Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder6.news.weretis.net!feeder.usenetexpress.com!feeder1.iad1.usenetexpress.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!buffer1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!buffer2.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2017 17:48:38 -0500 Message-ID: <596A9BD0.2064@ix.netcom.com> Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2017 15:48:48 -0700 From: The Starmaker Reply-To: starmaker@ix.netcom.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.04Gold (WinNT; U) MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity Subject: Re: Consciousness Explained - New book References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Antivirus: Avast (VPS 170715-0, 07/15/2017), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean Lines: 35 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 108.219.229.47 X-Trace: sv3-V7QL3yGSkfMzzTP0MGk0KX1tCl8bSDpFBhkCWyz3fs+V5mA2Y5WG9NCvU9hLtt1AZgit9RK/Q247Ohm!ALwPbVOX6yXIMJQmw6dKAatPZJ4FJdTeGmVdGFe6Bs4ryt/DWhF3VUEte/+OF9j8aYSHgey/8jLr!FSHy/7IXbhE= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3779 Xref: csiph.com sci.physics.relativity:425090 Edgar L. Owen wrote: > > Consciousness is part of reality and must be covered in a true TOE even though physics completely ignores it. Thus physics itself can't possibly construct a true TOE. > > Consciousness isn't a physical phenomenon and thus the universe it exists within can't be physical in the usual sense of consisting of material objects. > > There are two steps in understanding consciousness. > > 1. Thus the only solution to the problem of consciousness is to add something to the universe that is compatible with the existence of consciousness. There is only one thing this can possibly be. It must be the actively self-manifesting existence or reality of everything in the universe that science completely takes for granted and ignores. > > But if things didn't have an actively self-manifesting existence they simply wouldn't exist, so they must have it. > > We can call the actively self-manifesting existence of things their immanence. Immanence is an old idea that expressed the hidden presence of the divine in things but I use it completely absent any religious connotations. > > 2. The second step is to understand how the brain's simulation of reality works to understand how consciousness appears within it. > > Our simulation continually computes an internal information model of reality in which it encodes external objects and events as neural data representations of them. So far this all occurs at an unconscious level. > > But there is a little subroutine in the simulation called the focus of attention routine that actively monitors representations in the main simulation. The action of this focus of attention subroutine generates data that representations are being focused on, that they are being experienced. > > Thus what we call experiences are the data that representations of things are being focused on or experienced in the brain. > > What we call consciousness is simply the immanence of the data of such experiences. Because of their immanence experiences become conscious. > > Thus consciousness is a combination of the immanence of existence that all the data that makes up the computational universe has occurring in specialized brain structures encoding that experiences are occurring. > > It's a very simple and straightforward explanation of consciousness, and it appears to be the only possible actual explanation. > > This is all explained in detail in my book Consciousness Explained, It's True Nature Finally Revealed, available on Amazon under my name. > > Edgar L. Owen but consciousness has never been proven to...exist.