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Quote by: luke virtual kh Consciousness has been explained materialistically. It's merely activity in the brain. Simple. |
Even if it is solely tied to activities in the brain, then that still means it can't be explained because we don't know a lot about how the brain actually operates and activity in the brain and consciousness aren't identical. You can train yourself over time to do things unconsciously. That's still part of brain activity but isn't consciously noticed. When you sleep and aren't dreaming, there's no conscious recollection of anything, yet activities still occur in the brain so consciousness excludes at least some forms of brain activity. There are sounds occuring all the time that we don't pay attention to, yet the nerves in the ear still pick them up.
I recognize that the brain is able to filter out unnecessary data, so we can consciously pay attention to the important parts but obviously consciousness isn't something that encompasses the entire nervous system. It's attached to elements of it. So there are likely specific features of the brain associated with consciousness but there aren't any visible strings ... so what holds your consciousness to one specific spot and what aspects of brain activity are being consciously detected?
And this still leaves the gaping hole of what connects the two together. Why are you in a specific body and not another? What physical mechanism can account for this when cells and atoms are being continually recycled through the body? There's isn't a specific spot in which consciousness resides (as far as I know). It's distributed in operation. If it's distributed, then it would seem to be a product of energy/forces which travel and radiate and have characteristics we're still exploring that aren't easily equated with our typical understanding of matter.
Consider this: If consciousness is simply part of a physical system in the brain, then where does it go when you're unconscious? When you're unconscious, the brain and all the matter it's composed of is still there ... but YOU aren't. Matter doesn't disappear, yet consciousness does. So consciousness would seem more likely associated with the properties and/or energies of matter, than the matter itself.
I guess the point is that even if consciousness is simply a product of the material world. Here are some of the things the material world has to offer:
Quantum Entanglement and Teleportation (physical properties can be shared and move between discrete units)
Bose-Einstein condensates (matter doesn't have solid edges but is blurred and even multiple atoms can under certain circumstances effectively merge into one)
Holographic/Fractal characteristics to the universe (A bit harder to explain, but the overall complexity that we see to the universe is quite likely more a product of our inability to understand how small sets of interactions evolve into complexity over time and on larger physical scales)
Also, matter and energy can be transformed between each other and most views in science seem to be heading toward simply saying everything is energy and then trying to explain how on a macroscale view we see the approximations of matter.
My guess is that even with all the possible findings of these, consciousness still lies outside the universe we know. It just seems as though we'll never likely be able to really point to something and say "that's you", though we might be able to at least understand how you communicate with the universe and find some interesting possibilities along the way.