Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO, these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain.
I knew about similar split brain experiments, and although I agree to the illusory component of consciousness, these nonetheless do not answer my original question on the observing component of it. Thank you for sharing!
I was referring to the observing component itself being an illusion (as a split-brain patient seemingly has two of those). If that component is also a byproduct of physical processes, then your “observer” being attached to your body is self-evident.
If I stand up too quickly or hold my breath, it's consciousness that I start to lose, not my consciousness's control of my body. It seems to me that implies consciousness comes from the brain.
Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept
Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for it to exist
One hit upside the head and you’re a completely different person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or following heavy psychedelics use, etc…)
I would love nothing more than to not be special, the only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard problem of conscience are ones that requires something other than the physical. Either there is a soul or conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be an available algorithm that my brain could compute that would spit out conscience.
But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The brain could theoretically do anything it does from information processing, problem solving, planning or even develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the visual information of red light hitting your eyes to "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.
The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain, but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up with that "something".
the other way of thinking about it is that we don't know if we share a sense of "red", aside from merely being consistent with other compatible nodes (other humans) in a network. the other node simply can distinguish "red" from "green" just like I can, but we don't know if they are perceiving that color the same way I am. whether it is a hardware difference in the rods, cones, other aspect of the eye, or computational aspect in the brain, we don't know.
your supposition still relies on their being a separate entity to imagine, quantify or figure out, when that is not necessary. a tribunal of processes is enough for this "observer" phenomenon.
Perhaps it isn't well-defined, but I initially thought of it as something atomic and immutable (even in the face of brain damage), and now I no longer do.
[0]: https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo