| > But if your consciousness is separate from your physical brain, how come pumping certain chemicals affect consciousness on a very fundamental level ? I would argue that it doesn't. Consider the following changes to your conscious experience: - You stub your toe. Your experience changes to include pain. - Someone says your mother's name. Your experience changes to include thoughts of your mother. - You take LSD. Your experience changes to include a range of thoughts, sensations, and hallucinations characteristic of a psychedelic experience. Which of these would you say count as a change to the part of you that we have been referring to with the word 'consciousness'? I would argue that none of these are changes to what your consciousness is; your conscious experience continues to simply be the feeling of what it's like to have your own thoughts. As your thoughts change, your experience of having them changes, but your consciousness never ceases to be anything other than the experience of having your thoughts. On a "fundamental level" nothing about consciousness has changed. Your consciousness is still sitting in a movie theater, watching your brain play out - it's just watching a different movie. My argument rests on the view that your consciousness is not the haver of thoughts, but is the unexplained witness to the actual haver of thoughts - the brain. As evidence for this I'd ask you to imagine what would happen if we built up, piece by piece, a perfect computer model of your mind. It would have the same thoughts, it would express the same ideas, and we could look at the state of the computer at each moment and explain exactly which structures in your mind led to, for example, whatever you choose to say in response to this comment. At no point would we find some sort of mysterious glitch in the computation, a glitch that we would have to assume was the point where the magic extra-physical force of consciousness entered the picture and exerted its control. The mind and its thoughts must work without consciousness, as such consciousness can only be the experience of watching the mind do its work, and not an integral part of its functioning. |