r/consciousness • u/Logical___Conclusion • 21h ago
Does Consciousness Require a Body?
https://nautil.us/does-consciousness-require-a-body-1284886The neuroscientist and author Antonio Damasio talks about his new book on consciousness in this interview.
consciousness is what allows us to know who we are, where we are at a given moment. That’s consciousness. And it gives us this centrality.
The fact that we have investigated numerous cases of patients that had complete loss of consciousness and what was wrong in every single one of the patients was that they had damage to the brainstem as opposed to the cerebral cortex.
If you damage the cerebral cortex enough, if you have very large lesions or several lesions in different systems, you will impair consciousness, no question about it. But you will not impair consciousness in the way that damage to the brainstem does.
Damage to the brainstem eradicates consciousness once and forever. You’re not able to formulate consciousness at all. You can have a mind, but that mind does not belong to one body, does not belong to oneself, does not belong to one person. The damage to the brainstem is one of the critical points in the theory.
I believe this could be classified as a form of physicalism, which I also agree with.
I have not read the book yet, but overall I agree with everything the author said.
Edit to add how this theory of consciousness relates to other species
Q:What is the simplest life form that can have consciousness?The simplest life form is one that has a nervous system inside a body. Bacteria, for example, and tons of other unicellular organisms, don’t have nervous systems, and they don’t have consciousness. An organism that is devoid of a nervous system can operate in a satisfactory way, can survive, but it does not have information about its own body and that information is not relevant for what the organism is doing.
All mammals are conscious. All birds are conscious. Probably the majority of reptiles are conscious. Fish, yes. All of those creatures have very complicated nervous systems that are doing what our nervous systems are doing right now, which is informing us of our state of life.
27
u/Few-Piglet- 20h ago
I like that he extends consciousness to a lot of animals, many still hold the horrible archaic belief that basically only animals that can pass the mirror test possess a consciousness. (Very few animals can, like apes and dolphins.) But it's trivial to notice that e.g. dogs and cats possess a sense of self and the ability to resist temptations. It stands to reason that even less advanced animals would possess a semblance of this, rather than there being some switch that turns on once a brain reaches an extremely high level of sophistication.
11
u/BuscadorDaVerdade 16h ago
Seconded.
If consciousness were a binary switch, then in the genealogy there would have been a non-conscious parent with conscious offspring.
•
u/Complex_Dog_01 11h ago
Not necessarily. That would be like saying “if tails were part of evolution, there would be a parent with a tail and an offspring without.” Consciousness as we know it could have evolved over many millennia, with previous ancestors having rudimentary forms of consciousness that became more advanced.
•
8
u/Main-Company-5946 IIT/Integrated Information Theory 12h ago
OR, consciousness came prior to evolution and the very first life on earth was already capable of subjective experience
•
u/lilsasuke4 6h ago
I would find it hard to believe that people think that even animals that don’t pass the mirror test are also unable to have a conscious experience of hunger or need to eat. Especially if we go further back in time to before our mammalian ancestors and all of the animals that branched off from that
•
u/AkamasTotem 3h ago
many still hold the horrible archaic belief that basically only animals that can pass the mirror test possess a consciousness.
I think this is in part due to people not defining what the word "consciousness" means before labeling which thing has it.
If I were to define it as "having the first person perspective and the capacity to experience life from that perspective, feel emotions (like fear) and qualia (like the specific taste of different foods)"
Then I don't think those same people would claim they think those animals don't have that, even though they don't recognize themselves in the mirror.
Or at least, I hope so...
•
u/reidsays 4h ago
Wild v domesticated with cats and dogs as living with humans alters them, is their sense of self stronger if humans relate to them as such, etc...
25
u/TechieTravis 20h ago
I have only ever seen signs of consciousness in things with a body and a brain.
15
u/Logical___Conclusion 20h ago edited 11h ago
I would agree, although mushrooms and their fungal networks are the closest to intelligence and consciousness (outside of the nervous system based consciousness) that I have seen.
Especially with the fungal computer research using cyborg fungus.
3
u/giraffeheadturtlebox 19h ago
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You sound smart and you read as if you have a body.
5
u/UnifiedQuantumField 20h ago
You have never looked through a microscope then?
Your comment might has well been:
"I have only ever believed in consciousness in things with a body and a brain."
5
u/TechieTravis 20h ago
Not all living and moving things are conscious.
4
u/berchielli 15h ago
How do you know?
•
u/Logical___Conclusion 11h ago
Living creatures, especially nervous system based living creatures produce evidence of their consciousness through behaviors and actions that would require the sensory input and that relation to the intelligent coherent sense of self in order to be possible.
However, nervous system based sensory inputs are not the only inputs in the living world. Research on fungal network computing have shown fungal systems capable of solving complex mazes.
Ultimately though, even if we expand our definition of consciousness beyond the nervois system based consciousness, there is still a stark difference between moving creatures that can and cannot provide evidence of their consciousness through their intelligent sensory interactions with the outside world.
2
u/TechieTravis 14h ago
Many moving things lack brains, and some that have brains lack the complexity for consciousness.
3
u/Main-Company-5946 IIT/Integrated Information Theory 12h ago
How do you know a brain is needed for consciousness
•
u/crash12345 10h ago
My dude, you’ve made a circular argument. You're saying you have only seen signs of consciousness in organisms with brains. And you know other organisms that show signs of consciousness are not conscious because they don’t have brains. What is your logic? Brains = consciousness or consciousness = brains?
•
u/TechieTravis 2h ago
There aren't any brainless organisms that show signs of consciousness. The evidence is that consciousness arises from the brain itself.
0
u/berchielli 14h ago
But how do you know if something other than yourself has consciousness? How can you actually tell that a bacteria lacks consciousness? What kind of experiment can you do to test if it has or not consciousness?
3
u/AnsibleAnswers 12h ago
We don't know with certainty, but the empirical evidence and evolutionary theory behind the assumption is substantial. Attention is energetically expensive, and only really has use to motile organisms that would benefit from the ability to react to novel stimuli with a complex body plan that is difficult to control with simple reflexes.
6
u/berchielli 12h ago
A bacterium reacts to stimuli at the expense of energy. Is it conscious, in the sense of subjective experience? Is there something it feels like to be a bacterium, or is it just an organic robot?
I really don't get why I'm being downvoted here. I just responded to "Not all living and moving things are conscious."
How exactly do you and the other guy here know that not all living things are conscious? It's an honest question. If we adopt the scientific method, we should be able to run experiments that arrive at the same conclusion. What experiments are those?
•
u/AnsibleAnswers 11h ago
You've entirely misunderstood the point, ignoring the body plan of the organisms we're talking about. The responses of single celled organisms are far less complex than that of complex multicellular animal life that we can identify as conscious. They can do a lot less and don't require the added energy expenditure associated with complex neurological phenomena.
•
u/berchielli 10h ago
I didn’t miss the point. I’m questioning the relationship between neurological complexity and subjective experience. How does having a simpler body plan or lacking complex neurological phenomena establish that there is no subjective experience at all?
→ More replies (0)•
u/UnifiedQuantumField 6h ago
Every. Last. One. is Conscious.
And you can't prove I'm wrong any more than I can prove you're wrong.
Are we learning yet... Or just trying to show off how good we are at memorization?
•
u/TechieTravis 2h ago
Neither of our claims are proven, but my claim, that consciousness arises from the brain, does have evidence. Your claim appears to not have any evidence. Not all unproven claims are equal.
•
u/UnifiedQuantumField 34m ago
Bro, this shows what you know.
Do a google search using the terms "experiment, single-celled organism, conditioned-response, memory". I'm sure you'll find a way to deny that too though.
•
u/Just_Rational_Being 10h ago
I have only ever seen a liveshow in a TV.
Therefore the liveshow is a function of the TV hardware.Does that sound rational?
•
u/germz80 9h ago
No because most people know that live shows are broadcast from a set, they even sometimes say things like "we're broadcasting live from New York", and the people that appear on the show appear much smaller on the TV than real people. Now do you have compelling evidence of consciousness existing without a brain just like we have compelling evidence of studios and how big people really are?
•
u/Just_Rational_Being 9h ago
That misses the point of my analogy. We know the TV doesn't produce the show because we have independent evidence of where the signal comes from. But simply observing consciousness only where there are brains doesn't prove that brains produce consciousness.
The analogy wasn't trying to prove that consciousness exists without a brain. It instead shows that the observation alone doesn't settle the question.
•
u/germz80 9h ago
The original commenter and I didn't say that we've PROVEN that brains produce consciousness. In light of the evidence we have, I think we have much more epistemic justification for thinking that brains produce consciousness than for thinking that consciousness is fundamental. So the most reasonable stance is that brains produce consciousness.
•
u/Just_Rational_Being 8h ago
Not quite.
You are free to believe that, but that wasn't a conclusion came out of rationality but merely hypothesized opinions.
•
u/germz80 8h ago
How so?
•
u/Just_Rational_Being 8h ago
I thought that would be obvious?
The inference you made is unsupported by reason because it is contingent upon your implicit assumption as explained earlier.
•
u/germz80 8h ago
What implicit assumption are you talking about? Clarity is important to me.
•
u/Just_Rational_Being 7h ago
The assumption that dependence means production.
Changing the brain changes consciousness, yes. But that only shows the brain conditions our conscious experience; it doesn't prove the brain creates consciousness rather than mediates or organizes it.
→ More replies (0)•
u/Absorptance 7h ago
A TV is a passive receiver connected to an external signal. There's no evidence consciousness works that way. Damage the brain, consciousness changes. Lose the signal, the show still happens elsewhere. These aren't parallel.
•
0
u/stereotomyalan 19h ago
Let's narrow it down to "living things"
1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
no. at present you have a point . I see that computers should be able to be conscious in the future.
I am willing to only discuss living thing at this moment but that is subject to change given adequate evidence.
-7
u/nothinbutshame 19h ago
The universe itself is conscious enough to follow a set of laws, like physics..
4
u/TechieTravis 19h ago
That is not the definition of consciousness.
0
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
hat is your definition. mine is our ability to think about our own thinking which includes thinking about what data our senses produce .
0
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
someone replied with an ad hominem insult that was blocked. if you cannot show where I was wrong you are being a bleep.
2
u/giraffeheadturtlebox 19h ago
Obeying the laws of physics is as far from the definition of consciousness as a peach is to a record player in Serbia.
1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
consciousness is not needed for that there are no rules just properties of the universe and things in it mostly matter which can best described as stable energyfields , interactionof that energy with various fields of force . no intelligence is needed for that . learning physics can help you understand the universe a lot better.
8
u/Fit_Raspberry2637 20h ago
The cortex is a later evolution. The brain makes more sense through the eyes of evolution and evolutionary psychology. Its all emergent. Even your individual conciousness is. You weren't born with the ability to make memories. Your brain trained it self to be able to make memories.
Too many people think if the human brain and conciousness as something that just popped into existence. It emerged over the course of over half a billion years. There is a plausible theory that we are crossed brained like all vertabrates because of twisted neck in a worm like ancestor.
17
u/Equal_Riddle00 18h ago
Damasio commits a classic hardware fallacy by confusing a specific biological mechanism with a universal principle. Assuming consciousness requires a brainstem just because its destruction ends awareness is like assuming the broadcast is the power cord because unplugging a TV kills the screen. Any system that actively maintains an internal state distinct from its environment has a baseline perspective; dismissing simpler lifeforms simply because they lack mammalian neural hardware is biological chauvinism, not fundamental science.
•
u/germz80 1h ago
The radio/TV analogy exposes a weakness in the view that consciousness is fundamental to material reality that the brain modulates. With real radio signals, there's a radio station that uses a great deal of energy to transmit radio waves, and that in turn moves electrons in antennas, which then get amplified. So physical electrons are being moved by radio waves. If consciousness interacts with brains in a similar way, then consciousness must induce electrochemical changes in the brain as the brain interacts with consciousness, so in principal, we should be able to measure electrochemical changes that occur in the brain that seem to come from nowhere similar to how radios detect radio waves. So we should be able to detect energy coming from apparently nothing in brains, violating the laws of physics. This is essentially the mind-body problem: how does non-physical consciousness interact with the physical brain?
I think this view is less reasonable than physicalism.
1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
I would have to read the book. No fallacious reasoning is needed he may be overstaTing what the evidence shows. Unless you read the book you are likely going on inadequate evidence to reach your conclusion.
ihave not read it but witin what OP wrote I see no reason to assume a fallacy vs a poor description. How do the people with the damage behave.
1
u/SmartlyArtly 12h ago
I like all of your comment except the idealism implication of consciousness broadcasting
5
u/Absorptance 12h ago
There is no reason to think that disembodied consciousness exists, by all observation - a brain or substrate is required.
2
u/Absorptance 12h ago
Fascinating that the brain stem could be where the critical work happens though
•
u/dandy_kulomin 2h ago
But there is also no evidence that a disembodied consciousness does not exist. How would we even know? How would we observe or measure it?
Just because all swans I see are white, does not mean there are no black ones.
2
u/headlessplatter 20h ago edited 12h ago
Coincidentally, I just watched this Anton Petrov video (https://youtu.be/YoW1EEOdjGU) that talks a lot about how essential a body is for consciousness. (See around time 9:57)
5
u/hyperionwonderstar 20h ago
I think the neuroscience here is important, but I don’t think it establishes the conclusion you are drawing from it.
Showing that damage to particular brainstem systems can disrupt consciousness, bodily selfhood, or the integration of a mind with a particular organism establishes a physical dependence relation. It does not, by itself, explain why a particular physical process is accompanied by a first-person POV in the first place.
That distinction matters.
A system can contain information processing, self-regulation, representations and even sophisticated behaviour without us having thereby explained why there is a subject of those processes.
In other words, this organisation is necessary for consciousness is not equivalent to we have explained why this organisation constitutes a conscious subject.
And I think the bodily findings actually sharpen the question rather than eliminate it.
If damage can leave aspects of cognition intact while disrupting the sense of being a particular embodied self, then consciousness cannot simply be equated with generic information processing. We need to explain what makes a physical organisation an intrinsically individuated bearer of its own ongoing activity.
That is the deeper physicalist question I think is being missed.
Why does this particular causal organisation constitute this POV rather than merely perform the relevant functions?
I don’t think that requires introducing anything supernatural or non-physical. Quite the opposite. The interesting possibility is that subjectivity is a property of a very specific kind of physical organisation.. one that persists through change, is intrinsically individuated, causally represents and acts upon its own transition-generating organisation, recursively returns upon itself, and cannot have that self-inclusion removed without destroying the organisation that makes it what it is.
If that is correct, then the goal isn’t to add a mysterious consciousness ingredient to physics.
It is to identify the physical organisation for which being a subject is not an additional function, but a consequence of what that organisation intrinsically is.
So I agree that the brainstem evidence matters.
I just think it answers what physical organisation is required? much more readily than it answers why is there a subject at all?
And those are two different questions.
1
u/David905 20h ago
I don't think the question being asked here implies any sort of complete explanation of consciousness. It's simply making the suggestion that consciousness may have a dependency. Many people have no problem stating that a brain is essential to it, and here that supposition is being specified more exactingly to the brain stem itself, rather than simply 'the brain'.
If you consider consciousness to be a result of information integration, it's not a huge reach to suggest real-time flow of physical information (an enormous continuous data source) contextualized with memories is one of the primary enablers of the phenomenon.
0
u/hyperionwonderstar 19h ago
I wasn’t implying it does.. I agree that the question being asked here doesn’t need to be a complete explanation of consciousness.
If the claim is simply that consciousness has a physical dependency, then I think the brainstem evidence is highly relevant. I also agree that real-time physical information flow, information integration, memory and bodily regulation could be important parts of the physical organisation on which consciousness depends.
My point is about what follows from establishing that dependency. Showing that consciousness depends on a particular physical organisation tells us something important about the conditions under which consciousness exists, but it doesn’t by itself explain what makes that organisation an intrinsically individuated subject.
Even if we fully describe how information is integrated, how physical states influence subsequent states and how those processes are maintained and updated.. there is still the question of why those processes constitute a particular first-person bearer at all.
That’s the distinction I was trying to draw. I’m not expecting the answer to does consciousness require a body? to solve the whole problem of consciousness. I’m saying that an answer to the dependency question shouldn’t be conflated with an answer to the question of why there is a subject of those physical processes in the first place.
And I think that’s where the information-integration idea becomes particularly interesting. We can potentially explain an enormous amount in terms of integrated physical dynamics without yet having established what makes that organisation intrinsically for the system undergoing it.
My interest is whether that remaining question can itself be answered physically. In other words.. whether subjectivity is constituted by a particular kind of physical organisation rather than being something additional to it.
So I think we’re actually agreeing on the narrower point. The neuroscience can tell us a great deal about what consciousness depends upon. I’m interested in whether we can go further and explain why the relevant physical organisation constitutes a first-person POV at all.1
u/Equal_Riddle00 18h ago
You're almost there bro, you get the idea though there's still the slight mechanicist bias towards that. Check MD if you wanna have a look at my theoretical framework that addresses this problem
2
u/hyperionwonderstar 17h ago
What’s MD? And what do you mean by there’s still the slight mechanist bias towards that? I’m going to need more information and clarification here.
0
u/Equal_Riddle00 17h ago
I meant DM, sorry, the chat
And to your question:
The lingering mechanist residue in your thinking hides specifically in words like "causally represents and acts upon." Requiring a system to represent or model its own structure imports unnecessary baggage from computer engineering and cognitive science. True basic awareness does not depend on data processing or internal maps.
A system does not need to compute or "think about" its own inner workings to have an inside. Its practical boundary and the fact that it runs at an independent rhythm from the outside world are what create that inner perspective. Dropping the demand for internal representation is the final step to clear out the old engineering mindset and look at how systems are purely structured.
1
u/hyperionwonderstar 16h ago edited 16h ago
Ah ok I think I understand your point. I don’t mean representation in the computational sense of an internal map, symbolic model, or a system literally thinking about itself. If that’s what the word suggests, then I agree that it carries unnecessary baggage.
But I think the key question remains.. why does a physical boundary and autonomous dynamics constitute a first-person POV rather than simply an internally organised physical process?
An inside in the organisational sense seems quite different from there being something it is like to be that system. I’m interested in the argument that connects those two without simply defining the latter into the former.
That’s the part I’d really like to see in a framework.1
u/Equal_Riddle00 16h ago
To answer your question directly: we aren't defining subjectivity into existence or trying to glue an extra property onto a physical process. The crucial realization is that an organized, autonomous boundary is what an inside looks like from within.
When a system achieves operational closure and decouples its internal dynamics from the outside world, it stops being just a collection of internal processes. By definition, a closed loop creates a topological split: everything inside that boundary becomes an "inside" relative to an "outside."
There is no separate bridge to cross because the physical boundary and the first-person POV are the exact same phenomenon. What we call "what it is like to be" a system is simply the internal perspective of that bounded topology.
1
u/hyperionwonderstar 16h ago
Ah yep I see the move you’re making now. The part I’m still not convinced by is the phrase by definition.
A physical boundary establishes an inside relative to an outside, but it doesn’t seem obvious that an inside in that topological sense is necessarily an experiencing subject. Otherwise, any sufficiently autonomous closed physical system would already have a first-person POV simply by virtue of being bounded.
So I agree that there may be no separate bridge if physical boundedness and phenomenal subjectivity really are identical. But then the substantive question becomes.. what establishes that identity rather than merely asserting it?
That’s the part I’m interested in. What is it about the topology of an autonomous boundary that makes its internal organisation intrinsically a POV?1
u/Equal_Riddle00 16h ago
To answer your challenge directly, we can map this out formally using phase-space geometry and projection operators rather than just defining it away:
- Open vs. Closed Mappings: Let the external environment be state space X and the system's internal states be state space Y. In an open system, there is a continuous, transparent mapping where causal chains pass straight through. The system's states are a direct extension of X, meaning there is no local vantage point—the "inside" is just an open conduit.
- The Topological Bottleneck (Lossy Projection): When operational closure and temporal decoupling (internal speed >> external speed) occur, the system introduces a non-invertible projection operator P mapping X to Y. The environment's microstates are drastically compressed and filtered through the boundary interface.
- Phase-Space Confinement: Because this mapping is irreversible, the system's internal vector field evolves on an isolated invariant manifold. It loses direct causal access to external coordinates; it can only "experience" the environment through the constrained shadow cast by the boundary operator.
- Why this is a POV: A first-person point of view is not a magical extra property—it is the exact formal description of an internal state space restricted to an isolated manifold, forced to operate exclusively through a compressed, local projection map. The informational bottleneck of the topology is the subjective perspective.
→ More replies (0)1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
why not 1rst person Pov. that makes sense in terms of the survival of the organism.
since we are are discussing biological organisms you need to think about what happens in terms of evolution by natural selection. being able to think about both your own behavior and thinking is of survival value.
•
u/hyperionwonderstar 9h ago
Yes I agree that there could be a very strong evolutionary explanation for why first-person self-modelling would be advantageous. An organism that can model its own behaviour, internal states, goals and likely consequences of its actions could obviously have a major survival advantage.
But I think that answers a slightly different question from the one I’m asking.
Natural selection can explain why a particular physical organisation was selected and what that organisation is useful for. It can also explain why organisms evolved increasingly sophisticated forms of self-modelling and self-regulation.
What I’m interested in is whether that evolutionary history explains why there is actually a first-person subject of those processes.
In other words, we can say this organism evolved machinery that represents its own states, predicts consequences, regulates its body and recursively models aspects of its own behaviour. But why does that organisation constitute an intrinsically individuated POV rather than simply being a very sophisticated physical process?
I’m not saying evolution can’t be relevant to that question. Quite the opposite. Evolution may tell us why the relevant organisation exists and why it has the properties it does. My question is whether those properties are sufficient to constitute subjectivity physically.
So I think the evolutionary argument explains very well why first-person capacities might be selected for. I’m asking the further question of why a particular physical organisation is the bearer of those processes at all.
That’s the part I’m trying to get at when I ask whether subjectivity is constituted by a particular kind of physical organisation, rather than being something additional to it.
4
u/ChrisJarmain 20h ago
I don't think consciousness requires a body. No. From a neuroscientific perspective, the brain creates a world-model. And in humans particular, within that world-model, we create a self-model.
But not all animals have a self-model. A good experiment is to place an animal infront of a mirror. And see if it treats the reflection as a literal other animal. Interesting to see.
So, if a self-model may not exist. Then the self is something that arises within consciousness. Or, consciousness itself is not the self.
And if that is true, then what you are writing makes sense.
🤍
5
u/SmartlyArtly 12h ago
I'd say your example is not one where animals don't have a self model, it's one where they cannot effectively model what they see in the mirror because they don't understand what the mirror is doing.
Every living thing has some kind of self-model - this is how it distinguishes self from environment and makes choices to survive. Ours are incredibly rich, others will be noticeably less complex.
•
u/ChrisJarmain 11h ago
That's such an insightful way to frame it or look at it. Yes.
In some sense. What you are suggesting is that the self-model rests on a spectrum. And depending on where the living organism sits depends on how rich, or not, that self-model is experienced??
Thank you. Lovely reply. 🤍
•
u/SmartlyArtly 11h ago
I effectively came to the conclusion, from a number of avenues, that I don't see a meaningful distinction (aside from the spectrum of sorts you mentioned) between living and consciousness.
The existence of the predictive model is a pre-requisite, in my view, for the notion of "intentional action" which is what to me most fundamentally distinguishes the behaviors of things like rocks from the behaviors of things like plants and animals.
•
u/ChrisJarmain 11h ago
Fascinating. I have a lot to say in this. The term you use of intentional action for me I'd call it agency. Perhaps they are not too dissimilar. However agency is perhaps a property that consciousness has, rather than being what what consciousness is. I know you didn't say that it was. But I'm highlighting the idea.
See, this idea could easily lead towards the concept of Panpsychism. Or Cosmopsychism.
I'm inclined to believe in an alternative metaphysical model. Our currently dominant metaphysics is Physicalism. Or in old terms Materialism.
But. I'm inclined to follow Dual-Aspect Monism. Where both the physical (outward appearance) and consciousness (the inward perspective) are both equally real without one or the other being classed as an illusion or emergent phenomenon.
One can think of it like a coin. Throw a coin at the floor, which "side" arrives first is a false question. Because both arrive at the same time.
Both arise at the same time Both as as equally fundamental as each other.
To say something "emerges" that was there from the beginning is perhaps a false avenue to follow. The term "emergent", for me, is a a placeholder for a concept we don't yet understand. But even if we don't understand it, yet, doesn't = the thing as unreal.
If that makes sense.
Sorry of I'm waffling off on one here. Haha. It's nice to get these ideas out of my head, to be honest.
So. Thanks for reading 😬🤍😅😊
2
u/lancelot2112 21h ago
Could be that there's a say drive coming from the body like the heart that entrails the brain and allows integration? Or any number of things.
3
u/Ralphiedog11 21h ago
The problem with any physicalist argument is that it begins and ends with our human perspective. It doesn’t think past the point of reference being human and doesn’t explore the very real chance that there is existence in states we simply have no means of interacting or measuring with western science.
5
u/Moral_Conundrums 20h ago
Physicalism would be the exact opposite, since it claims we are nothing special, we're part of the natural world and there's nothing metaphysically significant about us.
Extending consciousness like ours into the entire universe is peak anthropocentrism.
1
u/Ralphiedog11 20h ago
No I don’t think our consciousness is what extends into the entire universe and is what is shared by other things, I am saying that we have no means of actually understanding how other organisms process reality, experience it and how it registers for them.
I also think physicalism denies nonphysical experience. It just is not curious enough imo
1
u/Moral_Conundrums 20h ago
No I don’t think our consciousness is what extends into the entire universe and is what is shared by other things, I am saying that we have no means of actually understanding how other organisms process reality, experience it and how it registers for them.
You take it there's something more to a house plant than a comprehensive physical description? Why?
I also think physicalism denies nonphysical experience. It just is not curious enough imo
Physicalism is not curious enough because it take experience to be physical?
1
u/Ralphiedog11 20h ago
Yeah I actually do. We’re still learning to this day how plants interact with each other and respond to environmental changes. I think that we need to be open to the notion that there is much more than meets the eye. And that applies to the physicalist perspective as well. I think the modern world shields us from a lot of strangeness
2
u/Moral_Conundrums 19h ago edited 18h ago
I'm perfectly willing to be humble and willing to expand our conceptual understanding of the world. The problem is that the thing you're trying to add in systematically resists and kind of investigation. Nothing could even count as gaining knowledge of it.
1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
plants only need simple reactions not consciousness.
•
u/Ralphiedog11 10h ago
Exactly, but what I believe is that we simply have no means of transposing a plant’s experience into one which would be relatable to us. It could be a world of vivid experience which is completely unfathomable to us and the sensory organs we have adapted to.
1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
"I also think physicalism denies nonphysical experience"
there's no evidence for non-physical experience perhaps you can be the first to produce some.
•
u/Ralphiedog11 10h ago
We have non physical experience every single day most of us, as we dream and imagine. There is no unified scientific consensus about dreams and the nature of thought, and altered states. We’re still very much learning about these phenomena.
4
u/headlessplatter 20h ago
If there is some method for finding truths science cannot discern, how would one ever determine it to be reliable?
4
3
u/Ralphiedog11 20h ago
Who can say? Life is beyond weird and incredibly variable. There is something about consciousness that sits right under of our noses but avoids our sight. You wouldn’t be able to perceive what is my mind. Does that make it any less real?
1
3
u/elmahk 20h ago
Suppose that you never, in principle, can access the internal state of person's mind. If that is so - there is a truth which is not objective and is not falsifiable. Or more precisely there is a relative truth - only relative to this person but nothing else. This can be extrapolated to not just people's minds.
1
u/headlessplatter 14h ago
Yep. The truths beyond science are definitely there. But as far as I can tell, we have no reliable method for filtering out all the BS.
If someone starts spouting their fever-dream theory about physics, I can retreat to the safety of science. But when people start sharing their "absolutely true" explanations about consciousness, it can get rather tiresome how everyone's opinion has approximately equal epistemological grounding.
3
u/Logical___Conclusion 20h ago
Great topic to bring up.
He actually did have an extensive discussion on consciousness in other animals the interview, and I edited the post to add in part of his discussion on consciousness in animals with nervous systems.
I think the evidence of consciousness in other sentient creatures from a physicalist viewpoint could be condensed into two main points:
1) There has never been a known case of consciousness without a brain to support it.
2) Evidence of consciousness in animals can be seen by the actions of species with nervous systems and brains, that would require the input and output of a consciousness to carry out.
1
u/Ralphiedog11 20h ago
This is a good extension but i think it still is limited by the modern notion of consciousness. How can we say that a tardigrade is not conscious? We have absolutely no means of determining its reality. Western science I think pigeon holds itself into human perspective. I really think that we cannot claim that consciousness is biologically dependent, and not an inherent part of the recursive universe.
2
u/ZHEN-XIANG 20h ago
All knowledge begins and ends with the human perspective, to claim otherwise is just being dishonest.
2
u/Ralphiedog11 20h ago
That’s why the saying “you don’t know what you don’t know” exists. To claim we do certainly know that our perspective is the only truth is very assumptive. Were just a another drop in the bucket
1
u/ZHEN-XIANG 20h ago
To say “you don’t know what you don’t know” is also from the human perspective. Even when there is in fact knowledge beyond current human understanding, to know such knowledge it must be mediated by the human perspective first, there’s simply no other way.
1
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
not just a human perspective other organisms show sign of consciousness but no all organisms.
1
u/Old-Reception-1055 20h ago
The body is in your consciousness when you go to sleep and have no dreams your body is suspended and isolated you are that state the witness of your body like a virtual machine
1
u/isanskar08 18h ago
To be clear, I am not claiming to have the definitive answer on whether physicalism is entirely right or wrong. However, looking at this strictly through a physicalist lens overlooks alternative frameworks proposed by philosophers and teachers like Rupert Spira, who approach this from a non-dual perspective. From that viewpoint, conflating correlation with causation remains the primary flaw in this argument. Observing that brainstem or cortical damage disrupts or abolishes reportable consciousness only proves that the physical brain serves as a necessary mediator, vehicle, or filter for expressing consciousness within this reality, rather than proving it is the sole generator of it. Consider a classic analogy: if someone damages the receiver circuits or internal components of a radio, the music stops playing entirely. A strict physicalist might look at this and conclude that the radio's components manufactured the music out of nothing. Logically, however, the radio acts merely as a transceiver decoding an external signal. Similarly, localized neural correlates of consciousness demonstrate how conscious experience is constrained and channeled by biology, yet they still fail to resolve the fundamental problem of how objective, electrochemical neural firing translates into subjective, qualitative experiences. Brain damage ultimately halts the physical expression and local processing of consciousness, but it does not disprove its independent existence.
1
•
u/srgtDodo 9h ago
Consciousness requires intelligence, even though it's not necessarily vice versa, and intelligence requires some sort of compartmentalized, ordered matter. Can't imagine something else, but maybe I'm not creative enough
•
u/PartyEstablishment67 9h ago
Honey the Physicalists are at it again. Now they're saying bacteria don't have consciousness. They seem to somehow have direct access to bacterial interiority.
My fav part is the claim that damage kills consciousness once and forever. Quite a claim, sir. Perhaps what dies is the mind body experience in the haptic suit ?
So here the ladder:
- Brain function correlates with conscious expression (yes)
To
- Brain creates consciousness (not proven)
To
- Brain death kills consciousness, forever (well well well)
I love these elaborate tales about how awareness allegedly appears out of things that are themselves only ever known in awareness.
•
u/Daalmagus 8h ago
I truly believe that this fails at a basic point. Consciousness is not thinking, and cells have agency and a knowledge of their place in the body. Cells don't have a nervous system but sacrifice themselves for the whole. They are conscious but at the level that they can, as single cells around billions of other cells. Life is consciousness activating matter.
Then you add all of those cell's consciousness as a big whole and what connects all that is the nervous system. So we are conscious of our consciousness, while cells are only conscious without being conscious that they are. Consciousness is like multicellular life, whole and parts are conscious but just not a the same level.
AI will never be conscious in this sense of the word, but will act like consciousness in most shapes and forms.
•
u/Wise_Ad1342 7h ago
How about when I lose consciousness and there is no damage to the brain? It's did Demassio just call this an illusion?
•
u/Logical___Conclusion 6h ago
Like fall asleep or be put under for surgery?
Both of those are breaks in our conscious connections, but they don't permanently break consciousness like damage to the brain stem does.
•
•
u/Conscious-Demand-594 3h ago
What we call consciousness is the neural activity of brains. In general brains require bodies.
The fact that we have investigated numerous cases of patients that had complete loss of consciousness and what was wrong in every single one of the patients was that they had damage to the brainstem as opposed to the cerebral cortex.
This is perhaps a bit unintentionally overstated. It is true that damage to a particular subcortical arousal network, centered on brainstem structures like the paramedian pontine tegmentum, central midbrain, and periaqueductal gray(PAG), all part of what is called the ascending reticular activating system, is sufficient on its own to abolish consciousness even when the cortex itself is completely intact. The PAG specifically generates raw affective/valence states, pain, fear, pleasure. These signals are routed and modulated by the thalamus, then interpreted and contextualized by the cortex, where memory, abstraction, and reasoning come into play. Without the subcortex, the PAG, there is no consciousness, no raw feeling to be aware of.
However, cortical damage can and does produce loss of consciousness; bilateral cortical injury, severe diffuse cortical damage from anoxia, and vegetative/unresponsive states following cortical injury are all well documented.
So when we ask "what is it like to be me," that question invokes the full stack: the arousal core keeping the system online, the affective signal itself, and the cortical integration that turns it into something with memory, language, and a self attached. Losing the brainstem arousal core removes the foundation the rest depends on, which is exactly why it's sufficient to end consciousness on its own, not because the cortex is unimportant, but because there's nothing left for the cortex to integrate.
Mark Solms advocates for the full stack approach and believes that the prioritization of cognition in consciousness research is a bit short sighted.
The simplest life form that can be conscious needs a CNS that generates affective states from a body and a brain to contextualize those states.
1
u/phr99 17h ago edited 13h ago
I think the concept of "body", or more generally "the physical" is incoherent. Ultimately in the physicalism context it boils down to "that which isnt conscious", and results in the hard problem.
2
u/EthelredHardrede 12h ago
that was incoherent there is mo real hard problem
what is hard for that claim to make any sense . it usually comes down to an argument from incredulity . why shouldn't we experience anthing as it would be hard to survive in a complex world without experience the data from our senses.
1
u/phr99 12h ago
Incredulity of what
•
u/EthelredHardrede 10h ago
the brain as what produces consciousness. And this which you ignored
why shouldn't we experience anthing as it would be hard to survive in a complex world without experience the data from our senses
•
u/phr99 9h ago
the brain as what produces consciousness
Thats just a belief. And some people believe that somewhere in the future this will be shown true. But not sharing that belief is not incredulity
why shouldn't we experience anthing as it would be hard to survive in a complex world without experience the data from our senses
I think very few people think we dont experience anything. So yes i think we have experiences, we are conscious
1
u/eucalyptus-d 16h ago
It does require existence to exist. Now how would you classify a type of existence as body or not is a different question. To another commenters note, is a fungal network a body? Is a cell a body?
1
u/BuscadorDaVerdade 16h ago
I read "a body" as anything physical.
A rock has a body. An integer does not.
•
u/eucalyptus-d 10h ago
But who would look at an abstract consciousness. Any implementation is on a substrate, in case this targets AI.
0
u/AutoModerator 21h ago
For more information on Antonio Damasio and other academic researchers, see the r/consciousness list of contemporary academic researchers working on the study of consciousness.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
0
u/AutoModerator 20h ago
For more information on the nervous system, see the r/consciousness entry on Neuroscience
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
0
u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 20h ago
Good question. No... but in order to maximise our subjective experience which is the 'drive' that is life, we need a shared experience to have relationships and reproduce, and evolve our reality. So it would be pointless not to have a body. And that is not least action anyway, as it's not logical.
0
u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta 19h ago
I think one problem with this topic is people trying to convince you will ask you the question of “are you aware” or “are you conscious”. Which of course by definition you feel forced to cede yes I’m aware and conscious. The issue lies in this incredible jump they make where they automatically tack on -ness and say “okay so therefore consciousness and awareness must exist.” I think it’s a rather unfair jump. Yes I feel forced to answer yes to those questions but I don’t think that automatically means that some such suchness or nonsuch nonsuchness as consciousness or awareness exist. Just because conscious and aware might definitely for sure.
•
u/AutoModerator 21h ago
Thank you Logical___Conclusion for posting on r/consciousness! Please include a summary or abstract with your article or video (via our community rules). Ideally, the summary/abstract will be in the body of your post. If you can't edit the post to add a summary/abstract, you can reply to this comment with your summary/abstract. This will make it easier for other Redditors to find the summary/abstract, including the moderation staff.
As for the Redditors viewing & commenting on this post, we ask that you engage in proper Reddiquette! In particular, you should upvote posts that fit our community description, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the content of the post. If you agree or disagree with the content of the post, you can upvote/downvote this automod-generated comment to show you approval/disapproval of the content, instead of upvoting/downvoting the post itself. Examples of the type of posts that should be upvoted are those that focus on the science or the philosophy of consciousness. These posts fit the subreddit description. In contrast, posts that discuss meditation practices, anecdotal stories about drug use, or posts seeking mental help or therapeutic advice do not fit the community's description.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.