Does "Consciousness" Die?
This question was put to the Sift by @bmacs27 in a comment thread (albeit worded differently), and since I share her/his curiosity as to what @siftbot's drones (you know, we meatbags) think about it, I thought I'd put the question under the light in a Sift talk.
What is "consciousness" (imagine the scare-quotes from here on), and can it survive the death of its physical host?
Here is a brief, unresearched, of-the-top-of-my-head summary of my take on the notion of consciousness and death (i.e. it is the opinion of a non-scientist layperson). Consciousness is an aspect of the complex brain's functioning (in conjunction with the nervous system). At some point the brain (with the help of the nervous system) becomes gradually capable of processing and eventually storing the complex information that is sensory input (probably not all at once). It is at this point - in my uneducated opinion - that consciousness begins, and thenceforth continues to develop and complexify (to different degrees) throughout the animal's early life. Needless to say, this view necessarily entails that when the brain is dead, so is its owner's consciousness.
Discussions about consciousness often arise from or raise the question of person-hood, and when discussing the latter I like to pose the following hypothetical and hear what people think:
Imagine a human who was born (or is to be born) with a genetic malformation rendering it incapable - from the start - of receiving or processing sensory input of any kind. (Personally, I highly doubt such a being could survive, but it's a philosophical mind game, so bear with me.) Is that being a person? Is it, or s/he, conscious, or capable of consciousness? (my answer = no)
Now imagine the same thing, only this time the affliction came after an initial phase of normal reception/process of sensory information. Does the person cease to be a person (i.e. "is dead") if they can no longer process sensory input (including the stockage of previous input, i.e. memory)?
Let the wracking of brains and tapping of keys begin!
irrelevant trivia: the acronym of this title = "dead" when read in French ("décédé). And no, I did not do it on purpose (not that such a thing would be beneath me, hehe)
What is "consciousness" (imagine the scare-quotes from here on), and can it survive the death of its physical host?
Here is a brief, unresearched, of-the-top-of-my-head summary of my take on the notion of consciousness and death (i.e. it is the opinion of a non-scientist layperson). Consciousness is an aspect of the complex brain's functioning (in conjunction with the nervous system). At some point the brain (with the help of the nervous system) becomes gradually capable of processing and eventually storing the complex information that is sensory input (probably not all at once). It is at this point - in my uneducated opinion - that consciousness begins, and thenceforth continues to develop and complexify (to different degrees) throughout the animal's early life. Needless to say, this view necessarily entails that when the brain is dead, so is its owner's consciousness.
Discussions about consciousness often arise from or raise the question of person-hood, and when discussing the latter I like to pose the following hypothetical and hear what people think:
Imagine a human who was born (or is to be born) with a genetic malformation rendering it incapable - from the start - of receiving or processing sensory input of any kind. (Personally, I highly doubt such a being could survive, but it's a philosophical mind game, so bear with me.) Is that being a person? Is it, or s/he, conscious, or capable of consciousness? (my answer = no)
Now imagine the same thing, only this time the affliction came after an initial phase of normal reception/process of sensory information. Does the person cease to be a person (i.e. "is dead") if they can no longer process sensory input (including the stockage of previous input, i.e. memory)?
Let the wracking of brains and tapping of keys begin!
irrelevant trivia: the acronym of this title = "dead" when read in French ("décédé). And no, I did not do it on purpose (not that such a thing would be beneath me, hehe)
16 Comments
JiggaJonsonYou can't think about your own consciousness not existing and fully understand it because your consciousness didn't develop to function that way.
Also, yes, it does die. Though Richard Dawkins has said, and I happen to agree, that he's not afraid of death, he's afraid of dieing. Most people like to imagine their death as some kind of slow fade to black as you lay in a hospital bed surrounded by relatives and friends. No one thinks they'll keel over with a cock in their hand strangled by their own belt.
bmacs27 says...Personally I find it hard to reconcile what I know about physics with the existence of consciousness to begin with. Perhaps a better thought question would be something along the lines of Chalmers' zombie world arguments. That is, could a person appear outwardly to perceive and act in the world normally and not be conscious? That is, could they just be some sort of robot, or cascade of known biochemical processes? Alan Turing, in his own way, was interested in the same question.
Therein lies the problem. If there is no satisfactory physical test for consciousness, how can we be so sure about how consciousness is anchored to matter? Frankly, I see little hope of unifying an understanding of consciousness with an understanding of physics without invoking quantum mechanics. Even that just feels like punting to the physics equivalent of magic.
Personally I'm on the lunatic fringe with consciousness. I can't derive consciousness, but I'm overwhelmingly convinced of its existence. So, instead of dealing with all the paradoxes I just assume consciousness is present in all matter. There are varying experiences, or "degrees" of consciousness however. The nice entropy reducing capabilities of our nervous system make our particular conscious experience substantially richer than that of, for example, a rock. So I guess my thought is that the experience sort of fades towards the experience the matter would have without the metabolic energy necessary to support neuronal conduction. Honestly, I don't think it would be possible to obtain data on it, but I imagine it to be somewhat like fading to gray. I suppose it would be equally likely to be like fading into chaos.
Boise_LibExcellent talk post!
The theory of Quantum Consciousness is facinating.
I think that the theories of Gustav Bernroider as well as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff are probably close the the true nature of consciousness.
Unless we are all just simulations being run on a future supercomputer.
As to the question, "Is death the end of everything?" I say no--only because of a highly subjective, personal experience which will never convince anyone else--I believe (that's small "b" believe) that there is an unseen connection (didn't there used to be a spellcheck in here?) between all life--possibly the whole universe--through which we continue in some fashion.
It may surprise some that I am not an atheist since I so joyfully attack dogmaitc theists. I'm a walking contracidtion.
Definitely and *quailty discussion.
Boise_LibWhy didn't the quality take?
Back the the FAQ.
gwiz665It ceases to exist - in whatever form you may mean it exists - so, yes.
gwiz665.... I think that.
>> ^JiggaJonson:
No one thinks they'll keel over with a cock in their hand strangled by their own belt.
gwiz665I'll repost what I posted in the other thread:
I like Daniel Dennett's way of looking at Consciousness. "That which experiences", to me, insinuates that this thing in our brain is what actually experience things. Like a homonculus argument. In reality, I believe, that the brain generates the consciousness stream from the constant experience of sensory input. This explains how our brain can autocorrect itself after something has occurred, or call attention to thing we otherwise aren't paying attention to - a constant noise suddenly stopping will seem like we listened to it intently all the time, while we actually never was paying attention to it; or hearing our names in a crowded room.
It's sorta like software on hardware. Of course, it's gonna be insanely hard to "guess" how the software works, it's hard to do that on a computer now from just the electrical impulses, we need to translate upwards in abstraction layers.
hpqp@gwiz665
I like the hardware/software analogy too. In fact, there is a project to make a computer model of the human brain (for circa 2023): http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page-52741-en.html
gwiz665The main difficulty in simulating a brain is that the brain is almost infinitely parallel, while turing machines are inherently serial. Each neuron is dependent on the neurons around it, which themselves are dependent on the neurons beside them and so on.
To do that calculation in a serial machine is crazy time consuming. You have to essentially re-iterate every single neuron several time to advance one single "step", while the brain does it in real time. We're getting closer, but we're not nearly there yet.
There are ways to simplify it, of course, but then we sorta lose the point, don't we?
>> ^hpqp:
@gwiz665
I like the hardware/software analogy too. In fact, there is a project to make a computer model of the human brain (for circa 2023): http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page-52741-en.html
Boise_Lib>> ^gwiz665:
.... I think that.
>> ^JiggaJonson:
No one thinks they'll keel over with a cock in their hand strangled by their own belt.
I suspect that you're right.
marinarafeelings exist for those who feel them. This is true for animals, plants, social networks.
Consciousness exists for those who have consciousness. Consciousness can be defined as a feeling of a feeling.
As a Christian, I was taught life after death, but I've abandoned that view and moved all those instructions into a category of concepts that are better taken as metaphors than as literal fact. Should we expect to go to a higher plane after we die? I'll answer that with : do others remember us in a positive manner? Since your brain is dead, your identity rests only with those who remember you, or government records of your identity.
Consider a brain that has been chemically lobotomized. After the drugs are removed, that brain is chemically identical to the brain before the lobotomy. But the 'spirit' is gone. The brain is incapable of feeling, therefore consciousness cannot exist. Now is consciousness separate from the brain, or is it simply a part of brain function?
Final question: Are we part of a group consciousness right now? If we're aware of the intent of the group, how the group feels about itself, would it really be any different than if we had wires networking our 10 brains together? Would that awareness be fundamentally different from our own group awareness now?
@bmacs27 I think there could be a satisfactory physical test for consciousness. There's different levels of consciousness after all. Some monkeys will recognize their own self in a mirror, some won't. Is that an example?
@Jigga Quantum consciousness is flawed. After all, it's typical to explain something poorly understood with something that is poorly understood but we hope explains it.
marinaraalso i believe in a soul. Lets say you buy a sports car and give it to a stranger. Even if that stranger doesn't know why the hell he got a sports car, and even if you're long past stone cold dead, When that sports car is being enjoyed, that satisfaction of the stranger has to come from somewhere. It comes from the soul of the person who gave the car.
gwiz665@marinara
"Consider a brain that has been chemically lobotomized. After the drugs are removed, that brain is chemically identical to the brain before the lobotomy. But the 'spirit' is gone. The brain is incapable of feeling, therefore consciousness cannot exist. Now is consciousness separate from the brain, or is it simply a part of brain function? "
Well, "feeling" in the sense of sensory input can be turned off anyway in otherwise functioning brains, as evidenced in so many people( deaf, blind etc). Theoretically, a person can be completely devoid of sensory input and still live. Although, I'm not sure you'd survive very long.
Consider the opposite, a braindead person. The sensory input is still there - we can follow the electrical impulses in the nerve endings working their way into the brain, but it is never processed - as far as I know.
I believe the consciousness is the constant processing of data in the brain, condensed in such a way that it can itself dedicate enough resources to process it. Sort of a weird way to say it, I guess.
xxovercastxxSam Harris delivered the best argument I've ever heard that consciousness, or "the mind", dies with the brain. Here it is for anyone who's not already seen it:
berticus*quality
siftbotAwarding hpqp with one star point for this contribution to VideoSift - declared quality by berticus.
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