Not much has been said cuz there ain’t much to say about things that don’t exist. Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn’t even advanced rationality—it’s reductionism 101. I believe there was a Intelligence Squared debate on it just a few days ago that rehashed all the same old ground if you’d like a refresher. Here we go.
Giving a prior of .5 is ridiculous. Something for which you have no evidence and which breaks several known laws of physics should begin with a seriously tiny prior. You’re being heavily influenced by social traditions.
This isn’t even advanced rationality—it’s reductionism 101.
Rather it’s self-defeating reductionism, of the kind where you start by arguing that the only meaningful questions are based on experiences and anticipated experiences, and end by concluding that the concept of “experience” is meaningless.
Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn’t even advanced rationality—it’s reductionism 101.
The brain seems to be something that leads to consciousness, but is it the only thing? To know that it’s the only thing, we’d have to have data on all other sorts of preconditions and know what they lead to. We don’t have this data. More specifically, we don’t have the data that shows that the 3 possibilities I mentioned in the post don’t occur.
For the record, I’m not some sort of conspiracy theorist and I’m not religious. And I’m not arguing that there is an “afterlife”, just that we don’t really know.
The brain seems to be something that leads to consciousness, but is it the only thing?
Maybe other things can “lead to” consciousness as well, but what makes you suspect that humans have redundant ways of generating consciousness? Brain damage empirically causes damage to consciousness, so that pretty clearly indicates that the brain is where we get our consciousness from.
If we had redundant ways of generating consciousness, we’d expect that brain damage would simply shift the consciousness generation role to our other redundant system, so there wouldn’t be consciousness damage from brain damage (in the same way that damage to a car’s engine wouldn’t damage its ability to accelerate if it had redundant engines). But we don’t see this.
we don’t really know.
We know there’s no afterlife. What work is “really know” doing in this sentence, that is capable of reversing what we know about the afterlife?
Brain damage empirically causes damage to consciousness, so that pretty clearly indicates that the brain is where we get our consciousness from.
It causes damage to our ability to communicate our consciousness. For all we know, people with brain damage (and who are sleeping, unconscious, dead etc.) may be conscious, but just unable to communicate it with us (or remember it when they wake up
A concrete example might help. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven’t even discovered yet. It’s possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious.
It causes damage to our ability to communicate our consciousness. For all we know, people with brain damage (and who are sleeping, unconscious, dead etc.) may be conscious, but just unable to communicate it with us (or remember it when they wake up
This isn’t really the sort of thing that Shminux is probably talking about. People with many kinds of brain damage fully retain their ability to communicate, while various faculties for thought associated with those brain regions are affected. Or, on the other hand, regions associated with language can be damaged, leaving subjects impaired in their ability to communicate, while other faculties for thought appear to be largely intact. Brain damage does not simply amount to leaving our consciousness “on” or “off.”
To follow up on my earlier comment, I strongly recommend checking out the book “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons,” by Sam Kean. It’s unremittently interesting and engaging, and discusses cases which pretty thoroughly disabuse the notion of brain damaged individuals failing to communicate an intact consciousness in just about every chapter.
An extreme form of brain damage might be destruction of the entire brain. I don’t think that someone with their entire brain removed has consciousness but lacks the ability to communicate it; suggesting that consciousness continues after death seems to me to be pushing well beyond what we understand “consciousness” to refer to.
Not much has been said cuz there ain’t much to say about things that don’t exist. Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn’t even advanced rationality—it’s reductionism 101. I believe there was a Intelligence Squared debate on it just a few days ago that rehashed all the same old ground if you’d like a refresher. Here we go.
Giving a prior of .5 is ridiculous. Something for which you have no evidence and which breaks several known laws of physics should begin with a seriously tiny prior. You’re being heavily influenced by social traditions.
Rather it’s self-defeating reductionism, of the kind where you start by arguing that the only meaningful questions are based on experiences and anticipated experiences, and end by concluding that the concept of “experience” is meaningless.
The brain seems to be something that leads to consciousness, but is it the only thing? To know that it’s the only thing, we’d have to have data on all other sorts of preconditions and know what they lead to. We don’t have this data. More specifically, we don’t have the data that shows that the 3 possibilities I mentioned in the post don’t occur.
For the record, I’m not some sort of conspiracy theorist and I’m not religious. And I’m not arguing that there is an “afterlife”, just that we don’t really know.
Maybe other things can “lead to” consciousness as well, but what makes you suspect that humans have redundant ways of generating consciousness? Brain damage empirically causes damage to consciousness, so that pretty clearly indicates that the brain is where we get our consciousness from.
If we had redundant ways of generating consciousness, we’d expect that brain damage would simply shift the consciousness generation role to our other redundant system, so there wouldn’t be consciousness damage from brain damage (in the same way that damage to a car’s engine wouldn’t damage its ability to accelerate if it had redundant engines). But we don’t see this.
We know there’s no afterlife. What work is “really know” doing in this sentence, that is capable of reversing what we know about the afterlife?
It causes damage to our ability to communicate our consciousness. For all we know, people with brain damage (and who are sleeping, unconscious, dead etc.) may be conscious, but just unable to communicate it with us (or remember it when they wake up
A concrete example might help. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven’t even discovered yet. It’s possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious.
This isn’t really the sort of thing that Shminux is probably talking about. People with many kinds of brain damage fully retain their ability to communicate, while various faculties for thought associated with those brain regions are affected. Or, on the other hand, regions associated with language can be damaged, leaving subjects impaired in their ability to communicate, while other faculties for thought appear to be largely intact. Brain damage does not simply amount to leaving our consciousness “on” or “off.”
To follow up on my earlier comment, I strongly recommend checking out the book “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons,” by Sam Kean. It’s unremittently interesting and engaging, and discusses cases which pretty thoroughly disabuse the notion of brain damaged individuals failing to communicate an intact consciousness in just about every chapter.
An extreme form of brain damage might be destruction of the entire brain. I don’t think that someone with their entire brain removed has consciousness but lacks the ability to communicate it; suggesting that consciousness continues after death seems to me to be pushing well beyond what we understand “consciousness” to refer to.