What is consciousness?

[Colanth]

Is it not correct that according to some quantum physicists, everything is one and the same?

No, it's not correct (although some scientifically illiterate science writer may have said that).

If everything is just the product of a singularity, why don't we see everything at once?

For the same reason that, even though you and your brother are products of the same parents, you're not the same people.

If I am just made of flesh and blood, why do I percieve awareness and consciouness at all?

We're not quite sure yet.

[Colanth]

My thoughts come from my brain. But why do I percieve them at all? Why am I aware of these thoughts produced by my brain?

Evolution.  If your far distant ancestors hadn't evolved the ability, they would have been meat plants, easily grazed by carnivores before they had lived long enough to reproduce.

[Colanth]

I think of the brain as a computer.  Not the best way I am sure. But consider how a computer accesses memories off of the hard drives.  it points at a particular location address and then loads the information into the RAM for quick access to the CPU which outputs in some matter.  How does our brain actually address and locate stored information?

VERY bad analogy.  The brain is more like Data Addressable Memory, where the "address" IS the data.  But the brain stores the same data redundantly in many places at once, so it's really nothing like a computer.

Now it is not necessarily physical, just like the information on our hard drives is not actually physical.  It is just a bunch of bits configured in a specific way and held there by magnetic coding.

No, the magnetic coding IS the data (the bits are magnetizations of very small domains of ferric material), and it's VERY MUCH physical.  Data storage in a computer is 100% physical, whether it's on a hard drive, an optical disk, a memory chip or a punched card.  And what happens to "record" the data is a physical process, acting on a physical "thing".  There's no "non-physical" part of a computer's "memory".

[Hydra009]

Hydra wrote in part:

No. Chemists started chemistry and astronomers started astronomy. The reason these scientific fields exist at all is because early scientists took a muddled mess of guesswork/superstition, systematized the data and checked it for accuracy.

I respectfully disagree.  As do many others.

Alchemy is recognized as a protoscience that contributed to the development of modern chemistry and medicine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy

Through most of its history, astrology was considered a scholarly tradition. It was accepted in political and academic contexts, and was connected with other studies, such as astronomy, alchemy, meteorology, and medicine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrology

Apparently, you didn't dig around very much, or you'd notice nuggets like this:

"Boyle appealed to chemists to experiment and asserted that experiments denied the limiting of chemical elements to only the classic four: earth, fire, air, and water. He also pleaded that chemistry should cease to be subservient to medicine or to alchemy, and rise to the status of a science. Importantly, he advocated a rigorous approach to scientific experiment: he believed all theories must be proved experimentally before being regarded as true. The work contains some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reaction, and marks the beginning of the history of modern chemistry."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... bert_Boyle

The differences between the two approaches couldn't be more stark.

Read up on the Scientific Revolution.  It's quite fascinating.  It also runs directly counter to your assertion that "trying to explore the metaphysical can help us to understand things better.".  Rather, it was the eschewing of mystical mumbo-jumbo and an insistence on testable hypotheses that lead to great scientific strides.

What non-physical brain?

You objected to the idea that the brain is purely physical:  "There are a bunch of naysayers out there which will not consider anything other than the physical brain as being able to influence us."

The antithesis asked you point blank what you mean by that and you ignored the question.

If I've misinterpreted your position, I'm genuinely sorry, but you certainly seem to be advocating for some sort of dualism where consciousness is at least partially non-physical, hence my strong disagreement.

So I'm only going to ask you this once and only once, where do you think that consciousness comes from?

What I am trying to point out is we don't really have a handle on how the brain does its' thing.  By trying to find a "soul" scientists might actually learn better how the brain works.

Why stop there?  Why not advance geography while looking for the fountain of youth?  Or advance medicine by looking for bad humors?  Or advance psychology by delving into blood type superstitions?

Do you seriously not notice how ridiculous that argument actually is?   :-k

[Colanth]

My idea of a soul came from the story of a young girl who had an accident and completely lost her memory.  All of it.  Not partial amnesia, she had to relearn everything.  She had to learn how to talk, walk, feed herself, I mean everything.  Once she learned how to talk well enough, she complained to her family that they seemed to think she was the girl they knew before the accident.  She knew she occupied the same body, but she didn't think of herself as the other girl.  The other girl lost her "soul" in the accident.

Only if you define the girl as her memories.  Then you're defining "soul"as "memories".

Now the body had a new "soul" and the girl was a different girl.

That's consistent - the body now had different memories.

It would be like if your hard drive got reformatted.  You would put new information in, maybe a new operating system.  Then you would have to reload programs, leaving some out and adding new ones.  While the computer is physically the same, it is a new computer in a way.  Does that help at all?

No, since the computer is the same in all ways, only the data it's storing is different. So you've again defined "soul" as "memories".

We have a word for what you're using "soul" for, you're just using the word for "the part of how brains work that I don't understand".  It's the soul of the gaps.

[Colanth]

I do not think science has a good grasp of how all of it works.  They just know how it is wired, not how we address and locate memories to do what we do.  This is the "soul" which needs to be found and understood in my opinion.

So when we didn't understand what lightning was, that was the god we had to find?

You said it yourself, but didn't recognize it.  "If we don't understand it, it has to be a god doing it."  Or a soul, in this case.  Wrong in both cases - lack of understanding isn't evidence that there's some entity that we made up that has to be there.  (The whole concept of a "soul" is just a misunderstanding of Genesis 2:7.  It means "breath", nothing more.  That's what the ancients thought was the difference between living things and non-living things.)

[Colanth]

As far as having a good grasp of what science thinks about it, hell no.  What I know I learned by reading a few articles and watching some documentaries.  As far as the level I am looking for, I want to know exactly how it works.

Science doesn't know yet, we're still investigating.  But "we don't know" doesn't mean God did it" any more than it means "we have souls".

Science isn't going to look for a soul any more than it's going to look for a god.  It's going to look AT minds, and go wherever that takes it.

[mediumaevum]

Is it not correct that according to some quantum physicists, everything is one and the same?

No, it's not correct (although some scientifically illiterate science writer may have said that).

If everything is just the product of a singularity, why don't we see everything at once?

For the same reason that, even though you and your brother are products of the same parents, you're not the same people.

1) According to a physics book known as The Fabric of the Cosmos the world is like a hologram and time is an illusion. According to Brian Greene, every even that had happened or will happen is just as real as the now/present. That logically follows that everything is the one and the same thing from the same singularity that casts a "picture" on a screen, what we percieve as the universe.

2) Nobody, to my knowledge, has so far answered what precisely causes Quantum Entanglement. Yes, I know that it happens if the photons are placed very close to each other and stuff like that, but it doesn't explain what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance" - that they can communicate instantly without regard to the speed of light.

I say that this can only happen if it is the one and same particle just many places at once. I suggest that the entire world is made up of one single particle no bigger than the smallest particle in the universe, and that every particle is one and the same different places in time and space. Yes, that's for my account.

However, there is a clue to this proved by the Double Slit Experiment too where an electron can be multiple places at once.

[Plu]

Nobody, to my knowledge, has so far answered what precisely causes Quantum Entanglement.

I say that this can only happen if it is the one and same particle just many places at once.

Argument from Ignorance fallacy.

You can say whatever you like, it isn't worth shit until you give actual empirical evidence that it means something.

[frosty]

Obviously my post was ignored, but I wonder what proponents of the 'soul' have to say when confronted with the accusation that the 'soul' is simply a gap filler. It's ironic that these people themselves are spitting out this and that about science, some information seems to come from reliable sources, yet anything we don't know is merely replaced by the 'soul'. It's a legitimate point I am bringing up and ignoring it doesn't make it magically (no pun intended?) go away.

Science is pushing back superstition further and further, yet superstition fights back by filling gaps of the unknown. These 'soul' proponents, I'm sure, are the 2013 equivalent of people that used to believe that heartbeats were the "footsteps of God" and breath and wind were the "breezes of the divine".

[LikelyToBreak]

I think we may be having trouble with the fact that words have different meanings.  Here is a list which may help.

soul (noun)
1. the principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans, regarded as a distinct entity separate from the body, and commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; the spiritual part of humans as distinct from the physical part.
2. the spiritual part of humans regarded in its moral aspect, or as believed to survive death and be subject to happiness or misery in a life to come: arguing the immortality of the soul.
3. the disembodied spirit of a deceased person: He feared the soul of the deceased would haunt him.
4. the emotional part of human nature; the seat of the feelings or sentiments.
5. a human being; person.

physical  (adjective)
1. of or pertaining to the body: physical exercise.
2. of or pertaining to that which is material: the physical universe; the physical sciences.
3. noting or pertaining to the properties of matter and energy other than those peculiar to living matter.
4. pertaining to the physical sciences, especially physics.
5. carnal; sexual: a physical attraction.

energy  (noun)
1. the capacity for vigorous activity; available power: I eat chocolate to get quick energy.
2. an adequate or abundant amount of such power: I seem to have no energy these days.
3. Often, energies. a feeling of tension caused or seeming to be caused by an excess of such power: to work off one's energies at tennis.
4. an exertion of such power: She plays tennis with great energy.
5. the habit of vigorous activity; vigor as a characteristic: Foreigners both admire and laugh at American energy.

//http://dictionary.reference.com/

When I am referring to "soul" I am talking about the fourth definition of soul.  I am, maybe incorrectly referring to "physical" as being solid matter and thinking of "energy" as being different.  Like how we have a radio (matter or physical) and radio waves (energy).  Thus, when I am talking about the physical brain, I am talking about the solid physical components, and thinking of the energy elements as a different state.  So, what I was thinking was the hard drive of a computer has the material hard drive and it has information maintained with different energy states.  It is just an analogy.  

I'm not a neuroscientist, nor a physicist.  I use language imprecisely.  And what I am trying to get across, is that if we look at things in different ways, we may end up with a new understanding of something.  Think about brainstorming for a minute.   Say you are in a brainstorming meeting for Company A tasked with coming up with ways to improve production, and to get things started someone says, "I'm thinking of pink elephants."  The discussion starts and ends up deciding on revising the drug policies for the company to better improve production.  Are there naturally occurring pink elephants.  Not that I know of.  The pink elephants didn't even matter.  What mattered is that they got people thinking about things in a way they may not have before.

It seems many here are stuck on the "soul" as being the religious separable, intangible, part of our body.  This is the religious prejudice I have been trying to point out.  Granted, I have not been as clear as I would have liked, and didn't differentiate what I meant by physical and energy very well, but tried I to clear it up with an analogy.  Which some seemingly took exception to.  Yes, radio waves, magnetic fields, electromotive force, are all physical.  But, they are not what we would normally think of as solid matter either.  Because I may be referring to different states of energy,  I am not saying that energy is God.  I didn't think atheists would have a problem with not seeing God in different states of energy.  It seems I was wrong.

frosty wrote in part:

Obviously my post was ignored, but I wonder what proponents of the 'soul' have to say when confronted with the accusation that the 'soul' is simply a gap filler.

I thought your previous post was more directed toward mediumaevum so I didn't answer.  I hope my explanation of "soul" explains why I don't see it as a gap filler.  It is the consciousness we have as ourselves.  Not the "soul" the angels take care of.  That being said, yes it is a gap filler because we, I don't understand our consciousness as well as would be desired.  I am not suggesting a God given spark of life.  

Colanth wrote in part:

Science doesn't know yet, we're still investigating. But "we don't know" doesn't mean God did it" any more than it means "we have souls".

Science isn't going to look for a soul any more than it's going to look for a god. It's going to look AT minds, and go wherever that takes it.

Where I have said "God did it?"  And didn't I explain that when I refer to "soul" and I was talking about consciousness and memories.  Maybe scientists are not going looking for God, but they very well may look for different types of energies effecting our consciousness and memories.

I'm not going to address each every person who took the time to post, but I have tried to clear up their concerns with this post.  I am not trying to convert you to new-age God worship.  I do think you should brainstorm different ideas and see where the ideas take you though.  And I would suggest you get over being consumed with the idea of God being implied in everything.  Things are the way they are, and that is what they are.

[Plu]

I think it's pretty much proven and known that (electrical) energy in the brain is what generates our consciousness. So in that regard, you're not really suggesting any new approach I think, just the currently understood one.

[SGOS]

It seems like since we are conscious, we should be able to understand how we are conscious, right while we are doing it.  We should be able to sort of "see" the electrical energy in our brains assemble into something we recognize as meaningful.  We should be able to feel it connecting through neurons and branching out through brain tissues as it gels into a thought.   But it doesn't happen.  We go from a highly organized state of protoplasm to consciousness, with no comprehension of the vital steps inbetween.  In the process of experiencing, we bypass the very thing that seems like it should be readily understood.

Psychologically, I think a couple of things turn this into the big mystery we make of it.  First consciousness is so important to us that we rely on it exclusively to define ourselves.  Our consciousness is the who in "who" we are.  It's not our bodies or eyes or the color of our hair.  It's the sense of self we experience in our brains.  We experience this state even though we might lose an arm or a leg, and even if our hair falls out.  It's the thing that will always be with us no matter what happens, at least until we cease to exist.

Second, we become so enamored with this experience of self that we give it special status.  And the fact that we can not experience how it happens leads us to fill in the gap between "blob of protoplasm" and "self".  Some of us simply can't help but explain it through supernatural explanations.

But we didn't evolve that way.  Survival does not require understanding how we are conscious.  Being conscious is the trait evolution selected for survival.  Understanding the process is all but useless to that end, so here we are experiencing without having much of a clue why it happens.  It drives us a little batty.  We bring up the subject on the internet.  And we sing about it during church services:  "Jesus loves me...." as he loves the part of me that experiences consciousness.

Go figure. :-D

[LikelyToBreak]

Plu wrote:

I think it's pretty much proven and known that (electrical) energy in the brain is what generates our consciousness. So in that regard, you're not really suggesting any new approach I think, just the currently understood one.

Yes, but there are different types of electrical energy and there are also chemical energies influencing our brain's functions.  I am also suggesting other forms of energy may affect our brains in yet not understood ways.

For instance, currently there are scientists studying how magnetic fields effect the brain.  There are others who have for years studied the effects different chemicals and molecules have on our brain.  Maybe, if a scientist considered how the magnetic fields influence the chemicals and molecules in our brains, we would end up with a better understanding of what is going on.   Or maybe looking at a different type of energy not usually considered as having an effect on us.  For instance, how does higher or lower blood pressure effect our consciousness?  How are the chemicals and molecules effected by higher or lower body temperatures?  Can radio waves effect us in yet not understood ways?

There may very well be scientists exploring these different aspects, but I don't think we should rule anything out as far as the functioning of the brain.  Except God.  Yes, I agree God should be ruled out.  God should not be in any of the equations when exploring the brain.  There is no God, so God cannot cause anything to happen in our brains.  But, maybe by thinking of God, we cause chemical and electrical changes in our brains.  That sounds like an interesting study, which I think arguably has been done.

[Plu]

It seems like since we are conscious, we should be able to understand how we are conscious, right while we are doing it.

It's really strange for a proces to be able to observe itself. Practically impossible, even. So it's not weird that we can't do it at all; we always need/use outside observers to watch a proces while it's happening.