brain-to-???: certain flows of information within our brains (somehow) trigger the creation of conscious experience
???-to-brain: our brains keep records of conscious experiences and these records are why we're able to have such conversations as these
where ??? = Consciousness, the Universe, God, your spirit, your soul, or however you want to conceptualise it (I don't know or claim to know, although I would tend to argue that your spirit/soul isn't a thing (and neither mine of course), but that's another story)
You might naturally question how we could possibly store records of conscious experiences in our brains if these are indeed not things of the realm of computation. I think we can make an analogy with a camera here. A camera captures photons, but ultimately it does not store the photon but only some numbers (pixels, bits) which represent how to restore the original photons (although with a lot of loss). Now when these bits are fed into an appropriate device, e.g. a screen, some photons vaguely resembling the originals can be reproduced.
I see the brain as similar in that qualia cause excitation in our brain which are recorded in our memory and can be replayed in some dulled down form later, at least sometimes. But our brain doesn't store actual qualia but just records of them or perhaps just of having experienced them. If this were not the case, we would not be able to have this conversation.
To avoid further confusion, it might be worth pointing out that our brain might well store records of qualia and of physical/informational stimuli simultaneously, or sometimes perhaps just of one of these. So I'm not saying our brain reconstructs images from records of conscious experiences of those images for instance (but maybe, I don't know).
>You have zero control over what you will sending to the brain.
I agree. I never said that ??? is "me" here.
To be honest, I've come to the daunting conclusion that the metaphysical self (as opposed to the psychological/physical self) is an illusion, resulting from our brains' memories. Consciousness wise, the me of tomorrow, or one hour from now, or one hour ago, etc., is just as distant from me now as you are from me now, or as a dinosaur millions of years ago is. And when you or anything else suffers greatly, this is just as much a concern as if I were to be told I will experience the same suffering in the future. Although my primate brain (thankfully) does not allow me to experience quite as much angst over others' suffering as my future self's.
As to how I come to this conclusion, just as most of us here would agree that we do not have eternal souls, since elements of our personality, memory, and so on, are by all indications stored inside our perishable brains, by the same line of reasoning, and applying Occams's Razor again, we should not have a separate "spirit" (even of the barest form) since our impression of our lives being individual and continuous is the result of the same brain structures. Shedding the idea of the "spirit" also has the nice benefit of solving the various paradoxes of Star Trek teleporters, atomic scale cloning of people, and so on.
There is also no reason to presume that our time exists at the level of consciousness, and the fact that general relativity precludes the existence of a canonical time ordering for the universe (Block Universe) also points me in that direction.
> ???-to-brain: our brains keep records of conscious experiences and these records are why we're able to have such conversations as these
There's no such thing at ???-to-brain. You have zero control over what you will sending to the brain. And whatever it is that is sending that message to the brain, that is not "you". It is just another phenomena of the universe. In fact, "you" don't have any control over what you are going to do next. When I "command" my brain to lift my hand up, I ultimately have no idea where that command is coming from.
It is more like "brain <-> ???? <-> outside world" or "reality<-> ??? <-> reality" because we are just a witness to whatever the reality is doing.
???-to-brain: our brains keep records of conscious experiences and these records are why we're able to have such conversations as these
where ??? = Consciousness, the Universe, God, your spirit, your soul, or however you want to conceptualise it (I don't know or claim to know, although I would tend to argue that your spirit/soul isn't a thing (and neither mine of course), but that's another story)
You might naturally question how we could possibly store records of conscious experiences in our brains if these are indeed not things of the realm of computation. I think we can make an analogy with a camera here. A camera captures photons, but ultimately it does not store the photon but only some numbers (pixels, bits) which represent how to restore the original photons (although with a lot of loss). Now when these bits are fed into an appropriate device, e.g. a screen, some photons vaguely resembling the originals can be reproduced.
I see the brain as similar in that qualia cause excitation in our brain which are recorded in our memory and can be replayed in some dulled down form later, at least sometimes. But our brain doesn't store actual qualia but just records of them or perhaps just of having experienced them. If this were not the case, we would not be able to have this conversation.
To avoid further confusion, it might be worth pointing out that our brain might well store records of qualia and of physical/informational stimuli simultaneously, or sometimes perhaps just of one of these. So I'm not saying our brain reconstructs images from records of conscious experiences of those images for instance (but maybe, I don't know).