Does science even accept the existence of consciousness?

NPC detected. I am fully aware of my consciousness regardless of what it depends on.

honestly you're kinda retarded if you believe consciousness is a physical phenomenon or even an illusion

Rage, rage against the dying light of consciousness.

Gotta agree with this A much better and concise way of what I was trying to say in this

Solipsism is the only answer. I perceive therefore I am. I can pretend you might be conscious but that's it. I'm only talking with myself.

Brainlet answer. Research more. There's currently two main theories explaining what conciousness is.

are these theories based on evidence or are they just speculations?

What? We have get closer to creating life from mere molecules ina labratory everyday. Even without that we have several well formed hypotheses on the origin of life.

*IIT and global workspace theory.
Here's more information about it, an interesting page.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness

Attached: IntergratedInformation_560.jpg (1120x608, 261.76K)

Wrong place for this. You should go to /sci/.

Consciousness is a concept humans typically make to be a bigger deal than it actually is. Borderline dualistic nonsense about how it has something to do with the soul and whatnot. It doesn't. There's loads of evidence that all animals have some degree of consciousness. As per our best measurements, it seems to walk hand in hand with intellect. The gist of it is that with greater intellect by definition must come a greater ability for abstraction, understanding yourself, others, and how it all works together. That in turn translates to self-awareness.

So it's not about science not accepting consciousness, it's more about people not understanding what consciousness means. They believe consciousness is what gives us our sense of self and our ability to choose how to live our lives. And that's wrong.

You see, scientifically speaking, we live in a materialistic universe. The only random "unknowable" events take place in the quantum scale, and even then they're beyond our control. Meaning that choice itself, is a complete and utter illusion. Whether you believe in determinism or not, all humans are but sums of their nature and nurture, nothing more. Every single "choice" you, me, anyone makes, has to be either 100% preordained, or at best random.

It's through that we understand what consciousness means. We are just biochemical machines, same as any other animal, doing what our programming (that nature and nurture part) compels us to do. Our consciousness is just the bit where we are self-aware of the fact that we exist, and act. But it gives us no more choice than the planetary objects enslaved to the curvature of space and time.

We barely understand how our brain works and we have people here saying we know what consciousness really is.

Fuck your fag
This post was written at random

You are a fag.
So it was written, so it was told

If you are aware of that and deliberately go against your instincts, and do something you don't like or don't WANT to do, you just beat the game. From there it's a stone throw to changing your future by choice.

Checkmate free will deniers.

we still don't know everything about the quantum world nor the human conscience, so it would be silly to assume this is the hard truth. The best way to approach it is to be more open-minded and do more research on it.

Wow. Well thanks for coming in here and being a such a productive little dick as to offer nothing to the topic at hand and just insult at random. That after I went through the trouble of actually trying to discuss the OP's issue.

But I suppose you kind of contributed by proving that indeed, some of us are closer to simple animals than others. Takes a kind of simple primate to have that reaction you just did, I think.

I think therefore I am, fag

My animal brain and my human mind work in tandem. And they really, really wanted to call you a fag.

Get tucking fucked faggot. Lmao.

great post but keep in mind that randomness can emerge from a simple set of rules
go read A New Kind of Science

Well IIT for example which was a hypothesis proposed by Tononi, a neuroscientist might. It's scientifically impossible to observe someone's personal conscious experience, even if we can see some of it what it looks like in the brain, Tononi crafted his theory by working backwards from the few things that seem to be universally true about conciousness.

1. It's subjective - you are the only one having your conciousness experience / no one else can step in and experience what the world is like for you
2. We know that the experience of conciousness is "unified", meaning it can't be split into pieces. Like you are one thing; you cannot wilfully split your sense of selfe into two selves
3. You also can't decide to only process certain kind of information. You can't wake up tomorrow and decide you're only gonna see the color blue or only smell nice things.

Tononi took these observations as starting points along with the assumption that consciousness somehow comes from our web of interconnected neurons. He then proposes that consciousness comes from the amount of interconnectedness in a system, or in his words, "the amount of intergrated information".

IIT suggests that, essentially, the whole of all your neurons working together amounts to more than the sum of its parts. So connected neurons can create an experience that individual ones cannot.

There have been some preliminary experiments that compare the amount of connectivity in a brain to a person's level of consciousness.One study Tononi and his collaborators they rounded up 11 volunteers and used a magnetic pulse to deliver a burst of stimulation to neurons in their brains. Then they used sensors on the scalp to measure the amount of activity that pulse produced. Next they sedated the subjects and performed the same experiment.

(1/2)

>2. We know that the experience of conciousness is "unified", meaning it can't be split into pieces. Like you are one thing; you cannot wilfully split your sense of selfe into two selves
ever hear of split brain due to cut corpus callosum?or people giving themselves multiple personality disorder?

That's just you not understanding the issue. Not really that surprising. While all of what I just wrote is very well accepted within the best and brightest of the scientific community... sadly the population as a whole has a reaction not dissimilar to how the Church and cristians reacted to Darwin's theory of evolution some 150 years ago. A surprisingly short time ago.

Much as back then people were deeply insulted by the idea that we're simply animals descended from the same ancestors as modern chimpanzees, people today have a similar instinctual reaction to the idea that their freedom of will might not be so free after all. That their accomplishments are not their accomplishments, but simply a logical and inevitable consequence of their genes, and the events that happened to them since they were born. That all the wrongs and horrors and lazy actions of other people, are not their fault, but similarly inevitable events.

I've tried to explain this to common people many times. You just refuse to accept it. Logically however, it remains as obvious as it's ever been:

Everything you are today: Your money, your possessions, your career, degrees, friends, your intellect and knowledge, your entire personality and *EVERYTHING* that you are, is just a result of what you were yesterday, and what happened between now and then. Yesterday, the same holds true to the day before. You keep going back, and eventually you're a newborn babe, slave to your DNA, and whatever parents, culture, living standards and random events life would throw at you from that point on.

There is NOTHING in science, to explain freedom of will. No physical properties, no laws, nothing at all, that could make it possible.

The 2nd time around, the pulse produced much less activity, suggesting there were fewer connections between neurons, so that triggering one group of them didn't set off the same chain reaction that it had the first time around. It's still not possible to directly measure the amount of connectivity in the human brain, but experiments like this can serve as a decent proxy;a way of figuring out if there really is a link between intergration and consciousness. If there is, that implies that consciousness exists on a spectrum. And when you play this theory out, it implies for example that not only could machines become conscious, but everything with any amount of interconnected information, from a wasp to the internet, might already be a little bit conscious.

ITT doesn't provide any kind of satisfying answer to the problem of consciousness, and the consequences also seriously challenge things we instinctively believe to be true about the world. So if it's true we might have to think a little harder about how we interact with things. This hypothesis is still W.I.P. but if it proves out to be true it could help us out what has consciousness and what does not. If IIT is right, measuring the amount of interconnectedness in a brain could help doctors and scientists decide how conscious a coma patient is. Or it could help future computer scientists answer those same questions about artificial intelligence programs.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574706/
Yeah this article talks about it nicely. I recommend it.