What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?

Question

i would appreciate it if the next person could refrain from copying and pasting 8 or 10 paragraphs at a time

Answer 1

Electro-chemical reactions in the brain.

Answer 2

The biological basis of consciousness is having more neural capacity in the brain than is needed for autonomic, motor, and sensory functions. The extra capacity becomes a neural net, and the neural net starts noticing things, including its own existence.

Consciousness is a matter of more and less, rather than being a matter of yes or no. Animals are conscious to a degree, but no other animal is as conscious as man has become.

A high degree of consciousness is an emergent property in nature. It arose as an adaptation from simpler living things having lesser degrees of consciousness. Consciousness itself is one of the properties that matter can aquire if it first possesses the property of being in the living condition.

For billions of years, the matter in our universe has been building higher order properties from the statistical envelope of interactions between simpler, precursor properties. One of the first examples of this is when, in the very early universe, quarks came together by pairs to form mesons and by triplets to form hadrons (including protons and neutrons).

The same general organizing trend runs all through the universe's history, bringing forth the earliest stars, then the elements heavier than helium, then a new generation of stars and their planets.

Planets became nature's organic chemistry laboratories, and at least one of the random experiments on Earth produced a molecule that could make copies of itself. Life began to emerge from inanimate organic matter as a new property.

Consciousness is yet another of matter's emergent properties, on an order in the organizational hierarchy one level higher than life.

When one sees the trend, one doubts that whatever metaproperty has been conducting this progression of properties is finished yet. One wonders what the next step might be.

There's actually a religion built around these ideas. It's called Cosmotheism.

Answer 3

Computer has hardware and software. Similarly brain etc are hardware. That means tehre is a biological connection
But the consciousness is like a sotware. It is programmed in to your biological system by the culture parents, society etc

Answer 4

What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?

For centuries, debating the nature of consciousness was the exclusive purview of philosophers. But if the recent torrent of books on the topic is any indication, a shift has taken place: Scientists are getting into the game.

Has the nature of consciousness finally shifted from a philosophical question to a scientific one that can be solved by doing experiments? The answer, as with any related to this topic, depends on whom you ask. But scientific interest in this slippery, age-old question seems to be gathering momentum. So far, however, although theories abound, hard data are sparse.

The discourse on consciousness has been hugely influenced by René Descartes, the French philosopher who in the mid-17th century declared that body and mind are made of different stuff entirely. It must be so, Descartes concluded, because the body exists in both time and space, whereas the mind has no spatial dimension.

Recent scientifically oriented accounts of consciousness generally reject Descartes's solution; most prefer to treat body and mind as different aspects of the same thing. In this view, consciousness emerges from the properties and organization of neurons in the brain. But how? And how can scientists, with their devotion to objective observation and measurement, gain access to the inherently private and subjective realm of consciousness?

Some insights have come from examining neurological patients whose injuries have altered their consciousness. Damage to certain evolutionarily ancient structures in the brainstem robs people of consciousness entirely, leaving them in a coma or a persistent vegetative state. Although these regions may be a master switch for consciousness, they are unlikely to be its sole source. Different aspects of consciousness are probably generated in different brain regions. Damage to visual areas of the cerebral cortex, for example, can produce strange deficits limited to visual awareness. One extensively studied patient, known as D.F., is unable to identify shapes or determine the orientation of a thin slot in a vertical disk. Yet when asked to pick up a card and slide it through the slot, she does so easily. At some level, D.F. must know the orientation of the slot to be able to do this, but she seems not to know she knows.

Cleverly designed experiments can produce similar dissociations of unconscious and conscious knowledge in people without neurological damage. And researchers hope that scanning the brains of subjects engaged in such tasks will reveal clues about the neural activity required for conscious awareness. Work with monkeys also may elucidate some aspects of consciousness, particularly visual awareness. One experimental approach is to present a monkey with an optical illusion that creates a "bistable percept," looking like one thing one moment and another the next. (The orientation-flipping Necker cube is a well-known example.) Monkeys can be trained to indicate which version they perceive. At the same time, researchers hunt for neurons that track the monkey's perception, in hopes that these neurons will lead them to the neural systems involved in conscious visual awareness and ultimately to an explanation of how a particular pattern of photons hitting the retina produces the experience of seeing, say, a rose.

Answer 5

acetylcholinesterase (it's an enzyme) breaks down acetylcholine and that spurs the signal across the junction. if this process breaks down you don't get cognition which is why this is the primary target in Alzheimer's meds.

Answer 6

Billions of neurons doing very simple things all adds up to one brain doing very complex things.

It's all in your head.