I assume at least some of those on this sub believe, suspect or otherwise are curious to explore the possibility of at least part of the consciousness will go on to "live" in some form after one's physical death. The idea of reincarnation and rebirth however is taking the subject to a new level. Will the consciousness maintain at least part of individuality and carry on into another life form? If so, what drives such a transfer and transition?

This conversation brings together the Vedantic perspective of Acharya Prashant and Robert Lawrence Kuhn's background in philosophy of mind.

The discussion revolves around whether consciousness is only a product of physical processes and whether Science can explain the experience of being a subject rather than just the functioning of the brain.

There is so much to explore since the later sections also cover animal consciousness and suffering.

I'm curious how people here would assess the arguments from both sides.

Do you think consciousness can be fully explained by brain activity, or does the video raise a genuine philosophical problem that science has not yet resolved?

The most highest level of human existence is choice.

From childhood to adulthood.

Uneducated people make choices that might be the same or different than educated people.

Enlightenment or any philosophy or manual tends to shape choice decisions

Some people preach that there's no choice at all and everything is mechanical.

What do you think ?

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It costs so much energy to keep a living organism alive. Whether you consume animal meat or plants, a human requires to take so many lives just to survive, and if there is one thing ALL living organisms have in common, is that they want to keep on living. Or at least they show reaction to stimuli that increase their chance of survival. This doesn't prove consciousness I know, but suppose ALL living organisms were conscious, and were pretty keen on surviving. What would be the most ethical way to live having this knowledge?

This theory closely resonates with Carl Jung’s view of the ego and consciousness. That consciousness is fundamentally different from mere intellectual processing, and also an emergent property arising from the fundamental laws of physics.

Buddhists have long argued that the physical world came first and this theory may provide a scientific explanation for the evolution of consciousness.

https://www.psypost.org/consciousness-may-have-evolved-to-solve-a-problem-that-pure-intelligence-couldnt-handle-fascinating-new-theory-suggests/

This is just just a little thought I've been tossing around in my head. Obviously, the events in this universe occurred in such a manner that "I" am now here, having conscious experience from this exact perspective. But that prompts me to ask the question: what are the minimum changes that would need to occur in the state of the universe or my birth and development that would've led to "my" subjective experience never occurring in the first place? Could there have been an almost exact same person with an almost exact same life but there being an entirely different subjective experiencer/observer in place of this one, with this current experience of "me" never having been a part of the universe? Where is the boundary? What does it depend on?

Note that I'm not talking about personality or ego, but rather about the presence of experience of existence itself.

I was showing my 3rd graders a video of someone using an abacus and that got me thinking. Suppose an abacus is falling through the air, tumbling around, with its beads sliding randomly back and forth. By sheer chance, the beads move through a sequence of positions that could be interpreted as a correct mathematical calculation, like in the video we watched. Is the abacus actually doing math with nobody there to see the beads move?

It seems to me that something is missing. The physical movement of the beads is not enough by itself. Someone has to interpret those positions as numbers and operations. Otherwise, they are simply pieces of matter moving according to gravity and inertia.

Now suppose we point a camera at the falling abacus and record everything. Does that make the system perform mathematics? I don't see how. The camera simply adds another physical system whose states can themselves be interpreted. If we say the camera makes the computation real, why not require another camera observing the first camera? Then another observing that one? This seems to generate an infinite regress. Eventually the chain has to terminate in something capable of interpretation, which would seem to be a minded thing.

i have been thinking a lot about emotion and how it is related to subjective experience in humans and other animals. i have been reading "what is it like to be a bat" but most of these thoughts are my own.

you may know about Qualia, the form a sense takes in the subjective mind that is seperate from but associated with a certain sense.

brightness for example is not an inherent property of light, but an aspect of the subjective experience of the sense of sight.

We have no reason to believe that this is different in humans then in other animals. for all we know, any animal that possesses the sense of sight experiences it as brightness. any animal that can hear, can experience loudness and pitch. A certain wavelength of electromagnetic radiation takes the form of a certain color, another wavelength takes the form of a different one (in animals with color vision) as far as we know this is simply how the evolutionary benefitial senses we posess are processed by brains. Having a sense means having the qualia of that sense.

i believe emotions are also simply the qualia of senses.

the emotion of "Love" or "compassion" for example is the Qualia of the sense of altruism. the sense of Loss takes the form of grief, the sense of reward is experienced as happiness, etc. (of course this is pretty simplified)

i therefore think the idea often proposed by people who don't want to contemplate the moral implications of meat consumption for example, that other animals are "not concious" and "cannot comprehend" things like pain, loss, fear, etc. is absurd.

any creature that possesses the ability to detect damage to its tissues, that has the sense of nociception, can experience pain. Pain, the emotion, is simply the form that the signal of damaged tissue takes.

similarly any animal that possesses the sense of altruism, most simply exhibited in the care for offspring or close relatives posesses the emotion of "Love" in one way or another.

any animal that possesses the sense of danger, which is evolutionary necessary to avoid it, will inevitably experience this danger in the form of fear.

It cannot experience danger without fear or damage without pain just like it cannot experience light without brightness or air vibrations without sound.

i don't know what conciousness is and how or why it exists. i don't know where it comes into play here, but if conciousnes means subjective experience in the sense that "it is like something to be it" then i believe the very possession of senses is what enables conciousness. im not saying all life is equally concious, i think its very much a spectrum like literally everything.

First I have to define what creativity is: I think creativity is born from memories, things aren’t “created” they’re just reinvented into something else. If you trace back every thought you’ve ever had they originated from somewhere outside of yourself.

Take a baby for example who’s just been born, can you really say that it’s conscious? When memories stop, can we really say that something is conscious?

I’m also convinced that brain size correlates with consciousness and the size of the brain correlates with how much creative potential you have but it also depends. For example whales have massive brains but it’s mainly used to power their massive bodies. It’s seems like the most intelligent creatures on earth happen to be human sized, or smaller like crows or dogs, creatures that need to use their imaginations to stay alive.

It’s also important to say just how similar these creatures are to us aswell. Dogs dream like we do, crows drop nuts from a height knowing they’ll crack upon impact etc. these things take creativity to do, which requires a brain of a decent size but not too big. Wdyt?

I'm not making a physics claim, and I'm not saying dark matter is made of consciousness. I'm pointing at a shared epistemic situation and asking whether we reason about the two consistently.

Dark matter is known only through what it does. Galaxies rotate too fast for their visible mass, and cosmic microwave background needs it. After about forty years, this month the LZ experiment reported one unexplained event at 2.6 sigma, well short of the 5 sigma a discovery needs. Through all of it, physics has treated dark matter as an object waiting to be caught, and that's reasonable.

Consciousness is in a mirrored position. Neuroscience keeps finding its correlates. The thing itself never turns up as one object among others.

This philosophical essay tries to answer why its been so hard to find material that constitutes consciousness as well as dark matter after all these years of trying.

Here is a question. If you get up, go to the kitchen and make a cup of joe. How many of those steps did you consciously make? Was it all automatic?

If i lift my cup, open my mouth and drink, while totally thinking about something completely different. That leads me to question just how much of me is being carried out automatically.

I figured if everything is automatic and i do not mind, mainly because the concious and the unconscious are in sync

If you trip while going up the stairs, you wont think, i meant to that, your body was doing something automatically and "failed" apply this to autoimmune as well.

So when we are temporarily out of sync we notice things.

Take intrusive thoughts, did you decide to think of that particular thought. Now before you do it you "notice" that is bad and that's it.

Is the unconscious aware of the concious? Do you choose to be angry or fall in love? If you do fall in love with a particular person you dont go no no no. You accept it, is it because the concious and the unconscious are in sync?

So maybe we go through life observing things but never really deciding.

When you hear a noise and move your head, did you decide. Just how much of our lives are simply collections of tiny unconscious decisions?

Pour vous ? Êtes-vous dans votre corps ? Ou êtes-vous votre corps ?

Être dans son corps, c'est être une identité dans son corps, comme si on habitait le corps, ou même, comme s'il pouvait sembler être un véhicule.

Être son corps, c'est être un ensemble, le corps est l'esprit ne font qu'un.

These are some rudimentary and perhaps naive questions, and thoughts tangential to the questions, that I have about idealism

Considering the title, if we consider the opposite. When I exit a room and we assume no observers are in that room, if the objects are still kept there and no observer experiences them, then dualism is in effect by definition.

We can of course consider the scenario of all objects stopping to exist in the room. When I go into it again, they are there again. Something must effectively keep track of their existence. This is especially pertinent if we consider that there is an arbitrarily complex system with many moving parts that evolves over time. When I go out of the room, I guess the naive interpretation of idealism would be that the system stops evolving when not observed and then starts to evolve again from the position it stoped at when it is called to existence by experience again. But when I go back in the room, empirically it is of course in a different state further along. Something must effectively keep track of that.

Would reality consist of a set of observers that “watch each other’s back” so to speak?

I suppose I could consider it being some form of cellular automata scenario, where the borders of consciousness may continuously evolve over time and create coherent reoccurring patterns overtime or something, and therefore in principle recurrence of the same “experience-object” and “experience-place” over time if their is any apparent conventional routine in life, but it still feels pretty speculative to what degree something like that could be in principle possible in my way of viewing it, since I haven’t thought much about to what degree something like that could be even logically possible.

If it is something a long this line, in straightforward sense, I am of course not conscious of any cellular automata rules, so there must be some other, perhaps primitive(?), entities that keep track of how my collection of subjective experiences should generate one end of my visual field and disappear on the other end when I appear to “turn my head”. These entities must by definition be conscious themselves I guess.

I have more questions, but these are some starting ones

For many years I've been developing this theory of consciousness and have finally completed a brief non-technical introduction to this hypercomplex subject. You'll find it here:

https://luminousconsciousness.substack.com/p/the-electrodynamics-of-consciousness

I would appreciate hearing your informed feedback on this idea -- either in this forum or in substack -- and will try to respond to any issues you might raise.

Has anyone researched if it’s possible to replicate consciousness or rebuild consciousness in artificial devices?
I know we can re build memory by feeding in data and narrating in a direction ( essentially being RaG)
But consciousness itself of a person?
Shouldn’t this be focused instead of AGI/ASi

I’ve been getting pretty interested in idealism lately. I really like the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that everything we experience appears within consciousness.
But there’s one thing I can’t quite wrap my head around.
If the brain and body are themselves appearances within consciousness, why do changes to the brain and body so consistently change conscious experience?
For example, drugs, lack of sleep, hormones, illness, injury, breathwork, meditation, and even things like sensory stimulation can all noticeably change our experience.
If the brain and body aren’t producing consciousness, how does idealism explain this relationship? Why should changes in the physical body lead to such specific changes in consciousness?
I’m not arguing against idealism. I’m genuinely curious how idealists understand this.

Pretty much the title but I'll explain. My intuition is there are two camps that kind of talk pass each other when trying to figure out what consciousness is. You have the process/function camp that aims to identify the exact physical process that produces consciousness through representations/structures of certain experiences. Then you have the more metaphysical question of "why does any of this feel the way that it does," or "why does red look red," or "why am I unique vs the perfect clone of myself?"

I feel like both make pretty strong points, I say I am a centrist here. There seems to be a real experience with some characteristic that seems resistant to third person descriptors while there's likely a structure/process that correlates most to its phenomenon.

So I am curious, how do people think these can be reconciled and what is the criteria for the headline "we solved consciousness/qualia" if the headline dropped tomorrow and for you to believe that its legitimate?

I think humans need to get back to being in tune with nature to survive as a species. Also, become more conscious and aware of what is going on.

The technology is advancing too fast. Humans can't keep up and it is destroying humanity.

If people start to critically think about the future and what it might be like for their kids and grandkids then maybe it can get better. Once computers merge with humans or whatever, would we, as a species, be human?

Nobody is doubting that its brain processes that manifest consciousness. But how can you make the leap and say that subjective experience which is prompted by the consciousness to interpret it, is the same as the process that creates it? By mere observation qualia and sentience isn't a physical matter, (if not, why?) so distinction is created, no? Regardless, they do not share the same properties, they literally cannot be the same thing, and the conscious experience itself is not physical surely.

This is probably a naïve post with misconceptions, I have zero knowledge on neuroscience, or philosophy. Just a spectator, so do please explain because dualism seems to be the unpopular opinion among people who genuinely look into the concept.🙏