Strange claims of non-corporeal consciousness from "Define Consciousness"

[Prettybirds]

I think its possible we lose the meaning of consciousness when we try and explain it through the languages allowed by our sense of reality as we know it. IMO, Penrose and Hameroff did the world a great service in beginning to understand the languages of our brains but even with this new understanding...however theoretical...we have a long way to go yet.

IMO as well, our consciousness created our brains. Our ability to understand our surroundings in ways that do not relate to pictures or words far exceeds our ability to see with our eyes and formulate words, it is when we truly begin to realize our brains are a result, not a cause, that we become free enough to truly feel, and understand what we feel, in these terms we wish to call life...The world of the BIG FEEL.

Upon this world we had set our sights, its blueness visible across universes traveled with the speed of a minds eye. Its potential swirling outward with the growing tide of it's universe, resonating a vibration recognized forever in space and time to be read as a road map for future experience and growth.

The concept is born of mileage of space, took seconds to travel and less to conceive. All the potential realized for infinity, the contact is done, the experience in its entirety played out. Our heaven and hell shall be externalized as naturally created dictates on this world that trapped our molecular selves by the sweet taste of reality as we know it, as we formed it...as we live it...

 

I love you Universe

Birds

[modest]

Hello Prettybirds.

 

The moderation team has moved your post to this forum. Please read the site rules and the 4064 in particular regarding supporting strange claims and preaching. Keep in mind, this is a science site.

 

For a scientific expression of your ideas you could explain, for example, how Philo of Alexandria (10 BCE - 50 CE) believed that our consciousness existed independent of our body in a cosmic ether before we were born and our body was formed in the image of that consciousness (or soul). Where did those ideas come from and what did they lead to?

More important in Philo's system is the doctrine of the moral development of man. Of this he distinguishes two conditions: (1) that before time was, and (2) that since the beginning of time. In the pretemporal condition the soul was without body, free from earthly matter. Without sex, in the condition of the generic (γενικός) man, morally perfect, i.e., without flaws, but still striving after a higher purity. On entering upon time the soul loses its purity and is confined in a body. The nous becomes earthly, but it retains a tendency toward something higher.

Philo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Preaching or advocating those same theological ideas is not acceptable by the site rules.

 

~modest

[Prettybirds]

Sorry, it was a poetic view of quantum consciousness, written in terms of kinetic and potential enregy and their roll in our reality. A reference to the cease of dipole oscillation exhibited by the electron in its hydrophobic pocket when trapped by a molecule as per Hameroff's theory. If the many people who talk of wild and interesting experiences when in this state are being true, there is a kinetic expression that follows the entrapment. An expression of consciousness not attached to our physical reality. Essentially we don't know where to find it or how to measure it if the theory holds true.

This is an interesting related site, a good explanation of Penrose, Hameroff and some percieved problems to the theory.

Quantum Consciousness

 

Lately I've been exploring sensorimotor memory. Specifically the ability to store information, if I understand it correctly, not related to image or words. In terms of trauma, I've read that one reason it is so hard to recover these sensorimotor memories is because they are not semantic, image or word based. I wonder about the process of the eventual emergence of a semantic connection and thus a recognizable memory to our minds eye. Perhaps akin to learning a bit of a different language. One of those languages is quantum physics. We are capable of interpreting much of our world without our 5 senses, just as we can understand our sensorimotor memory.

 

Anyway, no offence intended, just a poetic versus scientific kind of expression.

All the best

Birds

[CraigD]

Hi, Prettybirds, and a belated welcome to hypography! :coffee_n_pc:

 

Being a humanities student turned 1982 vintage math undergrad who stumbled into the computer programming profession, I’ve been pretty intimate with the question of consciousness from the perspective of several different disciplines. I also had the traditional smattering of undergrad psychology, and married a psych professional, so have arguable more grounding in that tradition than they typical math-educated programmer.

 

As you’ve discovered in getting your posts shunted to the strange claims forum, it’s challenging to discuss consciousness without sounding ... well ... strange, despite it being a subject that could fill a small library section with paper books in many disciplines. It’s a ticklish question, as famous polymaths like Penrose embrace the conclusion that consciousness is a distinct, objectively real property, while others, like Marvin Minsky, conclude it’s an emergent property at best, a semantic null (that is, a word referencing a referent that doesn’t exist) at worst, and unlike, say, a predicted subatomic particle that can be methodically shown to exist or not by specific experiment, for which no obvious way it can be answered in a scientifically rigorous way is apparent.

 

My own long formed, oft changed, intuitive guess is that consciousness is a semantic null, at best a metaphor for information processing systems with vague emergent properties and a catch-all name or the category of those properties. I don’t believe Penrose’s brain microtubule structures do, and will therefore ever be shown, to perform computations impossible for an electronic computer. I believe that powerful computers will run programs that are, in every practical sense, as conscious as you, dear reader, and I, am.

 

A technical comment ...

Lately I've been exploring sensorimotor memory. Specifically the ability to store information, if I understand it correctly, not related to image or words.

Though in a sense accurate, I suspect from this description that you’re misunderstanding the conventional meaning of “sensorimotor memory”.

 

The unusual adjective “sensorimotor” is most commonly used in the phrase “sensorimotor stage”, a term first used in the early 20th century by psychologist Jean Piaget to describe the first stage of normal cognitive development, in which infants learn how to interpret sensations and move their bodies in a coordinated way. Much of this learning is not, in the usual meaning of the word “cognitive”, in that it doesn’t involve abstract thought so much as training unconscious reflex nerve and brain systems. One need not even be awake and aware to use such systems, as, for example, when one roles over in ones sleep.

 

“Sensorimotor memory” usually refers to unconscious, partially outside-of-the-brain “learned” processes that allow us to perform simple “building block” actions such as grasping and lifting. The term “muscle memory”, though less precise in diction, is a more common one for these processes, which are learned by repetitive training. Such “memories” allow us to do things we can’t purely through more abstract reasoning – thus, while one can learn, say, history, from reading a book, one can only learn to skate or play a guitar by actually doing it.

I wonder about the process of the eventual emergence of a semantic connection and thus a recognizable memory to our minds eye.

One can “learn” of ones, or another’s, sensorymotor memories by observing the sensorymotor actions they allow us to perform. Though this is interesting neuropsychological study, the sensorymotor memories aren’t unique, personal memories as our normal, experience-based memories are, but instead somewhat mechanical things that are, with small differences, the same for all humans, and with varying similarity, similar non-human animals.

In terms of trauma, I've read that one reason it is so hard to recover these sensorimotor memories is because they are not semantic, image or word based.

In his 1985 book, The Society of Mind, Minsky observes that these low-level data (which he refers to as “subagents” and some more specialized terms, rather than the Piaget-derived term “sensorimotor memories”) are rarely recognized by ordinary people as even existing unless some physical injury (such as a broken) causes them to fail. When this occurs, a higher level, conscious mental process must consciously learn how to override and retrain the lower level, unconscious one, until eventually it becomes automatic and unconscious again.

 

Rather than sensorimotor memories, Prettybirds, I think the psychological concept you’re looking for is “nonverbal memory”, a catch-all for memories of sensory information other than from language. How, if, or to what extent such memories form long-term memories is controversial (and the subject of Whorf’s Hypothesis), but that non-human animals with no language or language little resembling human language, such as rats, are able to remember non-language perceptions, such as the layout of complicated mazes, seems to me clear evidence that such long-term memories exist.

 

We humans can, its fairly clear, recall nonverbal memories, and express them in ordinary language – for example, when we give someone verbal walking or driving directions to a familiar location to which we’ve never received or previously given verbal directions. This appears to be an unusual ability, unique among primates and other “higher” animals to humans – though, oddly, present in “lower” social animals, such as bees.

[modest]

In terms of trauma, I've read that one reason it is so hard to recover these sensorimotor memories is because they are not semantic, image or word based.

...Rather than sensorimotor memories, Prettybirds, I think the psychological concept you’re looking for is “nonverbal memory”, a catch-all for memories of sensory information other than from language.

 

The term I'm familiar with is procedural memory...

Procedural memory is the long-term memory of skills and procedures, or "how to" knowledge (procedural knowledge).

 

It is considered a form of implicit memory.[1]

 

As compared with declarative memory, it is governed by different mechanisms and different components of the brain. Procedural memory is often not easily verbalized, but can be used without consciously thinking about it; procedural memory can reflect simple stimulus-response pairing or more extensive patterns learned over time. In contrast, declarative memory can generally be put into words. Examples of procedural learning are learning to ride a bike, learning to touch type, learning to play a musical instrument or learning to swim. Procedural memory can be very durable.

...most recently I recall an episode of Castle where the victim of a crime had amnesia and couldn't recall his name. The episode's narrative established that procedural memory is very durable and the victim's was intact. He was able to sign his signature using procedural memory even though he could not recall or verbalize his name which the episode established as declarative memory.

 

In another pop culture reference, the movie Momento had a protagonist who had Anterograde amnesia (loss of the ability to create memories after the event that caused the amnesia occurs). He was, however, able to learn new things so long as they were procedural. So he could practice and become a good marksmen or good at juggling, as examples, but he would not remember learning to do those things. The movie, I should mention, was praised by neuroscientists as being:

Many medical experts have cited Memento as one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of anterograde amnesia in any motion picture. Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch called Memento "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media",[52] while physician Esther M. Sternberg, Director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at the National Institute of Mental Health identified the film as "close to a perfect exploration of the neurobiology of memory."

 

Memento (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

But, I'm rambling. I just thought it interesting to note that procedural and declarative memory (or, more generally, implicit and explicit memory) are quite distinct both physically and psychologically. The differences seem to have everything to do with consciousness, a topic explored very extensively in,

http://pages.pomona.edu/~rt004747/lgcs11read/Schacter87.pdf

<---- very good link :coffee_n_pc:

A good example is type-I blindsight where patients with brain injury are consciously blind in some field of view yet unconsciously respond to visual stimuli. The paper I linked gives other examples and concludes from them:

The striking similarity, however, is that in all cases knowledge is expressed implicitly and does not give rise to a conscious experience of knowing, perceiving, or remembering. This observation suggests that conscious or explicit experiences of knowing, perceiving, or remembering are all in some way dependent upon the functioning of a common mechanism, a mechanism whose functioning is disrupted in various brain-damaged patients.

 

~modest

[paigetheoracle]

Hello Prettybirds.

 

The moderation team has moved your post to this forum. Please read the site rules and the 4064 in particular regarding supporting strange claims and preaching. Keep in mind, this is a science site.

 

For a scientific expression of your ideas you could explain, for example, how Philo of Alexandria (10 BCE - 50 CE) believed that our consciousness existed independent of our body in a cosmic ether before we were born and our body was formed in the image of that consciousness (or soul). Where did those ideas come from and what did they lead to?

Philo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Preaching or advocating those same theological ideas is not acceptable by the site rules.

 

~modest

 

Thanks for telling me that Modest! Up until now I thought Philo was a kind of pastry!

 

But to be serious for two seconds, here we have a problem of evidence and that anybody can say anything about anything else's cause (and it can sound perfectly logical) but without evidence, how can we know which 'theory' is true, if any? All such speculation proves is that where there is mystery, the mind will try to make sense of it and this is the whole basis of science and before that philosophy.

[HydrogenBond]

One logical way to explain this is to consider the atoms of the periodic table. At the beginning of the universe, no atoms existed due to the extreme conditions. In spite of that, the inevitable result, as the universe progressed, would be the atoms of the periodic table. The potential to form atoms (in the future) was there even before the actual atoms. it was a logical result of the forces and materials.

 

Or, even before there was any water or H2O in the universe, physical water was going to be an inevitable thing, simply due to the way the forces and energetics add up. The spirit before the body is the logic of cause defined, before the physical result.

 

As an experiment to demomstrate what I am saying, I will start with gases of H2 and O2, that are 100% dehydrated. Even before we light the spark the spirit of water (the essence of water), although not yet in physical form, is ready to take it shape. We light the spark and poof, water, just like magic. (oooh aahhh). The ancient Philo was sort of describing logical inference before physical effect; a logical universe.

 

If we assume the spirit of conscious in ethereal form, not yet taking physical form, this would sort of imply that within early evolution, consciousness will inevitably materialize via the brain, for example. It is just the logic of physical laws extrapolated into the future, before they take form.

 

The artist will often use same schema. He starts with a large block of stone. The spirit of the Pieta is in ethereal form, floating within the ether of this mind. As the artist studies the stone the spirit (image) enters the stone, but has not yet taken form. Through the forces of his physical creation, the ethereal takes material form and results in a master piece. This last example, may have been the data used by Philo since most of spirit of science was not yet differentiated, allowing one to extrapolate thought to physical.