Consciousness comes from the brain!!!

[Onecirrus]

Provide your best counter argument to the statement above

[Someone here]

Lol 

"the brain" IS a collection of sights and touches and textures..

"the brain" IS consciousness. 

[AtheisticNonduality]

Brains are a hallucination in consciousness.

[ivankiss]

Kittens come from giraffes!

[dharm4]

This is not an intellectual argument you can win. You need to experience it. No other way.

[kinesin]

To craft a reason-based argument against this would be a fool's errand.  Not everything can be explained by reason, and it's important to be able to recognise the limits of such communications so that one doesn't waste too much energy trying to do a futile thing.  As of right now science has no generally agreed-upon mechanism for consciousness, so nobody can show you a proof like they could for the existence of, say, gravity.  In my opinion there are 2 primary ways by which a person comes to believe that consciousness precedes the brain -

1: They encounter some mention of the prospect and it catches their interest, and they find their mind open to the possibility. 

2: They have a direct experience of brain-independent consciousness.

For me personally, I believe that our direct experience of consciousness is a quantum phenomena and that our perceptible sensation of the inward-spatious quality of the mind is actually a dimension reaching all the way down to the quantum level, enabling the brain to interact directly with quantum potentials.  In my view, although the brain allows us to process sense data, which gives more complexity to our conscious experience than the majority of conscious entities have access to, the 'observer' which witnesses that sense data is actually a fundamental property which covers the entirety of the universe.

You might as well just treat this theory as fanfiction though.

[The0Self]

The brain is a thing in consciousness. There aren't really things, nor is there really consciousness -- consciousness is nothing, and everything. Not understandable, it's just like that... Keep contemplating the nature of reality, if you wish, or don't. It doesn't matter; there's no one doing it.

[Moksha]

We could discuss scientific research on supra-brain Conscious experiences, like this:

Ultimately though, "you" are relying on the experiences of "others", and as such there is no incontrovertible evidence, only the honest admission of ignorance. Intellectual arguments always spiral downward into an unanswerable abyss.

Direct realization, entirely free from concepts, is the only reliable answer. Everything else is hearsay.

[The0Self]

You could say... consciousness comes from the brain, which comes from consciousness. So are they even really there? They're empty.

[Nahm]

1 hour ago, Onecirrus said:

Provide your best counter argument to the statement above

Consciousness precedes all seeing & hearing, or ‘arguments’ as you say. You’d have a much easier time inquiring into detaching from thoughts / content (arguments). 

[Shin]

1 hour ago, Onecirrus said:

Provide your best counter argument to the statement above

There is no arguments that can change the point of view of someone whom isn't open minded.

You're asking something that is impossible !

 

[The0Self]

A baseless claim needs not a counterargument. In fact... all claims are ultimately based in nothing.

[LastThursday]

Poke a screwdriver through your eyeball and into your brain and see how long consciousness lasts?

Ok, my point. Consciousness begets more consciousness. It unfolds second by second. How it unfolds is up to consciousness itself. Consciousness is like a lava lamp, it just keeps on bubbling away. Consciousness is a closed system.

Screwdrivers and brains are part of that consciousness system, they a bits of blob in the lava lamp. Consciousness chooses to mess with itself according to its own plan. It turns out that some things within consciousness have a greater effect on how consciousness unfolds than other things. Shoving a screwdriver or taking a hallucigenic or whatever has a bigger effect than drinking a strong coffee. Messing around with someone's brain potentially has a huge effect on consciousness.

So what?

Stubbing my toe affects consciousness, but I'm pretty sure consciousness doesn't come from my big toe. Drinking five pints affects consciousness, but I'm also pretty sure that consciousness doesn't come from a sexy pint of IPA. Poking a screwdriver in your brain affects consciousness, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't come from there either.

Correlation is not causation.

Nothing is outside consciousness.

Edited May 14, 2021 by LastThursday

[Fran11]

Just like you couldn't create the color red, or the feeling of love, or the sound of a waterfall using lego-bricks even if you spent a million years trying out different combinations, the same way science will never be able to explain consciousness by studing brain cells' conections, because there is no possible conection (no matter how complex) that's equivalent to consciousness or even qualia.

Consciousness is just not possible under the materialist paradigm.

There's nothing rational or logical about the idea of consciousness being the byproduct of interconected cells. It just seems that way becouse of massive social indoctrination.

[LastThursday]

What about red Lego bricks and pansychism? Although, there's an argument for pansychism being TBS of idealism and materialism, so it's not pure.

[kinesin]

@Fran11 Here's something you may find interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

'Materialism' isn't as restrictive as it was even just a few years ago, it's expanding.  Many self-identified materialists in various fields now consider such things as systems, concepts and behaviours as 'material' because they fit various phenomenological criteria of material behaviour even if they may not be physically interactive or measurable in the traditional sense.

[Fran11]

@kinesin Gave it an overview and it seems interesting. I'll read it carefuly when I have more time. Thanks for sharing!

[Rajneeshpuram]

1 hour ago, Nahm said:

Consciousness precedes all seeing & hearing, or ‘arguments’ as you say. You’d have a much easier time inquiring into detaching from thoughts / content (arguments). 

We as a human unit decode the reality of the third dimension thru the 5 senses, and then the brain creates a "image" about how things are. Without brain there is not management of reality... so without brain there would be nothing to be consciouss of.

Thats why God incarnates into beings with brain, to experience its creation in the material dimension.

We as individuals kinda co-create this reality.. so it would be more accurate to call it the collective consciousness not just consciousness.

[The0Self]

7 minutes ago, Rajneeshpuram said:

We as individuals kinda co-create this reality

Yes. Via belief.

[Loving Radiance]

It is like investigating the letters of a book to look for the meaning. Meaning is not coming from letters as consciousness is not coming from the brain.