Is Consciousness And Brain Activity Linked?

[flobadob]

Do you think that once a brain dies, so to does the mind and consciousness of that brain, or does the consciousness live on?

[Old_Geezer]

This is a question about whether the mind is just an emergent characteristic of your neurons firing/connecting, or whether you are really a soul experiencing existence in a physical body. You will get the same answers as are usually given by the folk here. No one really knows, you will either find out, or not, when no longer alive.

[Matrixneo]

Withing the program if we die within the system we are deleted or reprogrammed so losing all knowledge of our previous life and entering a new one so death and then life infinitely yet one life and one death infinitely.

In the real world out of the maze that is the system we believe that our powers,strength and lifespan is infinite.

[Hypognosis]

I have toyed with the idea of external consciousness before but reached the conclusion that this reduces the brain to little more than the role of a radio/TV receiver. It also presupposes a medium of transmission and, since astronomers have succeeded in building detectors for practically the entire electromagnetic spectrum without, so far, ever tuning into someone's thought processes, then EM waves have to be ruled out and you have to wander into science fiction territory in order to conjure up some workable mechanism.

Ultimately, such concepts overlook the simple fact that we are equipped with senses; these feed information to the brain and the brain constructs these into a narrative of continuing existence ('life') and outwardly displayed reactions to that are what constitutes personality.

Personality is what gives individuals their uniqueness and from that arises the desire to persist beyond physical death. We each feel 'special'.

This does not, however, rule out the possibility that there is at least one and possibly many thousands of personality 'clones' out there who, despite different life experience, in the details, have generically similar life experience and shared influences (education, exposure to culture/arts etc) and thus end up with shared opinions and attitudes. Personality profiling is a relatively new concept but it seems to work so obviously has some merits.

If you search the internet hard enough, doubtless you will find conversations exactly like this, except in other languages. It is sobering to think that, despite 7 thousand million of us, most of us are kind of redundant copies of one character trope or another.

http://tvtropes.org/

Try that site, any time you need a chuckle.

Anyway, in summary, the brain turns perception of real external things into an internal model of the world and consciousness arises from that. When the brain dies, that consciousness ceases to exist.

As long as logic prevails, in the universe, of course. There could be stuff going on which we do not understand but this is of no practical use to me, or anyone else, if we have no means of control over it.

I'm not sure but I think that makes me a materialist, by definition.