Is it scientifically impossible for consciousness to exist within reality?

Discussion in 'Science and Nature' started by dishin reg, Aug 13, 2012.

  1. [quote name='"grape tomato"']

    We can't observe consciousness as it is an ongoing process created through electrical signals through our neuron networks. Wavelengths do definitely exist, but color does not. Color is just how the networks process wavelength.

    We are lucky enough to have networks capable of recurrent thought (thinking about thinking, or understanding of thought), which is due to our capacity for knowledge about our surroundings.

    Think of the brain as an input/output architecture (which it is). It takes any kind of information (in our case, sight, sound, smell, taste, feeling, as well as others) as input. The input is sent to the first layer of neurons, which chooses which neurons to send the next signal to based on an energy threshold. The energy is modified, and sent to the next layer, where the process is repeated. Many refer to this as thought. This is repeated until an output layer is reached, which is when an action is performed. This network also communicates signals chemically (i.e. Cannabinoids, Serotonin, Epinephrine) which can alter thought process.

    Color is just part of this thought process affecting the visual inputs.

    I drew a VERY simplified model of an animal neuron network. The text on there was from the first version of the image, so just ignore it.[/quote]

    You should be a teacher. Every post you make teaches me something, I swear. Im not forgetful so I take in the info and it stays there. But the way you describe something--it clicks!
  2. I'm an avid follower of Grape Tomato's posts and threads as well. He's quite an intellectual fellow, and I either learn new stuff from his posts, or gain greater insight towards stuff that I already knew a little bit about.

  3. So does this image of perception we experience really even actually exist?

    If so, where could it possibly be located? Since there is no actual image within my brain, where is this being experienced??

  4. It exists as a cascading chemical reaction within your skull. :eek:
  5. [quote name='"dishin reg"']


    If so, where could it possibly be located? Since there is no actual image within my brain, where is this being experienced??[/quote]

    There are no images iin your computer. Just chips and electricity. No color.

    So are the pictures saved on your computer not real?
  6. There is to much illogical fallacy's in your arguments. I have to admit, it's a very artistic view on it that's for sure.

    Edit: I can't help myself "Nothing is real, everything is permitted." There's your answer.

  7. Yes, this is the commonly accepted answer despite that fact that it only leads to more questions.

    A bit irrelevant, but I had to correct this. The tree absorbs all colors except green, not the other way around.
  8. That doesn't invalidate it at all. Everyone knows that we can't yet explain the intricacies of consciousness but it is still unreasonable to assume consciousness exist beyond our universe since there in no evidence of that at all. That would create a whole lot more questions and answer very little.

    It's not irrelevant, I did indeed make a careless mistake and it should be corrected.

  9. You're right, it doesn't and I didn't mean to imply that it did. I just find it incredibly frustrating how little we understand about the human brain. We really should understand more about the very powerful thing that defines and elevates us as human beings.
  10. And this^ is the beauty of science. For every one question that gets answered in the lab, dozens of more unanswered questions get asked. This is why science has no end. Every fact brings new questions. These questions don't invalidate the learned fact, they just expand the horizon of what can be learned. :cool:

  11. This is completely different, for multiple people can all look at the computer screen and see the same thing. We can test the image, we can perform experiments with the image. The images displayed from a computer are very real.

    The difference is that this streaming screen of consciousness we all experience is completely intangible. Only you can experience it. Not a single other human can peer into your perceptions and see what you literally see, because that image doesn't really exist within physical reality.

    Where is this image literally being experienced? It has to be somewhere, right? How can electrical currents in the brain create something as immaterial and intangible as consciousness?
  12. Yes it does. We are also learning to see other people's perceptions, below.,

    Once an image goes through the eye and onto the retina it is stored in neurons in the brain chemically, so it exists there. It's changed in nature from being light into chemically encoded electrical signals, so the image is real and has form in terms of physical chemical structure in the brain, the signals still exist in a coherent form. Change these chemicals and you change the thought.

    If you film something, images and sounds are converted and stored in just the same way as the brain, but if you were to look at the storage medium - say a DVD disc - you would see nothing. Does this mean that the images are unreal and intangible? No, they're just in a different form that we can't see.

    That's like asking how the pieces of metal and plastic in a radio transmitter can create a signal. Looking at the brain and seeing just chemicals that you feel can't produce consciousness is ignoring what those chemicals do in conjunction with each other. Take apart a bicycle and its parts have no use individually, put them together and it has a function.

    We've looked at individual neurons and seen where memories are stored as chemicals and electrical impulses, and we are able to change them. If they were not real in any way we could not do that.

    This is one of a number of methods we are developing to help us see other people's thoughts.
    Mind Reading from Brain Recordings? 'Neural Fingerprints' of Memory Associations Decoded

    \t\t\t \t\t\t \t\t\t\tScienceDaily (June 26, 2012) - Researchers have long been interested in discovering the ways that human brains represent thoughts through a complex interplay of electrical signals. Recent improvements in brain recording and statistical methods have given researchers unprecedented insight into the physical processes under-lying thoughts. For example, researchers have begun to show that it is possible to use brain recordings to reconstruct aspects of an image or movie clip someone is viewing, a sound someone is hearing or even the text someone is reading.


    The research was conducted by professor Michael J. Kahana of the Department of Psychology in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences and graduate student Jere-my R. Manning, then a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Group in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. They collaborated with other members of Kahana's laboratory, as well as with research faculty at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
    Their study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

    The brain recordings necessary for the study were made possible by the fact that the participants were epilepsy patients who volunteered for the study while awaiting brain surgery. These participants had tiny electrodes implanted in their brains, which allowed researchers to precisely observe electrical signals that would not have been possible to measure outside the skull. While recording these electrical signals, the researchers asked the participants to study lists of 15 randomly chosen words and, a minute later, to repeat the words back in which-ever order they came to mind.
    The researchers examined the brain recordings as the participants studied each word to home in on signals in the participant' brains that reflected the meanings of the words. About a second before the participants recalled each word, these same "meaning signals" that were identified during the study phase were spontaneously reactivated in the participants' brains.

    Because the participants were not seeing, hearing or speaking any words at the times these patterns were reactivated, the researchers could be sure they were observing the neural signatures of the participants' self-generated, internal thoughts.
    Critically, differences across participants in the way these meaning signals were reactivated predicted the order in which the participants would recall the words. In particular, the degree to which the meaning signals were reactivated before recalling each word reflected each participant's tendency to group similar words (like "duck" and "goose") together in their recall sequence. Since the participants were instructed to say the words in the order they came to mind, the specific sequence of recalls a participant makes provides insights into how the words were organized in that participant's memory.

    In an earlier study, Manning and Kahana used a similar technique to predict participants' tendencies to organize learned information according to the time in which it was learned. Their new study adds to this research by elucidating the neural signature of organizing learned information by meaning.

    "Each person's brain patterns form a sort of 'neural fingerprint' that can be used to read out the ways they organize their memories through associations between words," Manning said.

    The techniques the researchers developed in this study could also be adapted to analyze many different ways of mentally organizing studied information.
    Such studies would paint a more complete picture of a fundamental aspect of human behavior.

    "Spontaneous verbal recall is a form of memory that is both pervasive in our lives and unique to the human species," Kahana said. "Yet, this aspect of human memory is the least well understood in terms of brain mechanisms. Our data show a direct correspondence between patterns of brain activity and the meanings of individual words and show how this neural representation of meaning predicts the way in which one item cues another during spontaneous recall.

    "Given the critical role of language in human thought and communication, identifying a neural representation that reflects the meanings of words as they are spontaneously recalled brings us one step closer to the elusive goal of mapping thoughts in the human brain."

  13. #34 yurigadaisukida, Aug 16, 2012
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 16, 2012
    [quote name='"dishin reg"']

    This is just not true


    So yea your wrong. Imthe brain is a computer plain and simple

  14. Its not that he is wrong, as the image does not actually exist, but that you can decode what is in the brain to create an image we are capable of understanding. Even the decoded image doesn't exist in a physical way, but in a digital way that is programmed to be capable of viewing by us.

    The way they do this is with Artificial Neuron Networks. Neuron networks are very diverse, and are capable of so many diverse actions (consciousness and self awareness being some of these). Scientists (and me as a hobby) create Artificial Neuron Networks, and teach them (through selective breeding and on the spot calibration) to take input (as I said in my previous post, they can take ANY kind of input) from a human brain, and process it (in the same way we think) and then return a digital image as their output (as compared to our physical actions).

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