Amadeus7 wrote: ↑March 9th, 2023, 10:10 pm I just wanted to share my thoughts on what consciousness may be in hopes of getting feedback on how plausible this idea is.
Short Explanation - Consciousness arises when an electric field changes.
Long Explanation - Our brains are filled with neurons, these neurons fire electrical charges, this causes changes in the electric fields in the brain. When we are alive our brains have electrical activity, when we are dead they don't.
This leads me to believe that our conscious experience is tied to a change in an electric field.
If this is true then how do we experience so many unique subjective experiences? It's simple actually, an electric field can have many shapes based on the surrounding disturbances which gives rise to the wide variety of conscious experiences we have.
Does my conscious experience come from one field or multiple fields? I believe your own conscious experience is tied to a single field. It cannot be more than one because theoretically each of those fields could be moved into separate brains.
If this idea is true, then that would mean that the dead could theoretically be brought back to life if their field is once again in a changing state.
Looking forward to your responses
One can always try to describe consciousness in a physical way—but is consciousness / Qualia itself really physical? How can the firings of neurons be translated into pain, color, smell, sound, emotions, etc?Agent Smyth wrote: ↑March 25th, 2023, 12:47 am In a physicalist's eyes, the OP makes complete sense. After all, to adherents of physicalism consciousness is simply an electrochemical phenomenon that takes place in the brain. It can't be anything else now can it?
Explaining these subjective attributes with the language of physicalism is different from explaining why these things "can be possible" with the language of physicalism—to me, physicalist viewpoints only allow one to be capable of the latter. We all know that the brain makes consciousness "possible", but we don't yet know how what happens in the brain translates to consciousness. We don't even yet fully know what happens in the brain to begin with.
Here's what I personally believe: I think consciousness is not physical (in a third-person sense where you point at a tree and think "that tree is a physical thing.")
But rather, what it "feels like" or what it "means to be" physical—so more of a first-person sense of "being a physical object yourself". Which in this case, the physical object being the brain and the nervous system.
These perspectives on their own are not physical. They're just the "act of assigning". But what these perspectives get assigned to, what these perspectives attach to, are indeed physical.