurring in our brains, so we look for mind in the understanding of a particular brain region, but this Early Modern concept is being revolutionized.
What evidence are you referring to? Things like someone getting knocked out, psychoactive drugs changing experience by acting on the brain, that kind of thing?
A human who has had his heart removed is not demonstrably conscious either. The brain may be integral to the operation of the organism, the organism may still be, in the broadest sense, conscious, in the sense that consciousness is actively engaged in an ongoing information exchange with the environment in many different ways.
The brain may not be conscious. But if the body stays alive, the body can be considered conscious. I think we confuse consciousness with self-consciousness, which is awareness of oneself. This is the highest form of consciousness that we know of but all awareness is consciousness. All life contains consciousness, otherwise it could not survive.
As it happens I'm also currently doing a lot of reading on systems theory, which is the emergent self-organizing processes he is describing.
So when I am hammering in a nail it is in fact my brain that is doing it, not my arms, hands and hammer?
So, I am fascinated by your thought processes. I provide examples and arguments parallel or directly supportive of your positions, and you seem to repeatedly misinterpret them as contradictory or antagonistic. Maybe you are a little defensive?
No, the exact opposite, when you are hammering in a nail it is a holistic experience. Exactly what the UCLA professor says, which I have always believed, as a proponent of embedded cognition.
Edit: Sorry, it is frustrating enough to be misinterpreted by someone with whom you disagree, let alone someone you don't!
Great point. Consciousness would need to permeate through the entire organism, beginning and ending at the surface of the skin. I would argue “consciousness” is a direct one-to-one ratio with the entire body. If a man loses a finger, for instance, he is that much less conscious.
The professor quoted above goes on to say, if he is asked to describe the shore, it is neither land, nor, sea, it is both. Likewise, you really can't say where the boundaries of an organism are. It depends on which systems you are looking at, digestive, tactile, endocrine, etc. They have different interactive boundaries.
Assuming the professor is Lakoff, take a Read of his book “Philosophy in the Flesh” if you get a chance.
I think an organism has a boundary by virtue of it being finite. The organism begins and ends at its surface.
Edit: ooo..the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought, that does strike a chord. Thanks.
Quoting Pantagruel
Well, I wouldn’t go that far. The human skin is a surface given that the human organism does not extend beyond it.
Not just the thoughts "Do this. I am doing this. I did this." The whole experience, the actions, the interactions. I think the notion "holistic" works. Like you said, the act of hammering, not reduced to an intention or a brain signal. The whole event and context.
Quoting Pantagruel
Okay, but which problem does it solve, looking at it 'holistically' that we couldn't solve or understand otherwise?
I would expect a theory or hypothesis to answer a previously incomprehensible issue or unsolvable question.
Unless there are two ovdtogt's on here and you're the other one?
Not quite. I believe consciousness is essential to life. No life without consciousness. The 1 cell organism has to be conscious (aware) of it's surrounding for it's survival. Consciousness lies at the root of life. As you add the senses (sight, sound, touch, taste.....) these are all conscious enhancements. Then you get the even higher cognitive conscious abilities and ultimately the self-consciousness that we posses.
It is all part of 1 continuum. From very primal to very complex consciousness.
I suppose I’ll have to read the arguments. The shore analogy doesn’t quite cut if for me.
But I agree that there is no clear cut boundary between brain and body, or any organ for that matter.
More recently, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch have drawn on embodied cognitive science...to explain their "enactive" notion of experience..."First, that cognition depends on the kinds of experience that come from having a body, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embeddded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context" p94
i.e. It is all fine to consider the sensorimotor nexus as the correlate of consciousness, but that nexus itself necessarily operates within a complex context, and that context itself forms part of the framework of consciousness.
So, maybe you don't agree, or go this far, but, yes, this is my own position too.
I agree. we’re always situated (I think that’s another term they use) in an environment. Simple notions such as “inside” or “up” would be impossible without both the body and the context within which it exists.
Embodied cognition will probably supersede the computational theory of mind in my opinion. If the Moravec paradox can be applied to humans, a great deal more cognitive resources go into simple movements (like the act of taking a step) than any high-level reasoning. It’s why they can get AI to play chess but getting it to open a door is extremely difficult. Embodied cognition when applied to AI has led to interesting results.
Has anyone proposed a biological mechanism for how a function such as vision integrates with the rest of the brain? Many neuroscientists claim that the eye-related brain processes of an organism such as a frog are merely an automatic stimulus/response system, but this is almost ridiculous in the context of common sense observation. The activity of a sense organ such as the eye has got to be a sensory abbreviation for the sake of greater efficiency within very specific conditions, such as the quick reflexes required for predation or some kinds of precarious balancing, not at all a primary cause of motivity or even perception in general.
What is the relationship between incoming and outgoing brain processes, and are all outgoing brain processes what we could regard as "conscious awareness"? If so, any theories of how awareness integrates with the holistic consciousness phenomenon, and what makes awareness graduate to self-awareness?
These inquiries might be unanswerable at this stage of science, but worth some thought at least.
I don’t confuse the two.
I don’t think there is a discussion to be had here so I’ll bow out unless the OP has something to say.
cryptic
It has been said that the gut is the second brain. Consciousness occurs in at least some living creatures. Why couldn’t it pervade the universe? What you call cognitive science might not be all that there is. You might say science explains everything. I might say that science is a method to try to explain things. It’s a paradigm. Why am I wrong in saying that consciousness orders the universe giving us the laws of nature? How do you explain where the order comes from? How do you explain that the universe is at all explainable?
As far as we know conscious awareness is a biological phenomenon. Its function is to help creatures react to their environment.
That’s metaphysics.
Absolutely.
I've held this belief for a long time, anyone care to change my mind?
Consciousness is located in the whole body like a computer program is located all over computer’s integrated components, connecting wires and peripherals it uses. Obviously some parts are more relevant than others, like hand / mouse vs. brain / cpu.
However, you could say that a computer program is really only actualised on the display screen, for example, and that it is the display then where a program is actually located. And that would be more in line with asking “where is visual qualia located in the brain”, that I think is better, more specific question, which includes more interesting questions such as how is it visual qualia arranged in the brain-space, how big are individual pixels, and what are the colors represented with.
The only thing that bothers me about consciousness is that I just can't turn it off when I want to. If I could go p-zombie mode for undesirable situations, that would be nice.