Your basic position is that consciousness is a "whole body experience". — Pantagruel

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.

Ok, I think this will clarify my perspective for both you guys. I just grabbed a free Scribd account and did a quick skim through the book you recommended, "Philosophy in the Flesh". Where I follow Varela, Thompson, and Rosch is cited on page 94:

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.

By naming "the consciousness" it seems you are describing the sense of self - the thoughts I have, my awareness of who I am. Of course my thoughts, as being conscious thoughts, happen in the brain. My thoughts appear to me to be located behind my eyes. But there is more to my consciousness than my thoughts, because also the gut and the heart are contributors to the spirit's sense of ease.

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.

Interestingly, I read quite an early book by Paul Churchland called "Neurocomputational Perspective" and he talked about how, if we could come to attain a deep enough understanding of the neurochemical processes of the brain, we might be able to come to have a direct subjective experience of what those processes are doing, in the same way we experience a wavelength of light as "red". It was an interesting direction to take neurocomputation for sure.

...the frogs eye was essentially just part of its brain

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.

Iron lungs, heart transplants and such demonstrate the case well enough for me.

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.

↪ovdtogt I don’t confuse the two. — I like sushi

cryptic

I think it is, mind and brain are intimately connected, and where else would it be located? — Wheatley

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?

Why couldn’t it pervade the universe? — Noah Te Stroete

As far as we know conscious awareness is a biological phenomenon. Its function is to help creatures react to their environment.

As far as we know conscious awareness is a biological phenomenon. Its function is to help creatures react to their environment. — Wheatley

That’s metaphysics.

You sure?

You sure? — Wheatley

Absolutely.

Okay.

Consciousness is located in the brain, but it's not all about it's locale. The heart puts consciousness in that position.

I've held this belief for a long time, anyone care to change my mind?

Is consciousness located in the brain?

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.

Some people are bothered by consciousness not having a location in the atlas of the brain. It doesn't bother me. I'm just glad it's there. — Bitter Crank

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.

I've heard some suggest that the brain is a "receiver" of consciousness rather than a "generator".