[Profpat]

COGITO ERGO SUM ( Descartes )

COGITO COGITO ? ( Pat )

Welcome to the forum GodofReason, we have been waiting patiently for your return, and are awaiting for your enlightenment to be dispensed to we mortals.

[austintorn@aol.com]

Consciousness, or Awareness (along with the brain), seems to have the task of producing future, through a focus on learning something, good or bad, such as how to drive a car, or by merely observing, like how to swing a tennis racket. Consciousness is less involved after learning, although still on the watch, as we go somewhat on automatic pilot, but the brain is always employed. Consciousness might just be a higher part of the brain that makes sense of the lower parts. As for what is really “out there”, no one yet knows, whether it be real or virtual, but there it something.

Is Consciousness just an epiphenomenon, a tourist along for the ride, something that is a global workspace for the brain’s results, so they can perhaps feed back in for some final check and balance?

It seems that we are our brains. They are still true to us, for we’ve filled them with knowledge, memories, and associations—all of which results in our thoughts, feelings, and emotions that surface on the mind.

However, we, at the conscious level are not privy to the brain’s analysis—via millions of connected neurons voting or doing whatever they do, for that is subconscious; however, we become aware of the brain’s result a few tenths of a second later, seemingly being the last to know of what the brain came up with.

Sometimes the thoughts are simple, like hunger, and sometimes they are more complex life decisions or at least how to arrange a room of furniture.
Often times, though, thoughts appear out of the blue, unwilled. Technically, thoughts out of the blue must be unwilled since we can’t will what does the willing—the subconscious elections from the brain, and, in fact, might be often quite surprised at surfacing thoughts.

Perhaps some surprise thoughts, like killing someone, get vetoed and squashed instantly, although I’m sure many less obvious cases slip through, getting some of us in some trouble.

But, other than a global workplace, can consciousness affect the physical? Well, no, not if everything originates in the brain. But, then again, no one seems to know what consciousness really is, if it’s more than that brain’s perception of itself. It, along with the TOE, is one of the last frontiers that we can’t even get a handle on, making things like DNA comparison seem easy.

I could right now force myself to get up and take a walk, to show control of the mental over the physical, but doesn’t the action still originate from the brain since it was thinking about how to prove that the mental can cause the physical?

If we turned off our brain, could consciousness come up with an ideas on its own and then tell the brain what to do when our brain was turned back on?

[GodofReason]

Originally Posted by Profpat COGITO ERGO SUM ( Descartes ) COGITO COGITO ? ( Pat )

Isn't it the other way round? Oh no, I remember now, It's:

I'm pink therefore I'm spam. -Mike

Originally Posted by Profpat Welcome to the forum GodofReason, we have been waiting patiently for your return, and are awaiting for your enlightenment to be dispensed to we mortals.

I was here before???

-Mike (The Pez of Reason)

[GodofReason]

Originally Posted by austintorn@aol.com [size="2"]Consciousness, or Awareness (along with the brain), seems to have the task of producing future,

I might generalize by replacing "producing future" with "promoting evolution" which is very similar in biological terms.

Originally Posted by austintorn@aol.com As for what is really “out there”, no one yet knows, whether it be real or virtual, but there it something

We definitely only see an anthropomorphic symbol of the world in our brains. What is really out there has always proven more involved than we could symbolize. While some features (neurological symbols) will survive fairly intact for the next 10,000 (if we're lucky) years of human development, the world view will be vastly more involved than what we think of as "what's out there" now.

Originally Posted by austintorn@aol.com It seems that we are our brains.

I'd say human consciousness is surely brain-centered, but imagine the motile protozoan such as the paramecium. It scoots around in it's environs like a little bird dog, identifying mates, food, danger, light, etc and negotiating a hundred states of being without so much as a single neuron to spur it on. Wherein does such rudimentary consciousness reside? Does our chemical, molecular, atomic or even sub-atomic makeup provide some prerequisite foundation for what has evolved into human consciousness? I've got a feeling that neurology alone is not sufficient to sustain higher order consciousness.

Originally Posted by austintorn@aol.com Technically, thoughts out of the blue must be unwilled since we can’t will what does the willing

Okay, here's the (Mike) Harmon treatise in a nut shell. There are two basic neurological responses to the world. The original stimulus response is "instinctive" and the conditioned response is what eventually evolved into "reason". These are the two halves of the human perceptive circumstance. We either feel something or we think something and most of the time we are doing tons of both, because actually everything is feeling, but certain cross associations of feelings are in a rational category all their own. But, we'll start with reason. Like the words on this page, human reasoning is basically symbolic in structure and the first biological symbolism was the conditioned response.

Take Pavlov's dogs. The have two separate, naturally selected (instinctive) stimulus responses of cognition of sound (the bell) and salivation over the presence of food. Once Pavlov rang the bell often enough certain tissues in the dog's brain associated two intrinsically unrelated but environmentally related instinctive elements (cognition of the bell is associated with food). The dog was conditioned to symbolized the presence of food with the sound of the bell.

Like the words on this page, the sound of the bell symbolized the presence of food in the consciousness of the dog. The dog made the rational conclusion that the bell meant food was coming. But most importantly, the symbol itself provides an independence from the moment that is our higher level rational consciousness. This symbol of the bell for food freed the dog from a one to one relationship with the physical elements of the real world. But also the temporal expectation of food as subsequent and proximate to the bell frees the dogs consciousness from confinement to the moment. This expectation of future food is temporal cognition in the dog.

This environmentally conditioned cross-association of two elements of the instinct creates a second perception that is independent of the real world both structurally and temporally. Add to this independence the cascade effect and we begin to see the flow of a second internalized consciousness. When we notice that the bell evokes in the dog a purely internally induced stimulus (no food is around but there is nonetheless there is expectation of food, the salivating, the virtual taste of it in the dogs mouth) we begin to see the cascade effect that is our internal consciousness, our second world within.

The bell spawns the taste of food which is a stimulus itself that spawns further responses in an internal stimulus/response chain reaction or cascade that mimics the original conditioning of the real world. Our internal world looks like the real world for a reason, The elements of the internal associations were all originated externally as environmental conditioning (even if it's in the form of Mrs. Harris pounding participles into your brain in 10th grade).

This cascade is involuntary in some respects and voluntary in others. By reading the word -Vomit- there are certain chain reactions that you may not completely control like a slight rise in pulse rate and slight recoil from the screen and others that you willfully evoke like reviewing some funny hurlfest scenario from your youth.

But the magic is in the combination of the instinctive structure of your feelings and emotions that constantly spawn further cascades and your conditioning which in turn variously (rationally) inhibit or promote the subsequent responses to those stimulus whether internal or external. Your attention is the magical key. Your attention is grabbed by stimulus but modified by conditioning. The magic of your free will is all about what you like to feel compared to what you have to feel and the choices you make in emphasizing or suppressing your responses to those feelings (stimuli).

Nature vs nurture = stimulus response vs conditioned response = instinct vs reasoning.

-Mike (AtswhaddImtaugginabout!)