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What if your consciousness exists outside your physical brain, and within your brain is basically an aerial that is "tuned to your frequency", so no matter wher

by yokljo 8y ago

What if your consciousness exists outside your physical brain, and within your brain is basically an aerial that is "tuned to your frequency", so no matter where you are your brain will always communicate with the same consciousness. I suppose with that theory comes the ability for two brains to tune into the same consciousness, and various other fun implications. Is there already a name for this?

Ste_Evans 8y ago
Is there already a name for this? Yes, "philosophy", or more colloquially "bollox".
goto11 8y ago
It is called the mind-body duality.
goldenkey 8y ago
In the same vein, there are theories that subunits of our brain are conscious in their own right. And if the visual cortex could communicate itd say "Stop showing me cat memes!!" :-)
robotresearcher 8y ago
Dualism. Or ‘Mind-body dualism’ to disambiguate with other uses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism
qyv 8y ago
What if we all share the same consciousness, but are simply unable to comprehend it? To me the idea that all concious entities are in fact shared is comforting, because it implies that what we do with our lives will always be remembered. Even after our lives end, our singular consciousness, with all of our memories, thoughts and feelings, remains.
yokljo 8y ago
Another fun implication if it really were aerial-like, is that our consciousness would have a sort of "maximum bandwidth". I think this theory is actually pretty convincing. It would be awful if you were conscious of every single thing your brain did, including all your subconscious thoughts and motor neurons firing. That is why you are conscious of much more specific things like vision, hearing, touch and so forth. Generally the signals within your brain would be akin to random data, so surely they would be post-processed by your brain into a useful contiguous "conscious-ready" signal. That post-processed signal would probably be sent from one location, and therefore the aerial analogy works well. When you go under general anaesthetic, that specific part of the brain would stop transmitting completely and you don't experience a single thing until it wears off and it starts transmitting again. When you sleep and dream, the signal is just a mess of neatly post-processed signals coming from different parts of your brain, so you are still basically conscious. I read somewhere that if you stimulate a particular part of someone's brain, it can make them temporarily unconscious, which would make sense with the aerial analogy. If that's how it works, then maybe our sense of time passing is directly proportional to the amount of data sent. So if your brain transmits a lot of stuff in a short time, that short real-time seems like a long conscious-time, and vice versa. It's clearly a flawless theory ;)
filoeleven 8y ago
This is pretty close to the filter theory or transmission theory of consciousness, described by William James and FWH Myers over a century ago. In their view, consciousness is far more vast than we are aware of, and our brains filter most of it out in the same way that they filter out all kinds of stimuli they deem unimportant to physical survival. All kinds of physical events can affect the parameters of the filtering: near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, deep meditation, stroke, hunger...essentially anything that changes the brain modifies which parts and how much of the spectrum of consciousness gets through to an individual’s experience.

by yokljo 8y ago

Ste_Evans 8y ago

Is there already a name for this? Yes, "philosophy", or more colloquially "bollox".

goto11 8y ago

It is called the mind-body duality.

goldenkey 8y ago

In the same vein, there are theories that subunits of our brain are conscious in their own right. And if the visual cortex could communicate itd say "Stop showing me cat memes!!" :-)

robotresearcher 8y ago

Dualism. Or ‘Mind-body dualism’ to disambiguate with other uses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism

qyv 8y ago

What if we all share the same consciousness, but are simply unable to comprehend it? To me the idea that all concious entities are in fact shared is comforting, because it implies that what we do with our lives will always be remembered. Even after our lives end, our singular consciousness, with all of our memories, thoughts and feelings, remains.

yokljo 8y ago

Another fun implication if it really were aerial-like, is that our consciousness would have a sort of "maximum bandwidth". I think this theory is actually pretty convincing. It would be awful if you were conscious of every single thing your brain did, including all your subconscious thoughts and motor neurons firing. That is why you are conscious of much more specific things like vision, hearing, touch and so forth. Generally the signals within your brain would be akin to random data, so surely they would be post-processed by your brain into a useful contiguous "conscious-ready" signal. That post-processed signal would probably be sent from one location, and therefore the aerial analogy works well. When you go under general anaesthetic, that specific part of the brain would stop transmitting completely and you don't experience a single thing until it wears off and it starts transmitting again. When you sleep and dream, the signal is just a mess of neatly post-processed signals coming from different parts of your brain, so you are still basically conscious. I read somewhere that if you stimulate a particular part of someone's brain, it can make them temporarily unconscious, which would make sense with the aerial analogy. If that's how it works, then maybe our sense of time passing is directly proportional to the amount of data sent. So if your brain transmits a lot of stuff in a short time, that short real-time seems like a long conscious-time, and vice versa. It's clearly a flawless theory ;)

filoeleven 8y ago

This is pretty close to the filter theory or transmission theory of consciousness, described by William James and FWH Myers over a century ago. In their view, consciousness is far more vast than we are aware of, and our brains filter most of it out in the same way that they filter out all kinds of stimuli they deem unimportant to physical survival. All kinds of physical events can affect the parameters of the filtering: near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, deep meditation, stroke, hunger...essentially anything that changes the brain modifies which parts and how much of the spectrum of consciousness gets through to an individual’s experience.