[ExI] Consciousness as 'brute fact' and meta-skepticism

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Sun Feb 9 01:21:36 UTC 2020


If you used EEG you'd certainly be measuring something objectively, but not
something anyone would intuitively think had anything to do with consciousness
John wrote

Are you familiar with the stages of sleep?  And the eeg patterns of waking
life? A person in any of the four sleep stages is not conscious by any
definition.  And their unconsciousness varies:  the measure is how much
stimulation it takes to wake them up.  The four stages differ.  And the
waking eeg patterns  correlate very highly with ability to process
information.  So in other words, you can tell how awake or asleep a person
is from just looking at their eeg patterns. You can tell that their brain
processed stimuli, or not, such as sounds, that you presented.   I think
the little squiggly lines tell us a lot about consciousness,
unconsciousness and indeed other things about the brain, just as the little
squiggly lines on an ekg chart tell us about what the heart is doing. For
one example:  an eeg showing alpha waves tell us that the person is awake,
relaxed, and not thinking about anything is particular,esp. not something
stimulating.

I think it is indisputable that the eeg tells us about consciousness,  as
defined in a common sense kind of way.  Other words that could be used
here:  awake, alert, aware............

bill w

On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 4:54 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 5:34 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> > John, you have entirely missed the point.  I said the measurement would
>> not tell you what consciousness is, but simply a way to measure it
>> objectively.
>>
>
> If you used EEG you'd certainly be measuring something objectively, but
> not something anyone would intuitively think had anything to do with
> consciousness.
>
> *> If the measurements do not correlate with what we think of with common
>> sense as consciousness, then we choose another measurement. *
>
>
> I don't believe any objective measurement would work for consciousness
> unless you make an assumption of the very thing you were trying to prove.
>
>   > Without that there is no hope of making consciousness a scientific
>> entity.
>>
>
> I agree, and that's why, unlike intelligence, consciousness will never be
> a scientific entity.
>
> John K Clark
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