"Consciousness is an awareness of existence. I am aware that I exist. My question is "Where do I exist?"?

You might do well to meditate on this topic.

Also, I think you’re referring to sentience.
Animals have consciousness too.

So what your saying (in your opinion) is that animals have conciousness but aren’t sentient?
Surely if the universe is only conciousness, then it must encompass sentience.
I think of it like this: Conciousness is a sentient ripple riding on the crest of an etherial wave.

Ps. you obviously new what I was talking about, and since language is purely for the comunication of thoughts and ideas and fluid, what you thought I think was correct.

Thanks for agreeing!

I wonder where you are as well…

Consciousness is an awareness of existence in your own mind.

Self awareness is a bitch.

Good questions but, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, you’re approaching them in the wrong way. All this theorizing you’re doing won’t get you anything but ideas. If you just want to play with ideas, then fine. But if you really want insight into your nature, ideas won’t do it.

Ideas seem to be all I/we have since we can never truly know the noumenon.
Ps. how do I direct a responce at a specific person?

You type the ”@” symbol, then choose the name from the list that will appear below the text box, like I’m about to do:
@Pazza You can’t know it conceptually, which is what ideas attempt to do. You know it in a more profound way, by being it.

You exist within your brain, since your sentience is you, and all intellectual processes take place within the brain.

I believe C.S Lewis puts it nicely, “We don’t have a soul. We are a soul. What we have is a body.”

Whether it be a soul or a body.. either way, they are bound by the laws of nature.

I mean, obviously, the soul (assuming that it exists) has some way to interface with our dimension and control the body. Hence, it is obvious that it must appeal to the laws of nature that the body does in order to motivate the body to act how it wants in this dimension.

Some people take years to figure this all out, and still don’t come up with anything. The whole field of philosophy isn’t going to be answered in a Fluther question! :D

Start here.

@7Proxies We do not have a soul, we are a body that is capable of self-awareness and intelligent thought through biochemical interactions. Separation of the body and consciousness is akin to treating an internal combustion engine and the cause of a vehicle’s ability to move as separate entities.

@laureth Well done.

Thanks. :) Finally got some value out of that PHL101 class!

@laureth I love that paper! The first parts are easily resolved in my mind, but once there are two ‘brains’, it gets really mind bending. So well written too.

Dan Dennett is a good place to start. Here’s another for ya. Rorty’s thesis in this bit is that the concept of mind as a separate substance is not based in experience, but is simply a compelling but ultimately misleading description invented by Descartes.

Chapter 3 in this book is pretty much exactly what you need to read. Strawson is hard to read, but he outlines the issues very well.

@7Proxies
I see where your coming from, but what you fail to see is that petrol can exist seperately from the engine it is merely trapped within the engine and interacts with it.

@Pazza Petrol may exist separately to the engine, but only in the manner that food can exist separate to a human. The engine is useless for propulsion unless petrol enters it and the two interact. The human mind is useless for intelligent thought without sustenance, as shown in cases of oxygen deprivation.

This all has little to do with my analogy though. Combustion of fuel in an engine gives a car the power it requires for movement. Metabolism of glucose, ATP and a few other wonderful biochemical substances provide the brain with the energy it requires to sustain intelligent thought. I think we all agree to this point. To say that a person’s sentience is anything but neural in origin is to say that a car’s propulsion is a result of some ethereal entity willing it to move, and the engine is just a feint.

We know the brain undergoes changes with different thought patterns, to the extent that neurologists can, with the aid of an fMRI scanner, identify which of a series of images a subject is considering. So the brain is aligned with thought processes, but at this stage may be a cause, effect or third party. We also know that a stroke or head injury can cause a change in personality. This rules out the ‘effect’ option, as an effect of a common cause will not allow feedback. The third party option is extremely unlikely, as it relies on coincidental parallels between the brain and thought patterns each time a study is undertaken. This leaves us with the conclusion that the brain is the cause of thought. Alternative theories that involve external thought centres are quickly dealt with by Occam’s Razor, as there is no reason to reject the theory that the brain is the origin of thought.

@FireMadeFlesh
Good shot. But if thats the case and the big bang theory is to be accepted then everything we say and do was set in stone at the instant the big bang occured, that is if you abide by Newton’s law of ‘every action is followed by an equal and opposite reaction’

Look at it from this prospective, if all matter in the universe resided in a singularity then if must have been perfectly symetrical, this surely must mean that at the instant the big bang occured all matter and energy released from the big bang must have been ejected from this point evenly in all directions, and if that was the case, why is the universe asymmetrical?

@Pazza I didn’t pick you for an IDer. I had a very interesting conversation on the issue of determinism and the mind here that you may find interesting. I won’t repeat myself here.

As for the Big Bang, which is an entirely separate issue to evolution and neuroscience, all matter was uniform in the moments after the initial expansion. Quantum mechanics gives us the answer to the uniformity problem though. Particles are best described as probability waves (by the DeBroglie equation). If you measure its location, it has a certain probability of being in one location, and a probability of being in another. Probability waves are non-uniform, and the interactions between coinciding probabilities are enough to account for the non-uniformity of the universe. These fluctuations occur in the smallest scales of time, so over the last ~13 billion years their effect has been magnified according to Chaos Theory to the point we see today.

@FireMadeFlesh
I gonna have to think about probability waves now you bugger!
Can’y get my head around how uniformity can create something entirely random?
I guess I probably never will since I can’t do the math, or even understand its language!
(plus minus divide and multiply is as far as I go!)

Oh how these mental splinters irritate me!

This picture, and this one may help you.