In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

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mabw
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In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by mabw »

In the movie below, Johnny Depp spooks his partner by assessing her emotions through the levels of biochemicals in her brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film)

According to my psychiatrist, the meds he is prescribing me for my OCD balances the chemicals in my brain. Does it work? Yes. But therapy for OCD in my case is a combination of many things, so I'm not sure if the meds on their own is sufficient.

Hence my question. Is the brain and consciousness just bio-chemicals? If not, what is the extra component from a Buddhist perspective?

The Charvakas apparently taught that consciousness is an emergent property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka
The Buddhist response I know goes along the lines of "how do you get sentience from non-sentience". I don't know. But to me, it is something like asking "how do you get green when blue and yellow are mixed?"

I am halfway through this book on Quantum Biology which explores some of these questions.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Edge-Coming ... 0307986829
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Budai
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Budai »

Shakyamuni Buddha mentions in the Lotus Sutra that all phenomena are capable of Buddhahood. This goes along with the Mahayana idea that everything is a product of the mind:
But although I preach nirvana,
this is not a true extinction.
All phenomena from the very first
have of themselves constantly borne the marks of
tranquil extinction.
Once the sons of the Buddha have carried out this path,
then in a future existence they will be able to become Buddhas.
If you look beyond the physical, and meditate beyond form, you may find Emptiness, which is infinite and the basis for Buddhahood.
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Kim O'Hara »

mabw wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:50 am
...The Buddhist response I know goes along the lines of "how do you get sentience from non-sentience". I don't know. But to me, it is something like asking "how do you get green when blue and yellow are mixed?"
No, it's a much harder question than that. In fact, in Western philosophy it is known as the Hard Question, for the very good reason that no-one has come up with anything that even looks like an answer. Here's a good introduction to it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_prob ... sciousness

"Why does blue feel different from yellow when the physical difference is just frequency?" i.e., "Why is a quantitative difference experienced as a qualitative difference?" is almost as difficult, but "Why does blue + yellow = green?" is much easier.
I am halfway through this book on Quantum Biology which explores some of these questions.
I don't want be unfair to that particular book but I have to warn you that nearly every book with "Quantum" in the title is pseudo-science, so please be cautious about trusting it.

:namaste:
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Tata1
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Tata1 »

mabw wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:50 am In the movie below, Johnny Depp spooks his partner by assessing her emotions through the levels of biochemicals in her brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film)

According to my psychiatrist, the meds he is prescribing me for my OCD balances the chemicals in my brain. Does it work? Yes. But therapy for OCD in my case is a combination of many things, so I'm not sure if the meds on their own is sufficient.

Hence my question. Is the brain and consciousness just bio-chemicals? If not, what is the extra component from a Buddhist perspective?

The Charvakas apparently taught that consciousness is an emergent property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka
The Buddhist response I know goes along the lines of "how do you get sentience from non-sentience". I don't know. But to me, it is something like asking "how do you get green when blue and yellow are mixed?"

I am halfway through this book on Quantum Biology which explores some of these questions.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Edge-Coming ... 0307986829

Well the brain definitely is just biochemical. But consciousness well... let me put it this way, if im visualizing a pink elefant and you open up my skull to look at my brain you wont find one. It has no physical attribute whatsoever.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Queequeg »

mabw wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:50 am Is the brain and consciousness just bio-chemicals?
I think it is acceptable to say from a Buddhist perspective that the brain is indeed just bio chemicals. This would correspond to the mind at the level of the six senses (manovijnana), though I think early Buddhism did not make the connection between that cream inside the skull and the mental organ. I think it would also be acceptable to say that the manasvijnana (the seventh level of consciousness in the Yogacara system) matches up with functions associated with the brain in Western science. The Eighth level of consciousness, the alaya vijnana, doesn't line up well with ideas about the brain, and certainly the Amala Vijnana does not at all except to the extent that materialists claim consciousness is an emergent property of matter.

To put it in terms that I think would be intelligible, but not acceptable, to the devoted materialist, the subtlest level of awareness, a level that precedes the erroneous assumption of a distinction between subject and object, is the substrate of everything. Reality is an emergent property of the mistaken apprehension that observer and observed are distinct. Matter as we generally conceive it, is an emergent property several steps removed from the erroneous distinction between subject and object.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
Jeff H
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Jeff H »

mabw wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:50 am Is the brain and consciousness just bio-chemicals? If not, what is the extra component from a Buddhist perspective?
I think from a Buddhist perspective this is the wrong question. The question only makes sense from a strictly materialistic point of view. We can only posit matter because our senses provide perceptual data which our minds label and organize as things. That is, objective matter cannot be known without the subjective element of mind. Yet science assumes a material world that can be fully explained without resorting to the subjective. Therefore it is assumed that consciousness must arise from matter and yet they can’t explain how.

Science is marvelous and extremely useful in the world that Buddhists call “conventional” and “relative”, but it breaks down when trying to understand consciousness. Consciousness can be used as a bridge to the absolute but materialism cannot.
Where now is my mind engaged? - Shantideva
SilenceMonkey
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Alan Wallace is one of the Tibetan buddhists who does a lot of work with scientists. He has a background in science and wrote a couple books that might answer the question.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Another thought is... the brain doesn't reincarnate.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Matt J »

There isn't necessarily an extra component. The brain is material. Consciousness is immaterial. Materialists believe that by suggesting a large and sufficiently complex number of quantitative steps, they can somehow have a qualitative change from insentient matter to consciousness. In other words, if you make matter complicated enough, somehow consciousness jumps in from nothing.

It is not a tenable position. Some materialists, like Dan Dennett, accordingly try to deny consciousness altogether, which is rather self-defeating. Others turn to other methods, such as panpsychism (Annaka Harris, Sam Harris' wife, wrote a book about this called Conscious).
mabw wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:50 am Hence my question. Is the brain and consciousness just bio-chemicals? If not, what is the extra component from a Buddhist perspective?
"The world is made of stories, not atoms."
--- Muriel Rukeyser
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

You can take a piano apart and you won’t find where the music is stored. The brain is like a piano that way. It’s always hammering away and thoughts occur. But thoughts themselves aren’t made out of wood and metal strings. They aren’t made of anything.

There’s something called taxis (pronounced tak- siss) which refers to living organisms or even cells, responding not just at random to things in their environments... things beyond themselves. Sperm swim towards an ovum. Willow tree roots grow towards a source of water. Likewise, white blood cells attack bacteria and germs.
This demonstrates that a brain is not required for a basic, rudimentary level of “awareness” to occur.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it,
or even if someone is there,
all that really happens as far as sound is concerned is
the falling movement of the tree causes
air molecules to move, bumping into others
outwardly like concentric ripples in water.
If some of those molecules bump into an eardrum,
that causes a neurological Electric pulse to enter the brain, setting off other electrical charges in the brain.
None of those make any sound, just as the groove on the side of a vinyl LP record has no sound, or a tape in a cassette, or a recording stored as binary code on a computer.
That recording might be of the tree falling.
But it isn’t, until there is awareness of that stored information (playback),
Or, of the live event itself,
that what we call “a sound” actually occurs.
Still, awareness doesn’t hear the needle scraping the groove on the LP or the iPhone processing the stored sound file, or the electrical sparks firing in the water and fat of the brain. It hears the tree falling.

So, although the impressions we experience as humans rely on the wet electric sponge we keep trapped inside that dark little calcium box on the top of our necks, the awareness itself can’t be found to exist in that box.

The awareness itself has no physical characteristics. No color or shape or size. It is not limited by time or space. It can perceive a ball of gas burning 93 million miles away, and even farther. It can perceive stars that burned out and haven’t existed for a million years, but whose light only now reaches Earth. It can take as objects of awareness things which happened years ago or that haven’t happened yet.

I think the question of “where is it” is kind of like asking where is the space in a room. It’s just there. It doesn’t need any other explanation of justification. In fact, as soon as you try to narrow it down to this or that, here or there, it’s like trying to look at an entire elephant at once with a microscope.

The thing is, we humans cannot accept the idea that awareness “just is” because we think everything needs to have a reason. But we never ask “what is the reason why everything needs a reason?”
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by kusulu »

Somewhere buried in my mountain of boxes is a book of papers recently written by various scientists on the cutting edge theories of the mind-body problem. Anyway, yes it's a thing being seriously studied right now with lots of money behind the research since it touches on the topics of artificial intelligence. I'm about 180 degrees away from those questions right now, more interested in the history of certain ideas rather than the science.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Brunelleschi »

mabw wrote: Sat Feb 06, 2021 4:50 am In the movie below, Johnny Depp spooks his partner by assessing her emotions through the levels of biochemicals in her brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film)

According to my psychiatrist, the meds he is prescribing me for my OCD balances the chemicals in my brain. Does it work? Yes. But therapy for OCD in my case is a combination of many things, so I'm not sure if the meds on their own is sufficient.

Hence my question. Is the brain and consciousness just bio-chemicals? If not, what is the extra component from a Buddhist perspective?

The Charvakas apparently taught that consciousness is an emergent property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka
The Buddhist response I know goes along the lines of "how do you get sentience from non-sentience". I don't know. But to me, it is something like asking "how do you get green when blue and yellow are mixed?"

I am halfway through this book on Quantum Biology which explores some of these questions.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Edge-Coming ... 0307986829
Cool, I have a degree in this field and have done some research involving "brain science" (basically checking blood flows in the brain during certain mental tasks). Of course this view that we are our brain/our brain is us is the dominating view and sometimes people try to push their views of scientific materialism onto you.

But really, who cares? They can't prove it - much as they would want to.

I choose to accept Buddhadharma. If you accept the materialistic line of reasoning you will have to abandon Buddhadharma and find a new set of beliefs to guide your behavior. Ultimately their view leads to nihilism.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

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I sometimes wonder if awareness etc is more an emergent aspect of complexity, but I have no way of proving it- and even if it were true there is still a need to learn how to train, direct and express it.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Aemilius »

There are also the out of the body experiences and near death experiences. I have talked with people with experiences of both categories. Personally I find them convincing, that there is another mode of experiencing the world, a mode of existence that is outside of one's corpse. Also, if you accept the are psychic powers arising from meditation, like clairvoyance etc.., it would be difficult to see them as biochemical reactions in the brain.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Queequeg »

narhwal90 wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 2:24 pm I sometimes wonder if awareness etc is more an emergent aspect of complexity, but I have no way of proving it- and even if it were true there is still a need to learn how to train, direct and express it.
One problem with the whole a is emergent from x argument is... a is an intrinsic potential of x a priori. The better description is that a is dependently arisen with x. x is dependently arisen with a. Its not really possible to say that one comes before the other. So even by the materialist approach, consciousness and matter are both aspects of reality.

There are some renditions of the 12 linked chain taught by previous buddhas that say consciousness arises dependent on name-and-form, and in turn name-and-form arises dependent on consciousness.
There is no suffering to be severed. Ignorance and klesas are indivisible from bodhi. There is no cause of suffering to be abandoned. Since extremes and the false are the Middle and genuine, there is no path to be practiced. Samsara is nirvana. No severance achieved. No suffering nor its cause. No path, no end. There is no transcendent realm; there is only the one true aspect. There is nothing separate from the true aspect.
-Guanding, Perfect and Sudden Contemplation,
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by narhwal90 »

Queequeg wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 3:31 pm
narhwal90 wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 2:24 pm I sometimes wonder if awareness etc is more an emergent aspect of complexity, but I have no way of proving it- and even if it were true there is still a need to learn how to train, direct and express it.
One problem with the whole a is emergent from x argument is... a is an intrinsic potential of x a priori. The better description is that a is dependently arisen with x. x is dependently arisen with a. Its not really possible to say that one comes before the other. So even by the materialist approach, consciousness and matter are both aspects of reality.

There are some renditions of the 12 linked chain taught by previous buddhas that say consciousness arises dependent on name-and-form, and in turn name-and-form arises dependent on consciousness.
I'm certainly not proposing it as a theory though its something I wonder about. Higher order considerations such as distinction, identity, causality might well be expressed as the 12-link chain- there is no end of distinctions that can be made in an attempt to pigeonhole experience so why not. But I'm not making a materialist argument either, our senses miss so much of whats going on that delineating experience soley on the basis of what can be observed and reasoned is absurd.

Years ago I made a little robot that had 3 infrared led emitter/detector pairs on the front, it would steer away from any obstruction, or back up and turn if a larger obstruction blocked its path, so it would wander around a room. Given better & more sensors, more sophisticated software I could have it run away from some inputs, towards others. Not a lot different from some insect behaviors. Is there a fundamental difference between the awareness of the robot vs the insect?
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by Johnny Dangerous »

I came to the conclusion that proposing consciousness as an epi-phenomena of purely "physical" things is an absurd point of view in some ways. There is nothing we can identify as a purely '"physical" experience.

In fact, a purely physical thing or experience is an abstraction, and not something that we can find at all in our subjective experience of the world.

It is also proposing that consciousness essentially is produced from nothing, that the interaction of various physical properties conjures all of experience, essentially the whole world, from nothing. Strictly physical things again, being something we cannot actually have an a direct experience of.

In some ways this is actually close to the Buddhist view, but it misses that whole dependent origination thing. This is central when talking about how subjective experiences (i.e. mindstreams) arise. In this view, mindstreams are produced by the human brain in its interactions with the environment and genetics, and then cease to be entirely when the brain ceases. The only continuity, I guess is the environment and genetics, both of which are reduced to "physical" abstraction.

To me the idea that the mindstream itself has some kind of continuity..(maybe the Alaya-Vijnana model ala Yogcara) makes more sense, and does more explain the complexity of behavior and mental disposition beyond what science can quantify.
mabw wrote:According to my psychiatrist, the meds he is prescribing me for my OCD balances the chemicals in my brain. Does it work? Yes. But therapy for OCD in my case is a combination of many things, so I'm not sure if the meds on their own is sufficient.

Neuroplasticity is a thing. So, if your brain had a "one way" relationship with your experience, there would be no way to alter your mental state via your behavior, and indeed to actually change your brain over time via your behavior and thoughts. Instead, this is precisely the case - both the mind (this is obvious) and the physical brain can be altered through your changing of thought and behavior.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

Post by PadmaVonSamba »

When we talk about experience, there is both physical and non-physical. When we experience fear, our heart rate increases, we perspire, and the little hairs on the neck and arms stand up. This is caused by a molecule secreted by the adrenal gland into the blood stream. In a sense, it’s like getting a shot of dope, except that instead of a needle, the body itself shoots it from the inside. Interestingly, the molecule we “experience” as anger is only slightly different than the molecule we “experience” as fear. But that’s just the physiological part. That’s the part you can measure as brain activity. That’s how certain meds work to balance out or replace chemicals that may be lacking in the person who suffers from various anxieties or mental illnesses.
There isn’t really a lot of cross-over with Buddhism except in ways that scientists have been able to monitor the effects of meditation on brain activity.
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Re: In what sense is the brain and consciousness not just biochemicals

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PadmaVonSamba wrote: Sun Feb 07, 2021 10:20 pm When we talk about experience, there is both physical and non-physical. When we experience fear, our heart rate increases, we perspire, and the little hairs on the neck and arms stand up.
The experience of those things is subjective, it is not an objective physical property..in fact, there is no such experience as an objective phsyical property. it is a deduction made via subjective experience of measurements, visual observation, etc....all of which can only take place within the realm of subjective experience.
Meditate upon Bodhicitta when afflicted by disease

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when sad

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when suffering occurs

Meditate upon Bodhicitta when you are scared

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