Michael Graziano - Toward a Science of Consciousness 

Hi Larry, that is one option of course, but it is just as easy to invent a new you!, you after all is only a figment of your imagination if you didn't like who you were yesterday why would you want to be the same today!, even if you did like yourself you can still make yourself a bit better!. Cheers, Richard.

You must keep off the booze!

Every claim and every attempt to define consciousness is nothing but hand waving. Grazianos comments are based on what we actually know, granted the actual emergence and complexity are not yet explained. But the alternate theory is nothing but denial wrapped in speculation. Crazy ideas like consciousness is fundamental, have zero basis in fact, and reflect unconscious mortality denial.

Exactly....he knows nothing. He is confused.

Hard problem is only hard for dualists.

@@bennyskimjust because you don’t agree doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Maybe it’s too advanced for you? Besides, what’s wrong with trailer parks? I’m sure a person’s domestic situation has nothing to do with their insights. Look at you.. 😂

The point of the comment is that there is apparently nothing highbrow about the academic perspective. And you're even more proof - see if you can get a refund on that degree Doc, it did not work.

The hard problem isn’t even a problem, it’s a weak idea about the nature of consciousness which then says to support this unjustified weak theory it would be hard to solve. Maybe the whole weak idea is crap to start with. This raising the idea of consciousness to the level of spirits and gods and woo. If it arises naturally, but manifest only under the extreme condition of the unbelievably complicated brain, it makes sense way some would want to pretend it is magical. What he is saying is, maybe that’s a bad idea to start with and maybe it arises natural. and maybe it isn’t this remnant of Platonic Idealism which seeped into Xtianity and Philiosophy to soothe our mortality denial, and our need to elevate our importance.

Hi Rikkafe, one must be very careful without inherited genetic attributes, while it is abundantly clear that many characteristics operate in conjunction with others there is no causal relationship between them even when there is functional association. We must also remember that all of our genetic heritage stems form previous organisms, that every living thing shares most of the same DNA, in fact all of it is made from the same four proteins!, all of it came by pure chance mutations and variations and there is no evidence or requirement for purpose or intent, we have characteristics which may or may not be useful but as long as we can survive and breed no 'advantage' is implied, life is not a competition, that myth was invented solely to justify totalitarianism and tyranny!. Cheers, Richard.

Exactly! It's like they don't understand the real problem.

An illusion. The brains complexity and desire to maintain life over values and over manifests the idea of a personhood.

Puppets are not conscious but may be conscious in our imagination. Are you saying the brain causes its own consciousness by imagining itself to be conscious? What a load of rubbish!

@@ianwaltham1854 personally, I don't know. I merely shared some of what I remembered from his book. What is "imagination"? I didn't use that word. I used the word "assign." We (whatever "we" is) assign consciousness to inanimate objects. Whatever it is that does this, could just as easily (or so it seems to me) assign consciousness to another inanimate object - a soft and squishy brain. Personally, I think consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, but I don't pretend to know. Until we actually understand consciousness better, calling any hypothesis or theory "rubbish" is fraught with danger. The idea that the Earth went around the Sun was "rubbish" in an earlier time.

@@ptgannon1 Where does the assignment of consciousness to the puppet take place? In the mind of the conscious observer. Consciousness is a requirement for the assignment. So you're saying something that requires consciousness for its existence is the cause of consciousness. Then you said consciousness is emergent. But emergence is such a vague explanation for consciousness that you may as well say "I don't know" or "its produced by magic". Emergence is actually a concept of our conscious minds so again you're saying something that requires consciousness for its existence is the cause of consciousness.

@@ianwaltham1854 please do not speak in such absolutes. Read my post again. I said "personally I don't know," and then expressed and opinion. I'm not claiming to know. You seem very certain of yourself. Why don't you tell us what consciousness is, since you are so dismissive and contemptuous of the ideas of others.

@@ptgannon1 I am fully aware that you don't know and I will talk in absolutes because the subject matter requires it. Consciousness is either made by brains or it isn't. Yes or No. Sounds pretty absolute to me.

🤪😆🤣 worthless neuroscience? Spoken like a true genius. 😂

No, awareness is all there is. Consciousness is a label with no valid purpose. We become aware of our awareness through the complexity of our brains. The attachment to consciousness as a thing, is a remnant of belief in a soul or spirit, because we are blinded by the power of abstraction and want to give life to it. Platonic idealism seeped into Xtianity, and Philosophy and because it supports mortality denial we are motivated to keep the idea alive and even claim it is fundamental to life, despite no evidence of it for the first 14 billion years…

If you're one of those people saying that he is just 'stating the obvious' please take another look I mean that sincerely. You're exactly right, though, he is stating the obvious. That's the theory he's describing! That ability to be able for all of us to state the obvious is what is remarkable. It's that ability itself call it (X) that governs our conscious experience (Y). You're saying 'being aware is an obvious prequisite of consciousness', which is a true statement and with which I also agree with. That agreed consensus necessitates a condition of consciousness. That is exactly what this guy is doing. Here's a simple experiment to prove it. If you watch the video ask yourself if you can scientifically disagree with anything that guy is saying. You may not agree with his hypothesis, there might be others, but at the same time you couldn't scientifically prove why you disagree with 100% certainty due to the fact that it could quite literally be anything.

You didn't miss anything. You're pointing out the obvious flaw in his theory.

@@ianwaltham1854 only if you mis-define consciousness as a thing and not a label for a process that occurred naturally through means we are aware of already. (Not the details obviously) If you believe in a magic or missing component or some wild eyed information or consciousness is fundamental fairy tale.

Horses are conscious. And are very much aware that an apple is food.

@@bennyskim Dymamic time (thought) vs seqeuntial time (shared spacetime) ? I agree in part. Not seeing how the scientific requirement for repeatability can be honoured though. But thats the basis of common sense, shared spacetime or conscience in the original latin context.

@@bennyskim the mind doesn’t make time. Time existed 13.5 billion years before the brain existed. Entropy and heat makes time.

@@dr_shrinker True, it seems time is just a label for impermanence.

I agree with you. Instead of a word salad, we need an extensive six-course dinner including starter and dessert. A description of this dinner should be simple and complete. The first step, I think, is the observation that, from conception, a person spends his life building a model of reality using, among other things, neurons, synapses and hormones. Tools for this are concepts such as gene expression and the capabilities to observe and learn.

I think you missed it, consciousness is the focus within the integrated information. He used awareness but I think "focus" is a better way to understand it. IMO and in practice that means the path a single neuron firing followed by the next single neuron and so on, and follows through the brain. Many neurons fire as a result of that single neuron and the general direction of thought but focus is from the main path and the main path is determined by external inputs (eg looking at an apple) or internally generated (eg dreams) My 2c

Consciousness is the eternal COGNIZER. Matter is that which is eternally COGNIZED.

@@Arunava_Guptabased on what evidence?

That's a logical fallacy that conflates the existence of a thing with it being known. Your consciousness is required for your knowledge of anything, that's all. It's not necessarily a pre-requisite for other people's knowledge of things, nor does it imply that all things must be known in order to exist. So it's an opinion, and that's fine, but there is no evidence supporting it.

@@dr_shrinker oh, that's the most fundamental fact of reality.

@@simonhibbs887 Why do you always have to complicate matters? It's so evident it barely needs debating.

So the information makes the consciousness, but there is no information without consciousness? That does seem a little circular.

@@caricue *"So the information makes the consciousness, but there is no information without consciousness? That does seem a little circular."* ... That's why I added, _"The phrase "I am aware of my own consciousness." is unfalsifiable, _*_circular,_*_ redundant, and paradoxical, yet everyone can say it ... and everyone else can understand."_ According to my ToE, in the beginning there was the most rudimentary form of information, but it remained inconceivable until it was able to render itself conceivable through a mathematical self-assessment (counting the amount of available information). Once "Existence" realized that the amount of "Existence" available was 1, that rendered "Existence" conceivable. That's the entire cosmos' equivalent of "Cogito ergo sum." ... So, the emergence of a conceivable state of consciousness and information was a simultaneous event. 13.8 billion years later we have you and I discussing the nature of "information" in a comment thread while we are both using "information" to make our points. ... Seems that we're just as circular as "Existence," eh?

@@caricue I think there are three related but distinct concepts to do with information. There's information itself, there is the meaning of a set of information, and there is the value such meaning might have to us. There can be information without consciousness, otherwise there would be nothing for consciousness to discover. Information is simply the specific attributes and structure of a physical system. Meaning is an actionable correlation between sets of information. For example I can know that a robot has a map (information) of an environment in it's memory created from sensor data that corresponds to the arrangement and structure of an environment (also information) and the robot can use the map to navigate that environment. It can do this without any human ever being aware of either the map or the specific environment. However the fact that the robot performed that action, while an objective fact about the world, by itself has no value. That's where we come in as conscious beings, for example if the robot used its sensors to map a cave complex, navigate it and deliver rescue equipment.

@@0-by-1_Publishing_LLC Sometimes I feel as if I'm being a little pedantic in insisting that information only exists in a mind, but it becomes very significant when trying to understand reality. DNA is a perfect example. Everyone assumes DNA carries information, but does it? DNA is used as a physical template to make RNA, which is used as a physical template to make proteins. The Ribosomes that transcribe the RNA are mindless molecules. What use would they have for information? A person can read out the base pairs and find information, but what was there before he looked? It was a physical object, not information. I finally concluded that even a book doesn't actually contain information in itself. It is just an object, maybe useful to start a fire to an illiterate. Even a computer does not contain or process information. It carries out physical transformations based on its design and programming, but it doesn't know the difference between one data set or another. It doesn't know anything, it is just an object.

*"There can be information without consciousness, otherwise there would be nothing for consciousness to discover."* ... That presupposes that the information that existed prior to life was just sitting around waiting to be discovered by lifeforms that possess a consciousness. ... I disagree. You often use computers, AI, and robots as examples, so I will do the same: I posit that consciousness is just the highest, most complex level of information that has evolved since the beginning ... and that *consciousness* and *information* are synonymous in that regard. *Example:* A human consciousness is comprised of information. It can acquire and processes the same type of information that formed it (the cosmos). A computer is a device that's comprised of information. It can acquire and process the same type of information that formed it (human data) *"For example I can know that a robot has a map (information) of an environment in it's memory that corresponds to the arrangement and structure of an environment (also information) and the robot can use the map to navigate the environment, without any human ever being aware of either the map or the specific environment. "* ... A human consciousness (intelligence) programmed the robot on how to evaluate and map out its environment, so the human is aware of the robot's mapping ability via proxy. However, without the *direct human orchestration* of how to map out its environment, the robot is just a collection of useless metal-based elements like one might find floating aimlessly out in the cosmos.

How do you know what a grasshopper thinks? I can do many things on instinct that I am not even aware of.

@@dr_shrinker I didn't say that I know what a grasshopper thinks and I never asserted that a grasshopper has the capacity to think. These are your words not mine. I said "awareness" and "consciousness are two separate things and they are. You're also conflating two other very separate and distinct things in saying "I can do many things on instinct that I am not even aware of." Is it possible to "do something" and simultaneously be "unaware" of doing it? This is not saying very much in that the overwhelming bulk of not only our bodies internal metabolic functions operates beneath our conscious awareness but a vast amount of mental activity also remains submerged. If I asked you who your ninth grade history teacher was you'd likely know, but only after you made an effort to remember, which is to say that information has been stored by your brain but classified as no longer essential, and in time you may forget that teacher's name. If our brains could not prioritize information and kept a focused attention on too many things we'd be paralyzed by too much information. So to "clear the decks" so to speak our brains have automated all metabolic function to allow higher states of consciousness to be experienced.

@@michaelmckinney7240 it’s implied. You can’t be aware without thought.

@@dr_shrinker Thought and awareness are very different things. If I lost my car keys yesterday, I don't need to be told today that they're still lost because I'm "aware" of that fact. If I want to find my car keys being aware of the fact that I've lost them is pointless as far as finding them is concerned. I need to mentally switch from being passively "aware" that they're lost to the active process of "thought" in order to find them. I need to rethink my actions from the day before and mentally sift all the possible places where I might have left the keys. This is an active process of thought whereas awareness is a passive and relatively static frame of mind. Thought is an active and directed form of mental activity. Awareness is general whereas thought is specific and categorical.

@@michaelmckinney7240 great reply! 👍🏻. knowing you’re aware is a thought. You don’t know you’re aware of something unless you think of it. How did you miss this obvious fact? I guess you weren’t aware of it because you never thought of it. I’m not sure what a passive thought is…..there are thoughts and ‘not” thoughts. You can have broken thoughts. Like bouncing from listening to lyrics to a song, and thinking of how those lyrics relate to an event of your past, then bouncing back to another thought. Etc. shuffling thoughts. But there’s only room for one thought at a time. You can shuffle thoughts at microsecond intervals, making it seem like you’re thinking of two or three things, but you are graying out the thought, like projecting two or three movies onto the same screen. However, the frames of each movie are discreet. Thoughts are discreet. You can have one single thought like - “the house is on fire.’ Or you could have multiple, discreet thoughts, shuffled in quick succession. - “I like chocolate cookies, while sitting in a warm bath, by candlelight…..etc.” you cannot have all three thoughts at the same time. Your thoughts may shuffle so quick, they seem to happen simultaneously like a 30 fps movie versus a 3 fps movie, but that isn’t so. The universe is not analog, neither are thought patterns. They are pixilated/framed/discreet and they cannot occupy the same space and time. Nothing truly overlaps another thing, where fundamental physics is concerned. #Planckconstants

So you are saying because of life conciousness emerges? It is interesting how single cell amoeba can come together and self organise to form complex structures, but that suggests to me at least that conciousness is everywhere and life allows us to interact with it.

@@4D2M0T Life only comes from life. An amoeba comes into the world fully formed when its progenitor splits in half. There is never any need to self-assemble. A tiny animal like an amoeba or paramecium has basic awareness built in. It can tell self from non-self, inside from outside, food from danger, and apparently they can even remember for a short time. If single cell creatures have basic awareness, then, in higher animals, nature layers on cognition, better memory, modes of perception and intelligence. In this way of looking at things, there really isn't a need for a separate category for "consciousness."

Hi Ham Dani Yusuf, I agree!, this is the start point for me too!. Sadly as far as I know the only way to establish a reliable definition for something is to identify it in the first place, thus we can define a 'brick' as being a solid lump of regular shaped mineral for use in construction or window breaking, all we need is a real brick. The problem we all have here is that there is no evidence of anything even remotely like a brick that we can identify as consciousness, for that reason alone I am content to dismiss it entirely as imaginary in much the same way as we perceive grass as 'green' when that is the one thing it is most definitely not! whatever it 'really' is all we 'see' is that colour of light reflected from it which implies that nothing in it is actually green!.

@@richardharvey1732 I've made video series on basic philosophy, called Universal Utopia. In video #3, I define consciousness as the capacity to pursue goals.

@@hamdaniyusuf_dani Hi Hamdani Yussuf, thank you for this response, I am quite happy to accept this definition, as long as we understand that it remains in the realm of the abstract. I use it myself for this very purpose, all the construction projects that I engage in are carefully considered using my mind to visualise the components and the methods of construction beforehand. For many years now I have been able to imagine all sorts of shapes textures and colours which I can then describe in considerable detail to my colleagues. I find that if I can visualise the final product and then trace back the sequence of actions to the start I can find a reliable starting point which will produce the desired result. Several important things are very clear, that such methods rely on description not prescription, I try to keep my eyes and ears open as the work progresses and have no hesitation in amending the script at any time it fails to fit reality!, that insistence on keeping fact from fantasy is essential!, I always have to work with what I get regardless of what I want!. In that sense your use of the term pursue is so much better than attain as far as the goals are concerned. Cheers, Richard.

@@hamdaniyusuf_dani Hi Hamdani Yussuf, thank you for this response, I am quite happy to accept this definition, as long as we understand that it remains in the realm of the abstract. I use it myself for this very purpose, all the construction projects that I engage in are carefully considered using my mind to visualise the components and the methods of construction beforehand. For many years now I have been able to imagine all sorts of shapes textures and colours which I can then describe in considerable detail to my colleagues. I find that if I can visualise the final product and then trace back the sequence of actions to the start I can find a reliable starting point which will produce the desired result. Several important things are very clear, that such methods rely on description not prescription, I try to keep my eyes and ears open as the work progresses and have no hesitation in amending the script at any time it fails to fit reality!, that insistence on keeping fact from fantasy is essential!, I always have to work with what I get regardless of what I want!. In that sense your use of the term pursue is so much better than attain as far as the goals are concerned. Cheers, Richard.

Creativity is spontaneity related which is unconscious. Consciously one decides which of the elements that pops up in your head are worth pursuing. When working out a idea the unconscious is also involved since it is a creative process. Consciousness plays a rather modest part here. Interestingly people who are artists/writers/creators etc.. as well as mystics are equally up to their neck in the unconscious.

To some extent consciousness is brain derived, this doesn't mean that it cannot exist outside of and independent of the brain. Considering out-of-body and NDE experiences, shows that it can. And there is some portion of consciousness that is not brain derived, and transmigrates. As in rebirth or reincarnation. Thus the reason past lives cannot be fully recalled. Although this would be lost to a pure materialist.

@@willp9226 I agree brain activity correlates with conscious experience and can effect it in the form of brain damage. But NDE testimony suggests conscious mind survives without brains. During Howard storm's NDE he found himself staring down at his physical body. He was existing in a body but it wasn't his physical body. He could see what the other people in the room were doing but they could not see him. He was a materialist through and through so the only explanation he could think of at the time was that the hospital staff had replaced his body with a wax work replica. Materialists who think NDEs are the hallucinations of a dieing brain should ask themselves where the brain was getting the information to create a detailed and accurate replica of the hospital room. Here is the NDE I am referring to: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-diPhrDPH8U8.htmlsi=FewoSlCyzj3DlpUh

@@ianwaltham1854 Yes, and with rebirth or reincarnation, it seems that only very impactful events in one's previous life, for the most part are able to be recalled. Still, this suggests there is an aspect of or a part of consciousness that transmigrates after the death of the body. And a small portion of people can recall much more of their past life, but very few. Compared to what is recalled from past lives, NDEs or OBEs seem to allow for more vivid memories during the OBE.

No. You said: "There is no mystery, there is no God, there is no Self or Soul; we come from the great ape 600,000 years ago and all sensation and perceptions are only neuronal activites; truth is a product of the brain." This doesn't explain much, and certainly, no Wiseman would ever leave it at that. You haven't explained 'place' yet, let alone confronted the real questions. You believe the brain did all of this by itself. You said there is no God and there's no mystery, yet I haven't seen you refute anything by Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus or the ancient Greeks, Indian's, Egyptians in general who were masters in science and inquiry and could do dialectic unlike the old dry superficial fool like yourself. You believe the artwork itself alone is the truth, that there is no canvas and no Artificer. Sure, the brain did it all. Might I ask: where is the brain? How am I in your head and you in my head? What is this blueprint: being, forms, natures, relations, etc. where did being come from, where does being go after corporeal duration expires? In Metaphysics, you can't make stuff up, you actually have to explain everything. And you can't.

Also, how would the brain convert light into a 3D image/world projected ‘out there?’

The concept of quantum entanglement is useful in underatanding consciousness. The conscious state with its emotional overtones is totally different from and is *entangled* with the brain's activities. Requires a normally-functioning brain (which requires a certain amount of oxygen snd glucose). The first breath of a newborn baby provides a surge in oxygen which activates the brain areas responsible for consciousness. Once activated these areas will continue to function throughout one's lifetime. Death is the total and permanent cut-off of the entanglement when the brain areas are damaged irreparably .

You wouldn't know Truth if it fell from the sky, landed on your face and started to wiggle and giggle.

Good and bad are RELATIVE. 😉 consciousness/Consciousness: “that which knows”, or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). To put it succinctly, consciousness is the SUBJECTIVE component in any subject-object relational dynamic. The concept of consciousness is best understood in comparison with the notion of sentience. Cf. “sentience”. As far as biologists can ascertain, the simplest organisms (single-celled microbes) possess an exceedingly-primitive form of sentience, since their life-cycle revolves around adjusting to their environment, metabolizing, and reproducing via binary fission, all of which indicates a sensory perception of their environment (e.g. temperature, acidity, energy sources and the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, minerals, and water). More complex organisms, such as plants, have acquired a far greater degree of sentience, since they can react to the light of the sun, to insects crawling on their leaves (in the case of carnivorous plants), excrete certain chemicals and/or emit ultrasonic waves when being cut. At this point it is imperative to consult the entry “sentience” in the Glossary of this Holy Scripture. According to this premise, the simplest forms of animal life possess sentience, but no noticeable semblance of true consciousness. As a general rule, those animals that have at least three or four senses, combined with a simple brain, possess a mind but lack an intellect. Higher animals (notably mammals) have varying levels of intelligence but only humans have a false-ego (sense of self). Thus, human consciousness is constituted of the three components: the mind, the intellect, and the pseudo-ego (refer to Ch. 05). There is a rather strong correlation between brain complexity and level of consciousness, explaining why humans alone are capable of self-awareness. In this case, “self-awareness” is not to be confused with “self-recognition”, which is a related but quite distinct phenomenon, found also in several species of non-human animals, in which an animal is able to recognize itself in a mirror or some other reflective surface. “Self-awareness” refers to the experience where a human over the age of approximately three years, is conscious of the fact that he or she knows (that is, aware) that he or she is aware. Obviously, in the case of a child, he or she may need to be prompted in order to first be acquainted with this understanding. For example an adult could ask the child: “Do you know that you have a toy car?” “Yes!” “And do you KNOW that you know you have a toy car?” “Umm...I think so...yes!”. In contemporary spiritual circles (as well as in several places within this book), the capitalized form of the word usually, if not always, refers to Universal Consciousness, that is, an Awareness of awareness (otherwise known as The Ground of All Being, et altri).

That’s funny. I never knew about IIT until just now, but I have been preaching it for the past 12 months. Lol. Like I said before, subjective experience is a thought and all thoughts are based on objective memories/experiences. Just because we can’t map subjective thought in practicality, does not mean it can’t be done in theory.

"A hammer will discribe structures" - faulty logic Science is a tool and entirely dependent on man's sense organs. "Our senses will describe consciousness" ? - without consciousness our sense organs would be redundant. ----------------- There's not one man interviewed by Robert that is worth reading or following. They're clowns.

I do not understand. 😒

Are you a journalist? I have news that would earn you the Pulitzer prize, but you have to be brave and say the truth. Are you a mother or father of beautiful, innocent and vulnerable children? I know how to end all the wars in the world to protect their lives. You have to publish the discovery that atheism is a logical fallacy. The greatest knowledge, that grants the greatest power, is atheism is a logical fallacy that assumes God is the religious idea of the creator of the creation to conclude wrongly no creator exists because a particular idea of God doesn’t exist. Did you understand? If you didn't understand to understand you have to read until the end or until you understand. It shatters my heart to pieces to see people dying and crying in Palestine and Ukraine when to end the madness only the knowledge that should not be censored in the first place has to be known. Take a good look at the world and tell me what you see. Look what atheism and religion have done to you. If journalists run away offended and panicking like the devil from holy water on hearing discoveries have been made something seriously wrong is going on. I will explain the kalam cosmological argument that proves logically God exists and atheists wouldn't understand to save their own life, let alone their own innocent and vulnerable children's lives. What has a beginning of existence has a cause because from nothing can not be created something. Atheism is the belief immune to arguments that all reality is created, and that's why atheists remark "who created god?". Atheism is blind faith in the impossible. Logically an infinite number of causes and effects can not exist. The evolution of the species is a sequence, son, parents, grandparents, and so on so forth, and logically the sequence can not be infinite. Therefore an eternal first uncaused cause that caused what has a beginning of existence must exist. God is the first uncaused cause that created the universe. God is a reality of an infinite nature that created a reality of a finite nature or universe, and all is one reality, all is God, all is everything that ever existed, exist and would exist, all is Time and Space. Did you understand? You don't have to believe in God because God is necessary because logically it is impossible the existence of the creation or finitude without the creator or infinitude. To overcome a censorship the information that is prohibited has to be shared to be known. I hope for God's sake to be understood.

@LifesInsight I'm viewing your 3 latest comments and have seen a few others of yours over time. You're not a friend, let alone a man. Don't expect love from.

It would be a start to have a theory in which all known phenomena can be fitted without making "mysterious" claims such as; everything is consciousness, or; consciousness is an illusion. After all, that explains nothing.

@@MacWiedijk Hi Mac Wiedijk, thank you for this reply, I do agree that some form of unifying hypothesis is needed as a start point, until then all we have is speculation and conjecture, none of which is testable. Without consistent testability there can be no scientific explanation, one thing to note of course is that this reality is one in which we all exist, the fact that there are things for which we have no explanation which may or may not be real is important, it is but one of mant examples of the nature of the physical universe, our continues existence here is not predicated on our knowledge or understanding!, we might find pleasure or even comfort in knowledge and understanding but we can live quite well enough without it!. What I think is more risky is making untested and unsupportable assertion about the nature of for example consciousness, I think it better to admit to knowing nothing than to get it wrong!, that can lead to apparently sensible decisions being made based on false premise, we could end up with medical treatments that do more harm than good like frontal lobotomy and Electric Shock 'Therapy', even maybe 'vaccines' that do nothing to prevent the disease but actually kill some people!. Blind faith is inherently dangerous!. Cheers, Richard

@@richardharvey1732 Hi Richard, I think the biggest risks in researching theories are not the well-considered assumptions but the wandering of the scientific path due to blind panic and financial gain. Indeed, a lot of people are dying these days. Greetings, Menno

@@MacWiedijk Hi, Menno Wiedijk, thank you for continuing this thread, I do enjoy reading what someone else has in their mind!, especially when it seems to conform to a similar view of the 'world'. This last four years have been quite interesting for me mostly because after six decades of interest in science and humanity some things are at last falling into place and I seem to be able to make some sense of it all, if that is 'sense' is the right word!. My original interest in scientific method very much revolved around the rigour and discipline required to establish scientific principles and material facts!, the strict application of the rules of evidence, logic, coherence and consistency. Essentially it all seems so simple and obvious!. What has taken me so long to come to terms with is that just because we can apply scientific methodology to problems does not mean that we always do!, it seems we humans have many different talents, rational thinking but one of many, as it turns out not one we are actually very good at, rational thinking is very time consuming!, I am so often betrayed by the weaknesses of my own short term memory, I forget where I am and have to start all over again, long chains of consistent logical thought are hard to hang onto. What all of us are so much better at and so much quicker is just guessing the answer!, asserting that as our considered opinion and resenting and rejecting any critical challenge, I suspect much of this comes from the 'creative' side of our brains. What I am now only slowly realising is the scale and extent of this behaviour and the way so many false assumptions are embedded in our corrupt western culture. When an idea is so widely accepted and never challenged it does not ever get tested in any realistic way, thus assumptions that civilisation is in some way an advance and the fact that no human civilisation has ever survived for more than a few hundred years is always 'explained' as the product of external hostility, the idea that the concept might be fundamentally flawed is never allowed!. For most of the last forty years I have been thinking that humanity cannot possibly expect to continue on the extravagant trajectory for very much longer!. In fact I am quite surprised that we are still all here!. Now that I think I understand the extreme influence that emotions, desires, anxieties and fears seem to be the primary motivation while realistic assessment of the actual environment is ignored, that human cultures action and efforts are directed by such desires and expectations the levels of desperation and panic can only get worse!, there can be nothing more demoralising than finding you cannot just get what ever you want by wanting it!. Cheers, Richard.

@@richardharvey1732 Hello Richard, Although as a Dutch person I notice a language barrier, I can follow your argument well. I am the opposite of a scientific thinker myself. I try to follow the rules of logic and also make as much use as possible of the billions of neurons that form the subconscious and in which all knowledge and life experience are stored. This produces ideas that could then form the basis of critical research. My explanation and interpretation of consciousness is based on analogies and inspired by thinking and imagining how the development of organisms has ultimately led to the way humans function. In my view, science is a socio-cultural construct that results from, and supplements, man's chaotic and emotional way of thinking. So; like-minded but complete opposites. Greetings, Menno

Sings: “It ain’t necessarily so...” 🎤 consciousness/Consciousness: “that which knows”, or “the state of being aware”, from the Latin prefix “con” (with), the stem “scire” (to know) and the suffix “osus” (characterized by). To put it succinctly, consciousness is the SUBJECTIVE component in any subject-object relational dynamic. The concept of consciousness is best understood in comparison with the notion of sentience. Cf. “sentience”. As far as biologists can ascertain, the simplest organisms (single-celled microbes) possess an exceedingly-primitive form of sentience, since their life-cycle revolves around adjusting to their environment, metabolizing, and reproducing via binary fission, all of which indicates a sensory perception of their environment (e.g. temperature, acidity, energy sources and the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, minerals, and water). More complex organisms, such as plants, have acquired a far greater degree of sentience, since they can react to the light of the sun, to insects crawling on their leaves (in the case of carnivorous plants), excrete certain chemicals and/or emit ultrasonic waves when being cut. At this point it is imperative to consult the entry “sentience” in the Glossary of this Holy Scripture. According to this premise, the simplest forms of animal life possess sentience, but no noticeable semblance of true consciousness. As a general rule, those animals that have at least three or four senses, combined with a simple brain, possess a mind but lack an intellect. Higher animals (notably mammals) have varying levels of intelligence but only humans have a false-ego (sense of self). Thus, human consciousness is constituted of the three components: the mind, the intellect, and the pseudo-ego (refer to Chapter 05 of my Holy Scripture). There is a rather strong correlation between brain complexity and level of consciousness, explaining why humans alone are capable of self-awareness. In this case, “self-awareness” is not to be confused with “self-recognition”, which is a related but quite distinct phenomenon, found also in several species of non-human animals, in which an animal is able to recognize itself in a mirror or some other reflective surface. “Self-awareness” refers to the experience where a human over the age of approximately three years, is conscious of the fact that he or she knows (that is, aware) that he or she is aware. Obviously, in the case of a child, he or she may need to be prompted in order to first be acquainted with this understanding. For example an adult could ask the child: “Do you know that you have a toy car?” “Yes!” “And do you KNOW that you know you have a toy car?” “Umm...I think so...yes!”. In contemporary spiritual circles (as well as in several places within this book), the capitalized form of the word usually, if not always, refers to Universal Consciousness, that is, an Awareness of awareness (otherwise known as The Ground of All Being, et altri). sentience: the capacity to experience feelings or sensations, as distinguished from perceptions and cognition. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin “sentientem” (a feeling), in order to distinguish it from the ability to think/reason. Therefore, sentience ought not be confused with consciousness, though the two are closely related. As far as biologists can ascertain, the simplest organisms (single-celled microbes) possess an exceedingly-primitive form of sentience, since their life-cycle revolves around adjusting to their environment, metabolizing, and reproducing via binary fission, all of which indicates a sensory perception of their environment (e.g. temperature, acidity, energy sources and the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, minerals, and water). More complex organisms, such as plants, have acquired a far greater degree of sentience, since they can react to the light of the sun, to insects crawling on their leaves (in the case of carnivorous plants), excrete certain chemicals and/or emit ultrasonic waves when being cut. In animal life, there are up to five sensory organs which can detect external stimulants or percepts. ADDITIONALLY, many forms of metazoans have acquired a degree of consciousness, in which a subject-object polarity is established. Therefore, when carnists claim that “plants have feelings too” upon being confronted with vegan ideology, they may be correct (at least in a rather diffuse sense of the term “feelings”), so the most logical reason for being vegan is not because plants are completely without sentience, but simply due to the fact that humans are an herbivorous species. If Homo sapiens were naturally omnivores or carnivores, then no sane person would promote veganism. In summary, all forms of organic life are, by definition, sentient, yet TRUE consciousness is found in those animal species that have a certain level of intelligence (that is, as a general rule, vertebrates, though there are a couple of notable exceptions to this general rule). Cf. “conscious".

Ok now explain how a brain made of fat, protein, and water does all that.

@dr_shrinker You had me right up to when you said consciousness is reducible. We may be able to describe consciousness scientifically, but the property of emergence is too complicated for reductionism. Even Laplace's demon would agree.

@@stellarwind1946 like I’m going to teach you the entirety of neuroscience in a RU-vid comment. If you want to know, do your research. I don’t care if you understand how a brain works, or if you don’t, but you might want to start by learning what parts of the brain do…visual cortex, amygdala, hypothalamus…etc.

@@quantumkathit’s not too complicated. If you remove the brain, you remove conscious thought. At what point would a brain stop thinking, if you removed one neuron at a time? There’s your reduction of thought. I don’t subscribe to Kaplace’s Demon theory. It’s flawed because it can’t account for quantum physics. Besides, even if it could, it’s not relevant to understanding consciousness outside of physics that comprise the brain.

@LifesInsight not all chooses to be a clown in the circus of life.... but you are free to choose to..

@@evaadam3635 You have chosen to be a clown that tells obvious lies on the internet apparently just to entertain others.

One of the reasons, but not the only, is that the longer these researchers keep pushing the 'complexities' and 'difficulties' of and around consciousness, they keep getting funding from their university or technical school to continue their research, and of course their cushy jobs.

@@willp9226 indeed - survival of the fittest in Ivory Tower academia. Who can most accurately count the angels dancing on the heads of pins gets the funding