> If one day, as Matt has indicated so often, humans succeed in building an artificial brain with our capacity for sentience, empathy, reason, creativity etc., there will be a strong case for the brain being the source and not the receiver of consciousness. Until then, scientists and philosophers can only cling to their particular faith, or go on speculating.
The brain is made of "thousands of specific types of brain cell that look and behave differently." The ultimate object is to "lay bare the biological side of our personalities, memories, skills and susceptibilities. Somewhere in our brains is who we are."-
All dino farts. This brain scan article shows dead fish have NDE's!-http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/27/brain-scans-flaws-vaughan-bell-Great article on the limitations which are humongous. Much of what we read is hyper-hype hyped to the enth degree.


> On this subject, there was an article in the Guardian the other day on the connectome search, which either David or Matt drew our attention to a while back. Jeff Lichtman and his Harvard team have set out to map the wiring of the 85 billion neurons, each of which "forms 10,000 connections, through synapses with other nerve cells. Altogether Lichtman estimates that there are between 100 tn and 1000 tn connections between neurons." The brain is made of "thousands of specific types of brain cell that look and behave differently." The ultimate object is to "lay bare the biological side of our personalities, memories, skills and susceptibilities. Somewhere in our brains is who we are."
> 
> We've seen these staggering figures before, but they're worth repeating if only to emphasize the "intelligence" ... I'm gaining confidence in this concept! ... of the cells that have put themselves together, and the difficulty of accepting that even the most rudimentary (cellular) intelligence could have arisen spontaneously in the first place from non-living material.-Glial cells have functions adding to the complexity of brain function: five types or more and may even convert to neurons!.-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2012/05/18/know-your-neurons-meet-the-glia/?WT_mc_id=SA_DD_20120518

Another important negative viewpoint. An area may light up but for multiple psychological reasons:
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> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304537904577277760260276148.html-Raymond Tallis and I approve of this:-http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/05/09/3499101.htm -A philosopher reminds. Brain scans are a bit of the real human brain being scanned, a tiny bit.

Science to the rescue. All the studies are over-hyped by the press and by the scientists. All PET and fMRI scans do is study blood flow. Neuron networks, no way!!! Results are horse excrement, is my ranch comment (or raunch comment, if you wish). Free will is like Powell's comment on pornography in our supreme court: I know it when I see it; in this case I know it when I feel it. Anti-free-will screes are materialistic attempts to get rid of the designer:
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> http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/neurons-v-free-will-A more optimistic view:-http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/04/25/does-brain-scanning-show-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

Great comment:
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> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/04/09/will-this-post-make-sam-harr... 
> Basis of thought has some materialistic fixed items, but the thoughts are free-Two more articles on freewill and consciousness:-http://chronicle.com/article/Hilary-Bok-Want-to-Understand/131168/-http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/social-brain-social-mind/201203/free-will-weighing-truth-and-experience

"What ever that means" is what we're trying to find out! I'm tempted to ask if during the day you become a zombie. I don't mean that rudely. My point is that there are degrees or levels of awareness, and I just don't believe that you go through the day without being aware of what you are doing and perceiving. But being "consciously self aware" is a different level. In my correspondence with BBella, I suggested that small children are conscious/aware, but do not have the same levels of self-awareness that an adult has. They clearly know, for instance, that they're hungry, and they do what is necessary to satisfy their hunger. I don't think they consider different options, effects, influences, relationships etc. In our daily lives, we may well operate much of the time on a similar, lower level, but that doesn't mean we are not conscious.
Dennett in his Consciousness Explained (which it didn't at least for me) had an interesting idea - if a zombie could behave in exactly the same way as a 'conscious' person then that zombie is in effect conscious. But at least for me this logic also works equally well in reverse.-Different degrees of consciousness? Well perhaps. All I know if after an hour I look back on a supposed highly consciously self aware moment, it's all the same 'zombie' jumble.-> 
> If I'm to make sense of these two purely hypothetical statements (the reverse of which would be equally true), I need to know what consciousness "seems", and in what "sense we perceive it", and that requires definition. I perceive consciousness (it "seems" to me) as "awareness of one's surroundings and oneself". If that doesn't exist, I don't know how we are managing to conduct this correspondence. I perceive will as "the faculty of conscious and deliberate choice of action" (Collins). These definitions are valid for me, whether our will is free or not. If you disagree that the will (free or not) operates through consciousness, it would be very helpful to have your own definition of the two terms.
This whole debate gets locked up in a semantic debate. But if we have an unconscious desire (will) are you saying by definition it cannot be free. If so what are your reasons other than convention?
will - for the purposes of this discussion, synonymous with want, desire, wish.
consciousness - what I perceive as awareness.-Do I believe consciousness as a separate "soul'. Definitely not. But if it did exist it would have the same problems as my material self. How does it interact with my body, does it conform to the first and second laws of thermodynamics?
> "Less" conscious (why the inverted commas?) does not mean non-conscious. It confirms my argument that there are different degrees of consciousness. If you can see why there is no difference between lesser and greater degrees, e.g. between a child's awareness of hunger and what to do about it, and an adult's awareness of the different options, effects, influences etc.- not to mention the capacity for self-analysis - do please explain it to me!-The "" were to imply uncertainty. I can no more describe consciousness to you than I can describe the colour blue. We can exchange wavelengths and we can exchange fMRI pictures of conscious minds.-I'm coming to the conclusion that everything is conscious at least to some degree or nothing is conscious. Consciousness while a useful model in some aspects of science but only because it does not lend itself well to reductionism.-
And that zombie remark. That was highly personal and inappropriate. But then again I am shaped to say this beacause of sense of humour amongst other things.


I'd very much like to know what Romansh himself and others make of it, and especially of the above conclusion. -Like Bella when I ask myself the question am I conscious, I too seem to awake. And if I think back on my days experience I realize I have not been been conscious or at least present - what ever that means. I have memories of my thoughts and perceptions. These are very scattered though. But until I ask that question I had not been consciously self aware. -Regarding Bella's chatter yep it was there but that too is largely irretrievable at not easily retrievable.-Blackmore's conclusion that she is not conscious is I think largely a matter of convention, if you see what I mean. The point of the link was twofold, 1) if we have no free will then our consciousness is not what it seems. There is no independent me in my brain, and 2) if consciousness does not exist (at least in the sense we perceive it) then it pointless to have consciousness in our definition of free will.-The question Blackmore asks (for me) is there any difference between the awakened/present moment and the "less" conscious moments. The way I read Blackmore her answer is No. I can see why she says this.

You say we should focus on the object or situation instead of on what you call mind chatter, -I'm not actually telling anyone what they "should do". I am explaining what it sounds like she did and what I experienced, in awakening from a habitual tuned in focus on an inner world of destructive mind chatter, to focusing away from the mind to observation (without judgment) on the world outside my mind chatter. Seeing/feeling/being myself and seeing life around me as if I had never witnessed it before. With my addicted focus on the mind chatter, I didn't even have a balanced focus on my own body. Everything was blown out of proportion from reality, including myself. ->and I say we can only do that by wilfully (carefully chosen adverb!) suppressing the level of consciousness that makes us watch ourselves instead of looking at the object or situation.-I have to slightly change the way you put that sentence above. Maybe this is saying the same thing - we will see with your response: With my will, I chose to turn all my senses away from the mind chatter. In my sentence, there isn't any suppressing. In my particular instance, my mind chatter only quieted because I directed my focus, including my senses (ears, eyes, feelings, etc,) away from the mind chatter. Metaphorically, I remember saying, I turned my back on my mind. As we agreed before, there is no controlling thought (mind chatter) - only "willfully" changing our focus away from it.->that makes us watch ourselves instead of looking at the object or situation.-And, to address the last bit of this sentence to express how I see it in a slightly different way: What I've been talking about is not about watching ourselves or myself, but having an addictive focus on mind chatter or the film that runs thru the mind 24/7 (and believing the mind chatter as me). But in reality, the mind chatter isn't "real" or even within reality, in the sense of being tangibly true (even if it was a memory..it's no longer true - now). This non-reality was not me, therefore, not ourselves. It is something not of ourselves. -When I think how the term "watching ourselves" is used - I think of becoming self-conscious, as in, catching our reflection or looking in the mirror or watching or wondering how our legs look when they are crossed, or when we sit or stand...or how our fingernails look or our butt looks, etc. To me, that is what I consider self-conscious, or watching ourselves. Again, it's probably just two different ways of how we see terminology. ->We may be using different terms, but I think we're moving along the same track.-I agree...