Neuroscience of Consciousness | Raymond Tallis, Markus Gabriel, Susana Martinez Conde

28 thoughts on “Neuroscience of Consciousness | Raymond Tallis, Markus Gabriel, Susana Martinez Conde”

1. What do you think of this debate? Leave a comment below
   You can watch this debate, Neuroscience of Consciousness, in full at https://iai.tv/video/minds-matter-and-mechanisms?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=pinnedcomment

2. Susana – We are wired to…. Who wired you? The brain? And how your brain came to existence. The brain itself before even being the brain decided that?

3. 45 mins is just not enough

4. Susana seems closest to scientific reasoning. Indeed, why do we find the idea of being the products of our brains repulsive?
   I think people find it repulsive because it seems to impart upon us a feeling of “triviality”. People want to feel significant and that idea seems to shrink our significance. By that, the counter-argument seems to be emotionally heated rather than being reasonably established.

5. 22:03

   And this is why, ladies and gentlemen, reductive scientISM is anti-realist and ultimately vulgarly subjectivist.

6. Oh dear, another neuroscientist and a misguided philosopher who have both been programmed to believe that they are their brain.

   You would think that every neuroscientist in the world today would be au fait with the medical findings of Dr John Lorber who found over 100 people born without brains who functioned normally. This absolutely destroys the arguments of those Materialialist who keep claiming that Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain it cannot be and the ancients knew it:

   “If the body came into being because of consciousness that is a wonder, but if
   consciousness came in to being because of the body this is a wonder of wonders.”
   The Gnostic Christ The Gospel of Thomas

   The following link will take you to an article in which you can see the Brian scans of people born without a brain and this is not unusual in nature starfish who hunt, count and have memory also are born with no brain:

   http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/07/26/is-your-brain-really-necessary-revisited/?fbclid=IwAR1qoBK0EhiDE1m7UXLR4ePyoUx7HL9KQEVtYuOYlm0clVs31isIxNFUTSM#.XV_zekco-Ul

   Think about the implications as you peruse those scans No cerebral cortex, no amygdala, no pineal gland, no hippocampus, no brain structure of any kind, no glial cells no neurones.

   Is someone hiding this or is it just that people are oblivious to Lorber's research?

7. Whoever titled this somehow misspelled consciousness 4 times. Wait, nope 5. Missed one.

8. But IR and UV do affect us.

9. The 'hard problem' which neuroscience does not cannot explain is why human minds should be aware of their existence at all? Sure, we can easily infer the biological programming which triggers the biological responses we observe, but why is it that we should have any 'external' awareness of those events happening?

   When I look at my dog, I can see the programs his genetic code is executing, but I can also see that he is not aware that he will die one day, does not know that 'death' is a thing that happens. Some of the creatures he becomes familiar with will simply stop moving one day. He is existing, but he is existing without any conscious awareness that he exists. He is simply happening , a biological machine executing a program.

   Neuroscience cannot tell us why it is that we do not also simply "happen" without being aware of it, like dogs. There is no necessary need for this conscious awareness to be occurring while our programming is being executed. Stimuli –> response. That is all we see under the microscope. Why should there be anything more?

   Why indeed should any complex biological organism (incidentally?) generate this 'external awareness' mental phenomenon we experience? Or as Leibniz might phrase it, why is there something mental (thoughts/awareness) rather than nothing mental ? The bio-chemical processes we observe do not require it. Chemistry is what it is…does what it does. Why this 'something extra?'

10. Susana is the one that is correct 😊

11. This isn't a real debate. They all agree that consciousness is dependant on the brain. Its just speculative intellectual masturbation.

12. 41:32 Markus Gabriel accuses the lady neuroscientist of contradicting herself as she firstly invoked the possibility of a "brain in a vat that had her exact conscious experience she had right in that moment", while then saying that the brain maintains the experience of vision in a highly integrated and coordinated fashion with other senses and even integrating the nervous activity of motor areas (like those that generate head movements and eyeball movement). But, off course, Markus Gabriel is wrong.

    Remember that we're speaking theoretically, and this means that we aren't in any obligation to make this experiment happen in the next century or next millennium. So, given an arbitrary amount of time for science and technology to advance, we should imagine a "brain in a vat" that's fed through its visual nerve the exact types of stimuli that the eyes normally produce when they are seeing a natural scene (like being on a stage at the iai festival). But also, this brain would receive all the other normal inputs that the average lady philosopher's body (interacting with an environment made out of humans, chairs, stage, microphones, etc) sends to the brain via afferent nerves. Not only this, but also including the hormones and cytokines and other such things that are normally fed through the arteries. And when the brain would generate actions in the motor cortex and send them (as it normally would while inside a body), instead of a receiving muscle, this time it would be an artificial sensor that would gather the signals and feed them to an AI that would process them, and based on that.. the AI would recalibrate the visual inputs that are being fed to the brain via the optic nerve! So, when the brain would attempt to move the eyes to the left it would receive the exact visual input AS IF the eyes (and eye-muscles) were really there and moving accordingly. The AI would perfectly simulate "eyes" that are generating images and receiving movement commands. If this sounds far fetched to you, then look at these pioneers as they use an AI to "game" the brain of a monkey (while you're reading, think of the pathetic attempts of the earliest flight pioneers and where their endeavour lead: hypersonic jets and airbuses able to carry 1000 persons in max configuration) – https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/ai-evolved-these-trippy-images-to-please-a-monkeys-neurons/588517/?utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral

    For a "brain in a vat" scenario to work you would need an AI able to simulate not just a body, but "a dynamical body in a dynamical environment" according to the constant feedback it gets from the brain inside the vat. If one thinks (like Markus Gabriel) of a brain simply dropped in a jar with a bunch of electrical wires and hooked up to an artificial circulatory system, then that's a caricature that doesn't even require serious rebuttal.

13. Awesome talk! More like this please. Also, it would have been great to have Stuart Hameroff in the panel as well…

14. Too much word salad Philosophy. I would prefer to hear a talk between three neuroscientists talking strictly about the latest findings in neuroscience and what they think about consciousness. Really could of done without that philosopher !

15. 3 weeks before Christmas day in 2017 I dreamt I was in a busy place,people were walking past me and I met a man I'd never met before who was wearing glasses.He gave me what I thought was an orange.
    I woke up thinking it was just random until 3 weeks later on the Saturday before Christmas day when i was in town shopping and i was stopped by a vedic monk ,he was wearing glasses and he gave me a tangerine.
    He asked me if I was a violent man,to which i replied "not anymore" .
    I told him about my past and the mistakes I couldnt forgive myself for to which he then told me "the tangerine segments represent the different chapters of our lives ,we consume them,taking from each piece what we need to nourish ourselves with before moving on to the next".
    He then asked what I thought was up there 👆? "Aliens?"
    I laughed and said "maybe"
    He then asked me if I'd ever experienced deja vu?
    My brain stopped for a moment before shifting into overdrive and that dream came back to the forefront of my mind.I recognised him,and for a brief moment while we stood there looking at each other it looked like he recognised me .

16. We would like to understand the neuronal network functionality that underlies consciousness. As a first step in this direction, consider the ability of the brain to focus attention. The brain can focus attention on external inputs from the senses of vision, hearing, touch or on internal thought processes. This focus of attention is under our own control and if we could understand how the brain controls focus of attention then we would understand our own experience of consciousness.

    In this paper (link below) the control of focus of attention is explained as due to the ability of the brain to create electromagnetic wave patterns which select specific functional areas of the brain. The focus of attention is a distributed activity which acts globally within the brain so that we can have only one focus of attention. Focus of attention is required to learn a new skill or acquire new knowledge. Focus of attention is required to access stored information in the brain. The whole ability of the brain is built up gradually by successive layers of functionality which are created by the application of focus of attention.

    The electromagnetic waves that we detect from brain activity are not just the result of the neuronal network activity but also play an active role in the operation of the brain. The ability of the brain to control focus of attention is a learned skill (probably the first learned skill). This approach explains how information is encoded in the brain and how it is subsequently accessed.

    https://www.academia.edu/30004610/The_Conscious_Brain
    Richard

17. The main thing to understand is that Neuroscience is not psychology; it is physiology. Modern scientism says psychology is irrelevant to understanding the psyche, the mind. That's as stupid as saying physiology is irrelevant to understanding the gray matter of the brain. The problem stems from Aristotle who instituted the divide between physics and metaphysics and people believed in this separation. To say we are "meaning seeking" is all we need to say, but to say we are "meaning seeking machines" adds the materialistic religious faith in matter and is an inserted symbol that is a logical fallacy of a circular argument. Susanna's arguments are all nothing more than arguing the conclusion. She says brain as both the assumption and the conclusion.

18. I gift you a new emerging word/concept free for you to enjoy have fun adding your definition for the word. Jeffree of the lovevolution
    
    Lovevolution Love – vo – lu – tion {luhv = vuh – loo – tuhn} a noun
    
    Your definitions: fill in the blank for this new word 1.________________
    
    Examples: 2. Unites science and spirituality philosophically into a holistic concept of purpose.
    
    3. The process in time of bringing together or gravitating energy or information, towards higher order and coherency and lower entropy creating ever more complexity via information feedback loop towards love. [see:Resonancescience.org]
    
    4. The light of light emerging developing as an expanding network of connected information of light into higher orders of consciousness and real love.

19. What reason for Atypical facial pain

20. “Conciousness”

21. The only neuroscientist on the panel appears to have published no papers on the neurological basis of consciousness. Couldn’t sit long though a philosophical discussion of what should be an empirical science

22. I enjoyed the debate….sorry…. not l but my mind …sorry…brain was actually stimulated by the debate.
    Or …lm so confused….. maybe l believed and trusted everything was happening to me. Religion ef up everything…isn't it?

23. Consciousness exists as I write these lines. Free will exists as I make decisions. At every stage of our life I have different options and while I have a choice to go on one option but the consequences are beyond my control. Thought into deed into consequences. The Law of Requital works in our life. Body goes where our thoughts take us. We create our self and that is where our life is. Death? Why do we have it???

24. The Preface to the video is a typical example of why paradox is apparently the norm in a QM Universe that is a Hologram of pure relative time duration timing.
    "Everything" is this connected modulation mechanism in which the wave-package material-modules of substances, is temporal Superposition-point Singularity, ..objectives/nodes of FM-AM standing wave positioning/tuning, and is one self-defining module, in completeness.

    That's all, ..end of elemental alternatives to discuss, but there's no outer limit to formulate philosophy, (Geist?), all theory is dependent on the eternal fact of logical unity interconnectedness, and orthogonality-superspin-> pivotal/Pi-e resonance number sequence timing/coordination, duration infinity. (One "cognitive handshake" embedded in biology)

    The idea that the Actuality of Time Timing Superposition-point Singularity positioning, is identified as the "point" of no size/here-now-forever, and is an AM-FM radial integration of virtual vectors – construction of probability in potential possibility durations.., is not acceptable to unprepared perceptions.., tuned Math-Phys-Chem and Geometry in Spacetime resonances.

25. It is not rare to observe a Female Ape believing that Her Body is enough to become Aware of Her Self …

    But That is just a Natural Selection Imprinted Behavioral Pattern … To deploy 'Awareness Stuff' the System requires at Least 3 Local Entities and a Common 'External Environment' embedding the 3 Entities …

    'Self-Awareness' cannot be generated in An Isolated System performing Recursive Processes …

    The 'Universe' for deploying Awareness had to produce fragmented units and become the environment for those fragmented units … but that the fragmented units inside the universe can deploy awareness in their environment ( The Universe) do not mean That The Universe is – necessarily – Aware of Itself … Only, That The Universe had The Potential For Display Entities with Awareness … The Universe can deploy Awareness without been Aware of That Awareness …

    … But We Know, Females Apes – as Ovule Holders – must Self-deceive themselves into Beliefs That Their Body is Enough for 'Create Realities' ( Serve as Egg Replicants ) …

    … But That is just Natural Selection displaying Deception as a Persistence Pattern in This Planet with Specific Environmental Star System Inertial Regularities …

    … Apes Ignorance and Delusions are Funny …

26. I agree and I think the Money is the most important thing in the life

27. Excellent discussion! Very clear and concise. Important topic.

28. Aping manckind? From Manchester?

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