Actually, it would be a breaking news for people who subscribe to mind-matter dualism. There are quite a lot of them, for instance followers of many Christian religions.
Anyway, for most neuroscientists results like this are far closer to conformation using an interesting technique than truly groundbreaking research.
There's no cognitive dissonance if you believe that the brain influences consciousness but aren't committed to the idea that the brain is the source of consciousness. E.g. you could believe that the brain is a reducing valve, a la Huxley, and there is no cognitive dissonance there at all.
The world created in days -> but a "day" could be a million years. Evolutionary theory -> but <creator> is driving the evolution etc...
Like empiricism.
As far as science goes (or I understand it) the brain is just a neural network, which gets activated based on inputs and produces some outputs, like a computer does. Neurons can also self-activate, but that is not really the point. The point is consciousness would not be required for that. When look around me I see things. If my brain would just do input/output, there would be no need for me to see anything. I would just act without seeing/hearing/feeling consciously. I don't claim I have any idea about anything, but I feel like something is not adding up here on a fundamental level. I don't even know if other people experience the same thing or if they do indeed just act on inputs and have no idea what I am talking about.
I wonder if what I said made any sense to anyone and if any philosophers were considering the same thing.
Does it help if you view your consciousness as both being produced by the brain, and used as an input - i.e. a key part of a feedback system?
Maybe, depends how you fill in those words. I guess you could write a computer program that has self-awareness, in the sense that it is able to talk about itself. That is not what I meant.
Does it help if you view your consciousness as both being produced by the brain, and used as an input - i.e. a key part of a feedback system?
I'd even say that this is what most likely is going on, but it opens a completely different can of worms, with questions like: Does the part responsible for the consciousness (let's call it soul for lack of a better word) survive after you die? This realization tipped the scale for me from "No, that is just wishful thinking." to "I have no clue, but it is slightly more likely that it does, than that it does not.".
It's very annoying that I can barely talk about this without using words, which have been claimed by people, who hold believes I consider completely irrational.
Long term memory is a physical change in the layout of a neural network. Spend long enough walking around a new city and there is an abstract but physical map that's actually stored in the layout of neurons in your head. At the same time pieces of that layout represent locations on the map and how they connect to other locations. Think of an entrance to a parking lot and you might have a fairly static picture of the location linked to the choice of where that will take you if you go there. (So short term memory is now a neuron that cycles, a network that picks which target network to activate, and a network that represents something, plus feedback to turn on and off the targeting.)
So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions. When you say Apple to your self your actually activating neurons that keep cycling Apple over and over. Picture yourself tossing a ball and your thinking thinking about starting the cascade of muscle memory that causes you to through something while picking the perimeters of where you want the ball to end up and how hard you want to to hit the target, and possibly the position you need to be in to actually be able to through the ball. You can play around with the outcomes of if I do this that will happen by checking what neural net's predict the outcome will be. Chess is a great analogy for this, players don't think about moves as picking a piece up and moving it somewhere else, but what it means when the piece is in a new location. Though experience, education, or just thinking about things you can even train these neural networks to get better at those predictions.
Of course the actual implementation of these things is horribly complex, and many of the specifics are not all completely understood / studied. Also, chemicals play a major role, there are actual chemicals that represent things like pleasure in the brain. EX: Cocaine mimics the mostly hard coded chemical reward response for things like having sex by blocking the dopamine reuptake transporters. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1704
PS: Still I hope this simplified model helps you understand what's going on.
So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions.
No, it's not! (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness). Artificial NNs can also model memory (see Hopfield networks). However, I just used them as an analogy. Maybe Zombies work better for you and the Philosophical Zombie Wikipedia page does a better job of explaining the idea (thanks again xyzzyz).
These networks also connect to and build off of other abstractions so ((((peanut) + butter) + Jelly) + Sandwich) is built from more than one of these networks. Try and think of a pile of peanut butter next to some grape jelly. No problem it's brown next to purple.
Now try and do that for peanut butter next to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Most people feel something odd happen on the second one because they are reusing the peanut butter network for both of those. For me, I can't focus on their colors at the same time.
For a great subjective description of this watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y
Getting back to Consciousness, it's turning on these abstractions by choice. I want to think about Apple so I activate the Apple network and suddenly experience Apple. And it's the same network as if I had just read the word or saw a physical Apple. Language also get's mapped to this which is part of why philosophers think about thinks like platonic ideals yes there is an ideal Chair it exists and it's the Chair classifier in your head.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds
I don't think it makes any sense to talk about this any further, we might as well be speaking different languages. Otherwise you could also comment here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3747462. Naveensundar did a better job explaining it.
Can science truly explain where consciousness comes from? I would argue it cannot, because consciousness is a subjective experience, and is not objectively measurable.
Related to that question: Is consciousness really subjective? Is it not the only thing I as a person can experience objectively?
EDIT: I don't understand why I am beeing down voted? I am just trying to explain my point of view. I don't think religion can prove anything with certainty, either. Nobody can. You can just make more or less strong assumptions.
Theories with predictive power are the essence of science and models are optional, not the other way round. Science is not materialistic, it would be valid even if the world we perceive was "fake", a virtual simulation for example. As long as it's consistent enough for us to make predictions, it's all good.
I was thinking about Math or some subfields of Computer Science where you don't need any predictions (I'd think other disciplines have these purely theoretical subfields as well, but I dunno). I am not sure what the formal definition of a model is, but I think you'd agree you need some kind of non-trivial logic argument, otherwise it becomes, well... trivial ("X happens because we assume X happens").
Maybe I should have left that optional-remark or explained it further, it might be the reason I was downvoted in the beginning. First I also had a (semi-)joke in there about gaining citations being the ultimate goal of science, people might have though I was one of those fundamental Christians mocking science. It's very easy to get misunderstood if all people know about you is what they read in a comment of a few lines.
But I'm in perpetual discomfort with the way contemporary science is shunning anything "subjective" like it's the plague. Yes, we get it, you ("you, Science") despise uncertainty, and the subjective domain is deeply fuzzy and non-rigorous. But it leads to this robotic, industrial approach to things that should be more human - see the way hospitals work, for example.
I don't have any solutions, either. I'm just saying there's something rotten in this particular Denmark.
The question behind the perception of consciousness a key one behind the issue of mind/matter dualism: imagine an empiric proof, somebody builds a powerful computer which simulates a human brain to perfection yet mind/matter dualiasts won't feel that this "being" which talks, expresses emotions etc is anything more than a simulacra, a [soul|mind|...]less machine.
I think that usually when two persons disagree, either at least one of them is wrong, or they are not talking about the same thing.
Yet, it's difficult for two persons to align to the definition of what they are talking about, when one them won't accept that definition as something which is hits what's being discussed: imagine that I argue with a matter/mind dualist and tell "hey, my experiment proves that the neurological processes behave in exactly the same way", he will answer "so what, there is more in it than mere neurological processes".
Where is the "subjective" part in all this? The fact that you cannot even prove that I have a [soul|mind|...], the only "proof" you have is that I look like you, I'm (as far as you can tell) made of the same flash, was given birth in a similar way as you... so you just assume I behave internally as you do, so you can transpose your subjective experience to others.
Both point of view generally assume that our consciousness is general, not only mine or yours; the difference is whether the consciousness is a pure emergent phenomena of matter alone or "something else".
So the subjectiveness of the perception is only used as a tool against the provability, against the acceptance of any empiric proof; which is understandable, as the empiric proof in itself, when done in terms of matter, works in the framework of mind materialism, and as such becomes invalid as soon as you undermine the very material nature of mind.
In simple words: mind/matter dualiasts won't accept any proof based on matter.
That's why they are usually deemed as anti-scientific: because scientific thought strives to search for explanations of the natural phenomena which kind be defined in such a way that it can be falsified by observation.
Any explanation that by definition is not suitable for any kind of proof because disconnected from the rest of the physical phenomena is by definition non-scientific.
So IMHO, this is the heart of the discussion, not the "subjectivity" of the mind, that's only an excuse.
PS:
Interesting read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minds_I