Knowledge of the brain isn't a factor.
Do we agree consciousness is tied to 3 lbs. of meat?

Yes. High in fat. Not muscular tissue though, which is the classic definition of meat.

But why? Without an appeal to your own experience of subjectivity or testimony from others including the brain in question, what about a brain would lead you to think it's having a subjective experience of an inner self?

I have no reason to believe other people are of a significant different breed than me. Why wouldn't I be a **** sapiens like everybody else (of humans)?

Maybe I believe the way I do because I don't want to cherry pick. If we don't know a thing of anything then we don't. If we do then we do.

If you say brain and consciousness are not tied, then we don't know anything of anything. We don't even have a clue about anything. Have it that way if you want, I just keep it as an alternative in the background, want to explore the possibility, and maybe probability, we may know something of anything.

But if there's a concept of "happening", how would nothing happen in the universe right now? Like getting to understand consciousness as we think we know it.

Sounds like a 'win win' for more complete understanding how the brain works from certain perspectives

Well "tied to" isn't well defined. But what we do know is that we are conscious of brains. However, if you want to say that brains are conscious, that's certainly not immediately known or self-evident.

The people whose position is that consciousness arises solely from brain function have to explain our capacity for self-directed reasoned thought. If they can not do that I see no way for anyone to make a claim of knowledge. Where does the imagination reside? Where do the deep insights come from? What is creating the poetry?

Who is to say that our brains aren't unique in the universe? By weight they'd be an after-thought and the physics of consciousness could be buried somewhere really deep and unnoticed.

I'm going w/ the New Age idea! The universe itself is conscious and we are it's computing platform! I ought to start a cult which is a really good business if someone can get it going.

In my incomplete understanding, proving there exist true but unprovable arithmetic propositions is not to give an example of one. Maybe Goldbach's conjecture is an example. Maybe so is the Paris-thingamajig conjecture, provable in something more powerful than ZFC. Who cares?

What does it have to do with Wittgenstein or the material nature of consciousness?

That's your choice man.

If mathematical knowledge is subject to Godels findings, so too, is other types of knowledge.

Mathematical knowledge is constructed using symbols. So is knowledge derived through language and informed dialogue. We communicate using symbols.

This suggests that there may be things we can know to be true, through our language-laden understanding of the world, but which we can never prove.

It's an enjoyable approach, no need to pay any sort of personality to enjoy it. Or as Watt's suggested, fire your guru. Or perhaps give them a European style vacation.

What things?

You know what it feels like to contemplate on a difficult decision and deliberately make a choice. We'll never be able to prove that you make any choices deliberately. We can only continue to chalk it up to illusion - this self agency; this self directedness. Yet you know it's no illusion. You know it directly in your own experience. This knowledge, you cant prove.

I think I know it's no illusion.

Maybe conciousness is something hidden within a bundle of still images running quickly and consecutively to create a moving image/a coherent movie/subjective experience.

When we try to pin it down we only catch single images, the pixels of single images; the neurons, atoms, molecules, quarks. We assume that if there is indeed a movie, the projector must be the brain. The brain must be responsible for rapidly running these images in a consecutive and personally meaningful manner.

What we're missing by looking at the single images, however, is (a) the content of what is projected and (b) the totality of what is being projected. Couldn't some aspects of the movie be projected from unrecognisable, non-physical sources? For example, the aspect of awareness/conciousness; selective and self directed awareness - of things and self.

Of course we need our physical body or else we're dead.
The idea of body, soul and spirit is important here for our senses overwhelm us especially the "sense of sight" and also "sense of hearing".

Soul and spirit are not so tenable as we do not have sense for the same.

Being that soul and spirit are supersensible comprehend that the spirit/soul being, in intuitive thinking ( not the intuition often spoken to with flashes of insight) a thinking in which the soul/spirit being immerses within the the percept (not necessarily a physical percept) and becomes the object of its immersion.

If I am immersed within the color red "I am red" but if "I am red" then I have lost my identity , "I am red" . Now the salient point; being drawn to the physical body it becomes a "reflector' of my immersion and I experience "red" as individual.

The nervous system, and I 'm not sure of the rest of the body, is a reflector of thoughts, a mirror to which the thinker/human being experiences. When i speak of 'physical body" Aristotle spoke to it as the "human form " but the minerals are another matter ( no pun intended) .

So yes , one needs the physical body and especially the nervous system to think but it acts a a mirror of our supersensible experiences; thinking as a spiritual or supersensible activity.

Of course, all of the maladies of the nervous system will affect the soul/spiritual ability to function such as an infarct at Broca's region will cause impediments to speech. the speech difficulty is not because this region cannot , in a sense, create the speech but because it has lost its reflecting capability, in some measure.

Just to be clear, I've mentioned it before , there is a Body of man known as the formative force body(etheric body) which , as one of its activities, holds the form of the human being in properness and gives it life , contains our memories amongst other activities. A man asleep is alive but not sentient which is another body .

We, in our times use the physical body for thinking and consequentially are within the materialism to which we all know. Man has not always been so for in the past he possessed a dim clairvoyance to which he was aware of this non physical realm . He( we) was(were) in development to our age and our future is the development of our thinking capability such that the etheric body becomes the reflector of thoughts.... Ergo, the fallacy of materialism.

Cliff notes; the nervous system is the reflector or mirror of thoughts .

The "software", the experience, can be intriguing. But the brain is still the "hardware". Like in a computer, where the hardware sets the limit for what the software can do. In the brain the hardware and software are more overlapping though.

While a mechanistic, turing machine consciousness can only know what can be proved.

But knowing that there exist unprovable truths is not to be able to identify them. If Goldbach were an example, we would never know it.

Is there ever an example of a conjecture that naturally arose and never were proven where almost everyone was convinced it was true and then a counter example was found?

One time?

One can probably create on purpose a system that only proves wrong at some super huge number but would it be a natural system and not a made up one (ok hard to properly define that but you may know what i mean).

Goldbach is now known to be true up to 4*10^18.


Here is a conjecture of mine that i havent found any big counterexamples beyond a very small set of early numbers;

All numbers but a finite set of very few (less than 25 say) can be written as a sum of a square, a cube, a fourth and fifth power of a set of 4 integers.

ie for every n>2000 or so there exist a,b,c,d>=0 such that n=a^2+b^3+c^4+d^5.

I would love to find out some exception bigger than 10^100 one time , one time damn it lol, just to make it a little bit interesting for all other ones too! Just to make it possible to not be willing to give up hope even when all is against it.

eg 99998783=129^2+131^3+82^4+35^5 and so that you do not think i am pulling a leg by creating one the other way around;
99999784=8^2+448^3+56^4+12^5

Lagrange's 4 squares theorem secures that any number is the sum of 4 squares by the way (3 are not enough).

Not once.

FYP. Had to make sure I got the idea

Yes 8 not 9 thanks. Typo. Meant to type the next checked number as evidence i wasnt making up numbers with random a,b,c,d, although the choice of many 9999 was meant to get on board instantly those that get how unlikely it would be to generate that type number by random choices in a bogus claim.

I find that conjecture probably harder to prove than Fermat but it would be interesting if Fermat methods found a way to it.

Good luck with the little project, masque!


Quoting myself here:
You can see there's a dissonance here. I said "in the brain the hardware and software are more overlapping though", but earlier in the text I said the brain was the hardware only. I saw this when posting, but didn't know how to correct it at the time, but have a hunch now. Both views are kind of true: the software (experience) and the hardware (the brain), and then the simple "everything happens in the brain".

So I might have written: "in the brain-experience the hardware and software are more overlapping though". So this could be my attempt to crack consciousness. You could make an allegory with space-time from the theory of relativity (bold!), where the brain represents space and the experience represents time. And they are one when it comes to consciousness. What do you think?

I may expand a bit on the idea. Take the notion "consciousness happens in the brain". It's true. But it's like you can say "everything in the universe happens in the three-dimensional space". But you also have time as let's say a fourth dimension of the universe.

And now comes the boldest part: in the brain you in fact already have space-time for all the biological processes, and if that's four dimensions, then consciousness could be the fifth dimension of the brain. Make a theory including all five, and you have a model of the brain with also consciousness revealed.

First, I'm including a fifth dimension for consciousness as a feature of my cult. Second, it seems to me that if a fifth dimension could be proven as an actual thing rather than a mathematical construct we would be in the same place as the far out (for now) people who are proposing radical approaches. We can't even pin down time as a dimension nm consciousness. But I like it!