<story><title>A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/mysterious-case-man-who-can-read-letters-not-numbers-exposes-complex-roots</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akiselev</author><text>All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as &amp;quot;dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers.&lt;p&gt;The second you say the words &amp;quot;conscious mind&amp;quot;, you leave the realm of science. At best, &amp;quot;consciousness&amp;quot; is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience. The field has yet to 
differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years of evolution.&lt;p&gt;The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine, Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.</text></item><item><author>pulkitsh1234</author><text>Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will.&lt;p&gt;Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and &amp;quot;presents&amp;quot; the answers later on to the consciousness. It&amp;#x27;s not like the problems were solved within the scope of consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness, i.e. we can&amp;#x27;t experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness. The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).&lt;p&gt;The link between what the brain does, and what we experience  (consciousness) is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hackinthebochs</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m struggling to come up with something more substantive to say in response, but this is a bad take and it needs to be said. Studies that demonstrate high level brain activity without the corresponding conscious experience are important in that they help to constrain where and how conscious experience is generated. Platitudes about human intelligence have no utility here.</text></comment>
<story><title>A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/mysterious-case-man-who-can-read-letters-not-numbers-exposes-complex-roots</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>akiselev</author><text>All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as &amp;quot;dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers.&lt;p&gt;The second you say the words &amp;quot;conscious mind&amp;quot;, you leave the realm of science. At best, &amp;quot;consciousness&amp;quot; is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience. The field has yet to 
differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years of evolution.&lt;p&gt;The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine, Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.</text></item><item><author>pulkitsh1234</author><text>Somehow this is not surprising for me, I have heard about experiments related to free-will wherein the brain already made a decision even before the conscious mind became aware of it. Thus putting doubts on our conscious experience of free-will.&lt;p&gt;Also, in terms of problem solving, there are experiments which show that the brain calculates the answers and &amp;quot;presents&amp;quot; the answers later on to the consciousness. It&amp;#x27;s not like the problems were solved within the scope of consciousness, which is of course contradictory to what we experience. We feel the contradictions because we experience everything through consciousness, i.e. we can&amp;#x27;t experience things which happen outside realm of consciousness. The brain scans prove in a sense that there is a disconnect (For instance in this article the brain scans showed signals related to seeing faces in the numbers, but the conscious experience was not seeing them).&lt;p&gt;The link between what the brain does, and what we experience  (consciousness) is indeed the hard problem of consciousness.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>corin_</author><text>Why does our not fully (or even close to fully) understanding how the brain works mean conscious vs subconscious is unscientific?&lt;p&gt;Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic?&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that it&amp;#x27;s conclusive that some of our brain&amp;#x27;s processes we &lt;i&gt;feel&lt;/i&gt; we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don&amp;#x27;t understand everything that makes that the case doesn&amp;#x27;t stop that being the case.</text></comment>