Network theory sheds new light on origins of consciousness

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/03/213466/

"Where in your brain do you exist? Is your awareness of the world around you and of yourself as an individual the result of specific, focused changes in your brain, or does that awareness come from a broad network of neural activity? How does your brain produce awareness?

Vanderbilt University researchers took a significant step toward answering these longstanding questions with a recent brain imaging study, in which they discovered global changes in how brain areas communicate with one another during awareness. Their findings, which were published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge previous theories that hypothesized much more restricted changes were responsible for producing awareness."
 
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/03/213466/

"Where in your brain do you exist? Is your awareness of the world around you and of yourself as an individual the result of specific, focused changes in your brain, or does that awareness come from a broad network of neural activity? How does your brain produce awareness?

Vanderbilt University researchers took a significant step toward answering these longstanding questions with a recent brain imaging study, in which they discovered global changes in how brain areas communicate with one another during awareness. Their findings, which were published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge previous theories that hypothesized much more restricted changes were responsible for producing awareness."

This study doesn't establish anything strikingly new at all. It has been theorized for some time that conscious awareness does not use one single part of the brain.

In addition, the following quote from the article:
"The research suggests that consciousness is likely a product of this widespread communication

I dislike the use of the word product here, as this is still strongly an area of contention in consciousness studies (i.e. the well-known mind/body debate), and the article's author fails to recognize this by using the word product. Nobody knows right now whether the brain actually produces consciousness or if the brain serves as a conduit for consciousness, just like a radio serves as a conduit for a music broadcast. A radio also uses many different parts when playing a Mozart symphony.

Correlation is not causation.

My Best,
Bertha
 
Nobody knows right now whether the brain actually produces consciousness or if the brain serves as a conduit for consciousness, just like a radio serves as a conduit for a music broadcast.
That's incorrect! Many of us know that the brain is an interface. What you mean is that the current status-quo Western "expert" consensus hasn't given it's divine sanction to that actuality.
 
That's incorrect! Many of us know that the brain is an interface. What you mean is that the current status-quo Western "expert" consensus hasn't given it's divine sanction to that actuality.

Hehe ! I agree with you that there appears to be good evidence right now leaning toward the "Filter Theory" of consciousness than anything the Materialists have come up with. But there is not any kind of scientific theory yet established that explains how it works (quantum micro-tubules might be a start). But yes, quite a bit of scientific data points away from consciousness being just a localized product of the brain. Data that is regularly ignored by the "status-quo" Western orthodoxy.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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Hehe ! I agree with you that there appears to be good evidence right now leaning toward the "Filter Theory" of consciousness than anything the Materialists have come up with. But there is not any kind of scientific theory yet established that explains how it works (quantum micro-tubules might be a start!). But yes, quite a bit of scientific data points away from consciousness being just a localized product of the brain. Data that is regularly ignored by the "status-quo" Western orthodoxy.

My Best,
Bertha
??? TBH I really couldn't care less about scientific theories. Okay, that's not true. I could care less, but only a little. For what to me are obvious reasons, materialist science and science as we currently know it, cannot probe explore consciousness. To think that it can is to believe that consciousness is a property of the physical. In fact, it's the other way around.

BTW a read through of Don DeGracia's current series on consciousness may spark some more insights.
 
??? TBH I really couldn't care less about scientific theories. Okay, that's not true. I could care less, but only a little. For what to me are obvious reasons, materialist science and science as we currently know it, cannot probe explore consciousness. To think that it can is to believe that consciousness is a property of the physical. In fact, it's the other way around.

BTW a read through of Don DeGracia's current series on consciousness may spark some more insights.

I don't know. We can use the same kind of observation techniques to observe consciousness too. Thus we have a branch of science called psychology. And it turns out that we can use language and math to describe entities that are not "physical" in the traditional sense, such as the quantum wave function or non-locality. Telepathy also describes an attribute of consciousness that is not localized to the brain. So (speaking for myself) I'm not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water, and claim we can't use reason and repeated observations, or human language to analyze and to define consciousness. For example, Carl Jung regularly insisted his work with dreams and the unconscious was strictly empirical and science based.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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