Could the brain and body anchor consciousness rather than create it?

Philosophy of Mind
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I’ve been thinking about consciousness and I wanna know where the logic actually falls apart, because I feel like I’m onto something but I also know similar ideas probably already exist.

My main thought is that the brain might not actually create consciousness by itself. I think it could be more like consciousness gets anchored to the brain and body once the system is developed enough.

The best comparison I can think of is AI. An AI needs hardware, memory, sensors, processing power and some way to interact with the outside world. The hardware matters a lot, but the AI itself isn’t literally the GPU or CPU.

So I was thinking humans could be similar.

The brain would be the hardware that processes information, stores memories, handles language, reasoning, senses and all that. Then the body gives it constant information too, like sight, hearing, touch, pain, hunger, hormones, movement, balance, etc.

Consciousness would be the thing actually experiencing all of that.

This also makes more sense to me when thinking about IQ, disabilities or brain damage. Someone having less cognitive ability doesn’t mean they have “less consciousness.” It could just mean their hardware has different limits.

Same thing with something like damage to a part of the brain used for speech. If someone still knows what they want to say but can’t properly say it, I wouldn’t say their consciousness is damaged. I’d say the part of the hardware used to output that information is damaged.

The part I’m less sure about is whether consciousness could exist in some kind of dormant state when it isn’t anchored to a body. My thinking is that once a brain and body develop enough, consciousness becomes anchored to that system and you get an individual person.

What I’m mainly trying to figure out is whether this idea already has a proper name, where the biggest holes in it are, and whether there would ever actually be a way to tell the difference between:

“the brain creates consciousness”

and

“the brain and body give consciousness something to anchor to and experience through.”

What’s the strongest argument against this?

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If consciousness is simply anchored to the mind:body then this would imply that it’s pre-existing and prior to the brain substrate … which then begs the question … where/what is the source of this original consciousness?

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Thanks for this.

I am a little unclear about your proposition. Wheher consciousness develops independently of the person and attaches to them when we develop.or whether consciousness is part of hunan biology that switches on in evolutionary history when we develop human qualities.

My owm view is that conciousness is a set of evolved capacities witihin.he brain.

However I think the term has different components. I would separate first person point of view, sense of self and metacognition.

It’s a more common in evolution for capacities to have many simpler intermediate steps rather than that they are switched on at a threshold state. However its an open question when in our evolutionary histories all of these capacities evolved.

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If that is the proposition, it resembles aristotle’s conception of the soul and to some extent what the Stoics called pneuma. Pneuma is a divine fire that pervades the universe and animates reason in humans. However, it does as you say bring into question how it is created.

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Or you may call it God :slight_smile: which is essentially the same thing. The buck ends there as you don’t ask what created god who is eternal.

In this sense I mostly agree with the point of the OP that the mind/body is simply a vessel for consciousness rather than its source

6

By splitting the observer from the hardware, you save consciousness from being reduced to mere chemical reactions. However, the trade-off is that you take on the burden of explaining how an immaterial observer connects to, alters, and gets its core identity reshaped by physical meat.

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Yeah, that’s probably the biggest hole in what I’m thinking right now.

I’m not really imagining consciousness as a fully formed person existing somewhere before the brain though. More like there is some underlying capacity for subjective experience that only becomes an individual consciousness once it is anchored to a brain and body.

Where that underlying consciousness actually comes from, what it exists as, or why it would attach to one system and not another is the part I don’t really have an answer for yet. That’s probably the part I’m most interested in figuring out.

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I’m closer to the first option, but I don’t mean that a fully developed consciousness with a personality and memories is sitting around waiting for a body.

I mean more that the capacity for subjective experience could exist independently, but without a brain and body there would be nothing for it to actually experience or process.

Then the brain and body would give it things like memory, reasoning, sensory information, language and a sense of self.

I also agree that consciousness probably isn’t just one thing. First person experience, sense of self and metacognition could all develop separately and at different levels.

The evolutionary point is interesting too because it probably makes more sense for this to be gradual rather than consciousness just suddenly switching on at one exact point.

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That’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought about it in terms of a soul or pneuma.

I think where my idea differs a bit is that I’m not imagining consciousness itself as carrying reasoning, personality or knowledge.

I’d put most of that in the brain and body. Consciousness would mainly be the subjective experience of what that system is doing.

So if there is some pre existing form of consciousness, I’m thinking of it as something much more basic than a soul in the usual sense. More like the capacity to experience, which only becomes an individual person when it is connected to a specific biological system.

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Yeah this is probably one of the main problems with the idea.

I don’t necessarily think consciousness itself has to alter the brain though. The brain and body could still be doing the actual processing, reasoning, memory and decision making, while consciousness is basically experiencing what that system is doing.

So brain damage changing personality or reasoning wouldn’t necessarily mean the consciousness itself changed, it could mean the information and processes available to it changed because the hardware changed.

The part I still don’t really have an answer for is how that connection actually works in the first place. Like what physically causes a consciousness to become anchored to a specific brain and how information gets from the physical system to the subjective experience.

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Here is a point. You can regard it as metaphorical if you choose.

The sensors in the brain that receive signals tend to experience signals as content rather than electrical impulse and do so with a first person point of view.

But until brains became capable of metacognition ( thinking about thoughts) this didn’t result in what we regard as conscious experience.

It is therefore a latent capacity

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Welcome, @TheBigC!

We commonly use computers as analogies for our brains and/or minds. Before our current era, we used the most complex tech we’d built up to then. We used to use automated looms, as they were the most complex tech we had then. So, fair enough.

But I think that topics like this one, that consider consciousness and the like, do not always benefit from this. Computers and human brains are VERY different, in hardware (wetware?) and software too. This, to the point that the very analogy can mislead, if we aren’t careful.

There, that’s my comment, which does not properly address the interesting points you raise, but I just wanted to offer this :backhand_index_pointing_up: as it occurred to me. I’ll be watching this topic with interest, and maybe comment more directly on your topic. :+1:

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The most philosophically “respectable” idea along these lines is panpsychism. It tends to be a bit abstract, which is one of its main criticisms: panpsychists generally struggle to develop their theories beyond the core concept.

Various “brain as receiver” ideas have also been bandied around (they don’t have a fancy name, as far as I know). They suffer from the same lack of detail as panpsychist theories.

Generally, since such ideas are broadly naturalistic, the expectation is going to be that they should propose specific mechanisms or at least research programmes, which could in time deliver such mechanisms. So far, we have not seen much of that.

14

Your idea is very much like mine. I think consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, like mass and charge. But it is not a physical property. It is the capacity to subjectively experience. Everything, every particle, subjectively experiences.

The consciousness of different things is not different. Not different kinds of consciousness, and not different degrees of consciousness. There’s no such thing as higher consciousness. The differences and details are in the nature of the things experiencing their own existence. Let me try an analogy. Think of consciousness like vision. I can look at a blank sheet of paper. I can look at the Grand Canyon. I can look at my wife. I can look at a Monet painting. I can look at a bolt of lightning racing across the sky. I can look at a blade of grass. My vision does not change depending on what I’m looking at. The things being looked at are what’s different.

It’s the same situation with consciousness. When we compare two different things, it’s not the consciousness of the things that’s different; it’s the natures of the things that are conscious that are different. Take you and a dog. Your consciousness is not different than the dog’s consciousness. Rather, you experience your nature, and the dog experiences its nature. Of course the end results are different.

We think of consciousness from a human perspective. It’s the only perspective we have, after all. But our mistake is we have decided that what we are conscious of is what consciousness is. We think; we are aware; we are self-aware; etc. So we decided consciousness means thinking, awareness, self-awareness, etc. And we try to figure out which other things are conscious, meaning do they have enough thinking, awareness, and self-awareness to be considered conscious.

That is all wrong thinking.

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Under this position, did consciousness exist before any animals ever evolved the “hardware” for it?

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Yes and I’d even say that it may have directed the step up from non-life primordial matter to living creatures.

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Imagine that your first hypothesis is the right one: the brain creates consciousness. You would still be left without an answer about how you feel being you. How is that, in your case, what your brain created was precisely your consciousness, instead of another person’s consciousness?

Now imagine that your second answer is the right one: the brain and body give consciousness something to anchor to and experience through. You would still be left with the same unanswered question: how did it happen that, in that process, what came out was exactly your consciousness and not somebody else’s consciousness?

In both cases you are left without an answer because both hypotheses are attempts to objectify consciousness, to reduce it to an object, a mechanism. On the contrary, your personal experience of your own consciousness is subjectivity, pure subjectivity, so pure that it is impossible to objectify it. That’s why any kind of hypotheses will always bump against problems that are impossible to solve.

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I wonder, how does it direct material things?

I can imagine a version of this being true when I consider how I move my own hand with my own consciousness. But there is no hand for any consciousness to control in this case?

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Google ‘field theories of consciousness’ (I won’t do it for you!) Among them are Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic fields, admittedly controversial but relevant anyway. The advantages of field theories is that physics already has field theories, in the form of electromagentic fields, so it’s not hard to imagine a convergence. See this one in particular Field theories of consciousness - Scholarpedia

20

My belief on the consciousness is that it cannot be something generated from the brain. When you say “the brain”, it reminds me of the brain in a glass bottle. So the brain itself has nothing to do with consciousness.

Brain can only function when in the head of a biological agent. The brain is connected to the whole body via neurons, blood vessels and other biological links to the other organs in the body exchanging the vital metabolising matters, working together with the whole body as a conscious agent. Please remember without this condition, there is no signs of consciousness anywhere in the whole universe.

So it must be the full human body with all the bodily organs functioning normally to be able to have mental state and functions.

It is not some form of consciousness is being created or anchored by or into the brain, but when a human being is mentally alert, able to interact with the external world and others intelligibly and linguistically for the wellbeing of itself, we call the human as being conscious, or showing the signs of consciousness.

So consciousness is a word to describe the mental state of biological beings. It is not some matter or entity to be created or anchored.