Selfless

Byron 1, 

What is the nature of consciousness

Consciousness is consciousness and not reality, as is self-evident. It explains itself. Its not reducible to numbers, as in Pythagorean mysticism. E.g., justice is seven. Conscousness is part of man, a consciousness/body unity. There is no consciousness separate from a body, as in religion. Try splitting the shape of a piece of wood from the wood. Matter is formed. Consciousness is part of the form of man’s body.

Byron P.

1. Consciousnessness is not “part of a man’s body.” It is neither a part nor bodily.

2. “Consciousness is created by the firing of neurons and the firing of neurons is dependent upon calcium, chlorine, sodium, potassium and other things. As you say, everything working together to create our mind.”

That is not known. What is known is that consciousness has healthy functioning of the brain as a necessary condition. But then the achievements of the great industrialists had the proper functioning of the government as a necessary condition. That wouldn’t lead us to imagine that the government created those industries.

3. “One scientist thinks that consciousness can be re-created using multiple connections and that a computer will one day be able to know itself.” Before it can know itself, it has to know reality. Before it can know reality, it has to be able to perceive and feel. Before it can perceive and feel, it has to be alive. If it is alive, it is not a computer.

4. “I disagree that consciousness cannot be mathematically explained.” Mathematics does not explain; it measures. It relates one quantity to another.

5. “Einstein’s formula,” by which you must mean E = mc^2, is not about the nature of light. (The variable “c” refers to the speed of light–or any electromagnetic wave.) But I get your point.

Harry (#4:) A minor technical correction: “c” is the maximum speed of field propagation, not wave propagation. Magnetism (which before Einstein was thought to be unexplainable, hence “animal magnetism” for hypnosis etc.) may be derived from the effect of special relativity on the propagation of the electric field (the derivation is in the original version of the PANIC textbook for second-year physics at MIT; it is also in Feynman’s Red Books course.)

Re Byron P’s #6, an explanation is a statement of the cause. An equation, such as the one for eam deflection, is a description. What it lacks, precisely, is the “why.”

These two statements are not equivalent:

So it seems to me that it is the representation of what is occurring to the beam. It is an explanation of why the beam is doing what it does.

HBLByron Price writes on Tue, 17 Nov 2015 15:28:15 GMT:

Isn’t an equation a statement of the cause, a mathematical representation of the cause?

I can say that a beam moves under load in the direction of the load. And it will move a certain distance based on a ratio of the load and length to its strength. All of which occurs because of Newton’s 3 laws.

I could rewrite the equation and substitute F = MA for the load W. Acceleration would be that of gravity. At some point this equation could become an explanation for what is going on. The form of the equation that I gave is shorthand.

The proof that a mathematical equation is not a statement of causality is that it can be re-arranged. E.g., F = ma or m = F/a or a = F/m. But the causal statement is that a force causes an acceleration, not that a mass causes a ratio of accelration to force or that an acceleration causes a ratio of force to mass. The rewritten equations would have to be interpreted in terms not of causes but of effects (the effect of a change in the ratio of force to mass is a change in the resulting acceleration, etc.) And, notoriously, Newton’s law of universal gravitation is entirely silent about the (still unknown) cause of gravity; it simply quantifies the relationship between the force, the masses, and the distance between them.

A causal explanation relates the action of an entity to the nature of the entity that acts. An example is the perfect gas law: PV=nRT which puts into an equation an understanding of the nature of the gas–that it is a collection of molecules bouncing against the walls of its container and transferring their momentum to it, which, macroscopically, is pressure.

There’s nothing like that on the horizon for the relationship between brain and consciousness–the issue that began this digression. Contrary to a gas being an assemblage of molecules, consciousness is not an assemblage of neurons–or of anything else. As I wrote in How We Know, what a lot of little brain processes add up to is . . . a bigger brain process.

A small correction, I’m sure you meant m=F/a rather than m=a/F.

HB: Yes, and through the magic of the interweb, I will erase the error from existence.