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by Scarblac 814 days ago
If absolutely everything is conscious, how come we can go unconscious after a knock on the head?

How come chemicals like alcohol can change our consciousness? Or adrenalin?

How is it that the only consciousnesses we are aware of happen to be located in exactly one human body, rather than say only the upper half of one, or fifteen humans, or any other subdivision of the universe's matter? Why is my consciousness not shared with other people's?

To me the hypothesis "human bodies produce consciousness, probably by some mechanism that's shared by lots of life but not necessarily all" is a lot simpler.

1 comments

You don't know that we're unaware when "unconscious" just that we're unresponsive, and we don't have memories of that time. There is evidence that the senses are still active and a lot of brain activity continues.

There is evidence that the human brain contains many consciousnesses, just look into research on split brain studies. I'm sure you've had the feeling of being aware of what was going on but feeling powerless to stop your behavior, as if you were a passenger in your body, at some point in your life, maybe there's more to that than we want to believe.

> There is evidence that the senses are still active and a lot of brain activity continues

Why do you mention that if you're arguing that absolutely everything is conscious? Why would brain activity be relevant?

Because I'm arguing that there is consciousness, the processing systems of the brain are just too disoriented to pull together unitary consciousness sufficient to actively drive the body. Being knocked out doesn't turn the lights out, it just scatters them into a bunch of individual lights that are no longer working together, and don't imprint memories well.