Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The Mind-Brain Problem



The video above shows the relationship between experience and brain activity. It was fascinating to see the way certain injuries to the brain can have a person behaving differently. Especially at 3:24. This part of the video showed a man who was blind but was still able to recognize the direction of a light was moving because his brain still had visual.

Part of the readings that I was really interested in were the hard problem, mind-body problem, and brain stimulation. The paragraph on Transcranial magnetic stimulation describes a study where the stimulation temporarily silenced the visual cortex so they had no conscious perception of sight but could still direct their eye movement toward the light. That sentence stated almost exactly what 3:24 part of the video shown above.  What I was more interested in was finding out how our awareness could be shut off by stimulation. In the clip in my earlier post it talks about consciousness. It only left me with more questions but I know that consciousness can only be described at the moment by synonyms like awareness, self-awareness, feelings, etc. Consciousness is what makes us unique from others. It is our perceptions, our opinions, and intentions. Without consciousness we would be robots. So, if we could temporarily turn off our awareness, how is it we haven’t found out what consciousness consists of? Is there a way of recreating it?
So, right now my only explanation is that this mysterious part of the human mind has to be the workings of the main man above, God. In my philosophy class, when we discussed whether the egg or chicken came first, I learned of the “Old Earth” creationist view. It is the belief that God set up the bang for the universe to be created. Science exists because God put it here and He only gave us the ability to understand so much because I believe the closer we come to massive amounts of genius, the closer we come to destroying ourselves.

I saw a video and 2:30 minutes in a man explained a theory of what consciousness is and I had no idea what he was talking about but what I did hear was that consciousness was a series of several collapses. Click here for the video.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, very interesting video. I have to admit I did not know that injuries to the brain could make someone behave differently. Well maybe not so much behavior but like in the video when the old lady was only seeing half of the picture and when the man was blind but yet his mind still had visual. The brain is like the main function of the body besides the heart of course.

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