[rendx]

You're free to stop there. We can also turn it around, and I can ask you for any paper that details the theory of why the brain should be the location of consciousness.

I only gave one example and Wikipedia to start with. There's a lot of material out there if you're (rightfully) skeptical of that one paper. I don't even know what you're refering to as "their theory", as the way I read it, they're basically documenting various co-existing theories, and the authors don't disclose which one they find the most likely. I also don't see it as necessary for science to pick one; it's all about theories. I prefer documentation of all possible theories, and see no reason to dismiss one over the other unless they're disproven. I pointed to that paper, because any paper that talks about alternative theories shows the point I was making: We don't know yet. The point was not to claim that they've managed to put together good or bad arguments.

[hackingonempty]

We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.

> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33

[rendx]

> We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.

I don't see how this relates to the "seat of consciousness" (with)in a human body, or how the biological system works together to "form it". Or where thinking or memory storage or retrieval takes place. At least that was what I was talking about. You're talking about something else.

It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.

The modern term for "soul" is "psyche".

Remember that the OP was asking: "How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream?" -- clearly refering to something... conscious?

[hackingonempty]

> It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.

The evidence that the brain is where thinking happens is overwhelming, the minor influence of the rest of the body notwithstanding. There are no other theories.

[rendx]

How can you claim that "There are no other theories"? Do we operate from a different definition of "theory" perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind

Plenty of examples of theories listed there, no? Picking a random one: "Open individualism states that individual personal identity is an illusion and all individual conscious minds are in reality the same being".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis

"the extended mind thesis says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world"

To state it explicitly, I am not saying I believe in these alternative theories. I am also not stating anything about their probabilities. I just want to be accurate in my understanding, which is that multiple theories do exist and none of them have been proven or disproven. It is not known whether you only need a brain to think, or how much other regions like the nervous system spread throughout the body play a crucial role for "thoughts" to form.

If you discard a theory just because you judge there not to be sufficient evidence, you're working from a belief, and not from scientific reason.

In this particular thread, we're not even coming from "thinking" or "mind", but from sentience -- the stated idea that the "brain can feel pain", as brain alone (!). Depending on which physical regions and matter you include in "brain", it doesn't even have any structures that according to the current scientific consensus provide or relay perceptive data. Unless you believe in one of the many theories that place the mind outside of the physical structures of the brain.

[ywain]

Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.

I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.

[47282847]

Agreed. I don’t consider what they present as “evidence”. But that doesn’t turn it into evidence against the theories either. There are other theories that explain “out of body experiences”. We just don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be convincing enough evidence to make the case for “the brain is where consciousness resides”, nor is there against it.