<story><title>Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?</title><url>https://nautil.us/under-anesthesia-where-do-our-minds-go-20845/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonh</author><text>How to approach loss of consciousness is one of the problems I have with non-materialist theories of consciousness like dualism and panpsychism. If consciousness is not generated by my physical brain, how come physical chemicals can manipulate my conscious state? If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s happening in the recording studio. Why does the state of my brain affect my conscious state at all? If consciousness is fundamental, how can it ever stop?&lt;p&gt;It just seems that the brain is a physical system, and consciousness is a result of its physical processes. If you change the operation of those processes then you change states of consciousness. All the attempts to explain it otherwise seem inconsistent with the behaviour we observe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>otikik</author><text>Pick 3 random stones and arrange them so that they form a straight line. Does the line &amp;quot;exist&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;If you consider that only the atoms &amp;quot;count&amp;quot; for existing, then the line does not exist. (Neither do the stones, by the way - since they are constantly exchanging minor quantities of atoms and electrons with the rest of the environment, the set that defines what each stone is is constantly changing. But let&amp;#x27;s ignore that bit). The line is a &amp;quot;mathematical abstraction&amp;quot;, layered on top of the &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; world.&lt;p&gt;Now consider that you measure and define exactly where that line is, according to the system of coordinates that you prefer.&lt;p&gt;Now imagine that you remove the three stones. Now there&amp;#x27;s no atoms &amp;quot;sustaining&amp;quot; that the line any more. But in a sense the line is &amp;quot;still there&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s defined by the coordinates you wrote. It can be argued that it has always &amp;quot;existed&amp;quot; - before you put the stones there, before Earth existed, that particular line in space already &amp;quot;was&amp;quot;, in the same sense that numbers &amp;quot;are&amp;quot; - that the line has existed in some way or another since Space itself started existing.&lt;p&gt;You now pick 3 bottle caps and put them on top of the line again. Now the line is again defined by 3 clumps of matter. Does it &amp;quot;exist&amp;quot; any more than it existed in the previous two cases?&lt;p&gt;It all comes down to how we use the verb &amp;quot;exist&amp;quot; - it means several things depending on the context. &amp;quot;Exist&amp;quot; in the atoms world, or &amp;quot;exist&amp;quot; as information.&lt;p&gt;I believe that mind and consciousness is a bit of the same thing, just many orders of magnitude bigger. Instead of 3 stones what defines a mind is trillions of neurons arranged in a certain way. I am materialistic, but I believe in the be encoding of information. To me this means that each mind, at some point in time,   can absolutely be &amp;quot;encoded&amp;quot; into a big enough number (huge, billions of trillions of digits). So in that sense minds are &amp;quot;defined by atoms&amp;quot; but also &amp;quot;exist independently of atoms, and are eternal&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?</title><url>https://nautil.us/under-anesthesia-where-do-our-minds-go-20845/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>simonh</author><text>How to approach loss of consciousness is one of the problems I have with non-materialist theories of consciousness like dualism and panpsychism. If consciousness is not generated by my physical brain, how come physical chemicals can manipulate my conscious state? If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s happening in the recording studio. Why does the state of my brain affect my conscious state at all? If consciousness is fundamental, how can it ever stop?&lt;p&gt;It just seems that the brain is a physical system, and consciousness is a result of its physical processes. If you change the operation of those processes then you change states of consciousness. All the attempts to explain it otherwise seem inconsistent with the behaviour we observe.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strogonoff</author><text>Mind-body dualism strikes me as possibly  the least elegant and magic-leap-proof alternative to physicalism, so it’s unfortunate that people who explore this question get stuck on it.&lt;p&gt;In fact, non-material monist views exist! See, for example, Kant and Schrödinger. Some of Wolfram’s ideas[0] at first approach seem to be interpretable from this angle.&lt;p&gt;I’m not going to do the entirety of monism justice in a paragraph, but as one take: perhaps interacting  with other conscious entities involves changes in yours &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; tends to manifest itself as physical changes within time-space, a lossy map constructed as a shortcut&amp;#x2F;interface to the otherwise overwhelming underlying territory? This does not require conjuring an entire universe, with its arbitrary laws and constants, to explain perception supplied by consciousness (the only thing we have direct access to, that physicalists nevertheless tend to treat as a magic side-effect of magically existing reality).&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;writings.stephenwolfram.com&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;alien-intelligence-and-the-concept-of-technology&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;writings.stephenwolfram.com&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;alien-intelligen...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>