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Comment by mtarnovan | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily, there are plenty of rigorously documented cases of people being conscious without any brain activity.

This article is also pretty interesting: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.9555...

Without brain activity, all that can be demonstrated is the recollection of being conscious. It is well known that we can recall lots of things that never happened, with our brains filling in the blanks with invented details.

I am not aware of rigorously documented cases of people being conscious without any brain activity. Can you point me to some?

Are you aware of any documented cases of observing brain activity without using consciousness?

Yes- that's a widely done thing. In particular, brain activity is evaluated using EEG, MRI, reflex response, and many other physiological methods.

Consciousness is a primary requirement to see, operate, read results from all of that.

Stop trolling.

Is that how your llm model reacts when you can't formulate back a reasonable argument?

It’s not trolling, it’s an obtuse reference to the unsolved measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics.

If that's equivocation as a wisecrack, it's particularly unhelpful in discussion about a pseudodiscipline whose proponents do no small part of their bullshitting by conflating the everyday psychological sense of "observation" with the sense of physical measurement.

Physicals measurements like everything else can be read only through consciousness. I was not talking in terms of wave function collapse. Just simple fact that consciousness is necessary to know there are experiments happening. Consciousness is necessary for you to experience the world and arrive at this conclusions. You take consciousness for granted.

See linked article, under "Phenomenon #6: Cognitive abilities can be retained when the brain is seriously compromised", terminal lucidity, etc: "the patients demonstrated normal cognitive abilities just prior to death, contrary to what objective medical findings would have predicted (e.g., EEG, neuroimaging). These patients are operating in an anomalous manner that brings into question the idea that the body is a “puppet” controlled from the inside (the brain) and that perhaps it can function alternately in some instances."

I'm sorry, I can't take anything in that paper seriously, its references are "case reports", which are not rigorous documentation. They're observations mixed with narrative (even the one reference they say is prospective does not appear to be). This is not science, and there are explanations/reasonable alternatives for all the references that make more sense. In short, I question that claim "the patients acted in ways that would have not been predicted by EEG".

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