Where Is My Mind? The rise and fall of the claustrum | Hacker News Reader

Where Is My Mind? The rise and fall of the claustrum

nautil.us

16 pointsdnetesn12 comments

I've had the idea for a while that the brain is a rx/tx device that allows a "soul" (choice engine, memory access) to interface with this existence.

I don't know what the "signal" is, or where "souls" reside. And I'm using quotes because I'm not sure that the words are sufficient to express what I mean...

That is an old idea, that begs the question. Why would we evolve a transceiver for something that obviously was not needed for survival? What the hell was all the soul stuff doing before apes evolved transceivers? And what good did the transceiver do before it worked well enough to tune in souls?

It smacks of a desperate attempt to justify believing in a soul. If you want to believe in a soul, just do. Dragging in nervous systems just muddies the water. Gods, souls, Grace, are made out of pure belief. They don't need stuff.

Yup, the brain as "receiver" is an old idea, like you said. But your attempt at refuting it is quite narrow and has a lot of assumptions.

One such assumption is taking evolution as an unchangeable constant. To me it seems like if the "receiving" of the soul theory is true then evolution no longer plays any major role. It would simply be a story, or a lore. In a similar way when playing an RPG has a back-story that cannot really be experienced and never actually happened in the game.

It is meaningless to talk about "refuting" it. It's a "just so" story. Whoever wants to believe in it will, evidence or no. If you assume souls matter, and evolution doesn't, you have achieved nothing, and cannot predict anything. You are reduced to catalogging observations with no pattern, or just siiting and drooling.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_in_Biology_Makes_Sen...

> Why would we evolve a transceiver for something that obviously [does not increase probability of] survival?

(made an edit to your quote there, because as written it didn't make sense, but LMK if I messed that up)

As to your point.... I don't understand what you see that makes that obvious. Can you explain?

To me, there is plenty of room for an unobservable but survival-influencing signals:

1) There are many stable extra-terrestrial signals. The position of the sun and moon relative to the Earth's surface at a given position are the most obvious ones, but there are obviously lots more.

2) A set of these signals is observable by Earth's graduate student population, as of 2019

3) A set of these signals is observable by Earth's biomass, as a whole, as a result of a billion years of each species evolving in very specific pockets of those signals.

4) Set 3 is probably not a subset of Set 2

Ergo, it's probable that we gain some survival benefit from unobservable extra-terrestrial signals.

But maybe I've got a mistake in my logic. Let me know.

>Or, as Koch now startlingly suggests, it may be the case that the dualism between mind and matter is the obstacle for locating consciousness in the brain, and that matter already, somehow, experiences itself. Combining vitalism and materialism, the idea of panpsychism—that fundamental matter has conscious elements—is admittedly strange but, then again, so is consciousness.

What a weird ending for the article. Unless it was tongue in cheek, or I missed something, it sounds anticlimactic to go through an exhaustive description of scientific development to then finish mentioning such a hand wavy / mystical theory under a "we've seen weirder things" platitude.

If I'm reading it correctly, it's introducing a possibility that Crick hadn't considered: that materialism might be correct (as he thought), but the generation of consciousness isn't specifically located anywhere.

Sure, but it's obvious nonsense, just playing with words. If consciousness is a process that doesn't need for anybody to be doing it, why bother to look at people at all?

Agreed, a sensible overview of the history of research, and then a launch into cloud cuckoo land. It's as if the editor decided it needed to bring along the loons (who, it must be said, have the majority).

I have long wondered why so many people have such a hard time thinking of consciousness as an activity. "Where does the mind go when you die?" reads to me like "where does the flow go when you turn the water off?" or "Where does the signal go when you hang up the phone?", or even "where does the conversation go when you stop talking?"

I am also disappointed they did not mention frontal lobes, at least to say why not.

it’s not really cloud cuckoo land at least in terms of the philosophy of mind. dual-aspect monism and panpsychism are serious lines of thought in philosophy.

Not with any falsifiable basis. It all amounts to religion with the serial numbers filed off. If you want religion, go for honest religion. Dressing it up in science clothes benefits nobody.

Waaay out in the water see it swimming

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