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Interesting article didnt know where it fit best so I wanted to share it here.
Interesting article didnt know where it fit best so I wanted to share it here.
No, it’s not. Next question…
Seriously though, doesn’t basically every experiment in brain surgery and neuroscience disprove this idea? We know how different structures in the brain contribute to consciousness. We can’t explain the mechanism 100%, but that doesn’t mean that every piece of matter secretly has some consciousness embedded in it. It’s God of the Gaps nonsense.
I’m not against posting stuff like this. Obviously serious people take this idea seriously. Just none of the people taking it seriously study brains.
Well, we know that the simple fact of observing an event changes it (see the Double Slit experiment), so consciousness has to have some kind of link to reality itself, no?
We currently do not know what consciousness even is exactly, and we know only about the human consciousness, but there can be other degrees of consciousness within other particles in the universe.
And even if current-day experiments disprove something, that doesn’t mean it will in the future, just like before Einstein’s laws of relativity proved that gravity bends spacetime and that it is relative according to the point of observation.
And I’m sure people that study neuroscience ask this same question from time to time. It’s a scientist’s duty to find the factual truth about things, even if they disprove everything they know so far. We can’t rule out something as impossible just because we haven’t observed it yet, as it would directly contradict the scientific method, and therefore cease to be science.
Your opening statement is incorrect. Observation in the quantum mechanics sense does not have anything to do with consciousness. Observation is really just a form of interaction.
Figuring out what’s possible versus impossible isn’t really part of the scientific method. The scientific method is about collecting and interpreting evidence. Where is the evidence that particles are conscious?
Until there is a testable hypothesis, panpsychism doesn’t have anything to do with science.
Others in this thread have already explained that consciousness doesn’t play any role in the double slit experiment. I definitely understand your confusion there. I believed the same thing at one point. It doesn’t help that some people purposely spread that false interpretation of the experiment because it’s more interesting than reality.
It would help if we started explaining that an “observer” in quantum mechanics is another singular quantum particle like an electron or a photon. To “observe” means to collide or entangle.
I think you might be misunderstanding what “observation” means in that context.
Wikipedia: Observer Effect
Thank you for explaining this.
Altering or tinkering with the substrate will of course alter the ”functioning” of consciousness. This does nothing to demystify or explain its existence; it only proves that it “utilizes” or depends on that substrate.
If you remove the hands of a brilliant guitarist, you haven’t “proven” that musicality is purely a function of hand structure/mechanics.
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I mean no? Where did you get we have any idea how consciousness works at all? We have no idea what structures on the brain have anything to do with it, or if they have anything to do with it at all.
We know about brain structures shaping our personalities, memories and senses. But that’s not consciousness. Not at all.
Perhaps that is the misunderstanding?
Consciousness is awareness, experience. It’s the “observer” under the experience. THAT is a mystery, that is the hardest problem in science. Not “where in the brain do we process sadness?”…
Is your point that memory, emotions, and sensory input don’t have anything to do with consciousness?
What exactly is consciousness doing without sensory input to process and memory to give those inputs context?
Why do you think “awareness” of sights and sounds is separate from the parts of the brain that process those sights and sounds?
When you look through a microscope, or hear music through headphones, are you those tools? Or are you the thing that hears and sees?
How can you “have” emotions? When you try to reach the baseline of your experience, when you try to find the thing that experiences reality, what do you think you’ll find?
Grey goo, a network of neurons, a brain. You can literally inject chemicals into your body that change your emotions and consciousness. Physical things can interrupt my consciousness, so why would you assume consciousness is not a physical phenomenon?
When I look through a microscope, photons go through the lens of the microscope, then similarly go through the lens of my eye. My retina absorbs those photons and translates them into action potentials a.k.a. chemical/electrical signals. Those action potentials reach my occipital lobe (going through some synapses as purely chemical signals) where they interact with other action potentials from other parts of my brain, and I have the experience of seeing an image.
If my occipital is not the final destination of these signals, then what is? Where does the information go after it’s processed by my brain?