• intrapersona
    579
    Please put forth any evidence in favor of either side.

    If you want to pre-read I suggest this thread from a brain-health forum where most people posting have a good understanding of neuroscientific processes in the brain: http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/73157-how-does-consciousness-emerge-from-neurons/
  • dukkha
    206
    If it's created within a physical brain, then the brain that is creating your conscious experience cannot be located within your head, rather your entire body and the world around you - being constituted by conscious experience must already be a conscious creation within a physical brain. You know about your head through sensory experience. If sensory experience is within a physical brain, then your head itself must a conscious creation already within a physical brain.

    And if so, from the position of what you exist as - the conscious experience, the physical world including the brain supposedly causing your conscious experience transcends your epistemological access - you cannot know anything about this physical world, including whether it even exists, and whether there is a physical brain there causing your conscious experience. This then collapses into idealism because the physical world has no explanatory value at this point. The idealist then understands the "physical world" as being nothing more than a concept or idea in his mind that has no independent existence. It's a scientific unobservable and the idealist is a scientific antirealist.

    When we do science, we notice correlations between consciousness, and (our conscious experience of) brains. Due to the regularity of conscious experience we can record the correlations and then produce a predictive tool based on them. Whereby we can eg predict someone will get Alzheimer's based on observing particular brain scans. This doesn't mean that's what's seen in the brain scan literally causes the experience of having Alzheimer's, all it is is a correlation.
  • Barry Etheridge
    349
    Whilst I hate to go all logical positivist on you, doesn't that rather depend on what you mean by 'created' and, possibly to a lesser extent, 'consciousness'?
  • jkop
    903
    The word 'created' seems wrong, because to create is typically a conscious act of putting things together, or in motion, such as designed objects or machines. You don't explain whether consciousness is created by a brain under the assumption that it would already be a part of the brain, somehow creating itself out of its own brain events. You can. however, explain it like photosynthesis can be explained, i.e. as a higher level phenomena arising from lower lever events.
  • wuliheron
    440
    The entire mind and brain obey pattern matching which means consciousness is as much a physical as it is a mental process and the question is like asking if a race car works without gas. Exactly where the mental and physical overlap is the issue and experiments have already established that the brain and mind routinely substitute for one another at their most fundamental level of organizing. Its what is known as a neuromorphic design where what is software and hardware becomes context dependent.
  • intrapersona
    579
    You can. however, explain it like photosynthesis can be explained, i.e. as a higher level phenomena arising from lower lever events.jkop

    If that were so then computers, telephone, internet heck even toilet plumbing systems might all have consciousness. Why would consciousness emerge only with the prerequisites of certain parameters like electrical firing rates etc.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
  • jkop
    903

    That's an obvious fallacy. The fact that some "parameters" like electrical firing rates are sufficient for photosynthesis to work in plants does not mean that computers or toilet plumbing could produce photosynthesis. Like photosynthesis consciousness is a biological phenomenon.
  • lambda
    76
    No, it isn't. The idea that a human brain - which is itself a particular type of conscious experience - gives rise to conscious experience is a complete joke.

    Academic philosophers are absolute jackasses for spending so much time on a problem that doesn't even exist.

    'How does the brain give rise to consciousness?' It DOESN'T !

    God has made foolish the wisdom of this world.
  • ThePhilosopherFromDixie
    31
    Have you read Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke?

    He has a little section in the back where he deals with this question.
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