rationalskepticism.org

epepke wrote:

Kenaz wrote:I want to say once more, I am not trying to prove a notion that the brain is in fact a transmitter of consciousness as opposed to the source of it outright. I am going to say, however, that each of your points are only valid in proving the brain is THE source of consciousness if you assume that there can be no other medium or factor involved other than the organ of the brain. We hear, but our ears don't create the sound; they are a tool for receiving it and experiencing it. The notion that our brain may perhaps be better viewed as a tool for processing data from our other sensory organs and transmitting these in combination (forming our conscious experience) to what we call our 'consciousness' is an interesting one.

It isn't, however, as interesting as its popularity would seem to indicate. It could be, of course. There are a lot of things that could be.

However, the belief that it is fits in so obviously well with both human insecurity and a blatantly ignorant view of how life works, and the arguments for it are so monstrously contrived that I think the proper Bayesian probability to assign to it is rather low, and it certainly doesn't merit all the fuss.

We're learning more and more about how consciousness works in terms of neuroscience, but it's still in its infancy. When it gets to the point where we understand so much, and there are still glaring holes, then it will be time to come up with something wrong.

I make an analogy with Quantum Mechanics. Hardly anything is weirder, and it's write. However, before our instruments got so good that we would have seen classical behavior if it were present, and its absence clearly indicated it was wrong, classical assumptions were the proper way to go about exploring the universe.