Where does consciousness come from in terms of physics and neuroscience?
In: Physics
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Oh, this is a hard one. We don’t really have a good answer, despite trying many methods like simulation of the brain (even brains smaller than that of humans) or studying how neurotransmitters work in very deep detail.
We still have debates about objectively defining what consciousness itself actually is.
No one knows. This is one of the biggest unsolved questions in neuroscience–and philosophy to boot.
Anyone who tells you they know the physical/neurological root of consciousness is either lying to you (probably to get something out of you), or likely missing key details. If they actually had proof of an assertion like that, they wouldn’t be talking to you. They’d be publishing one of the most important scientific papers ever written.
We don’t know, and the question might not even be able to be answered by scientific means.
https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/
“The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science.”
This is a very legitimate issue that has been debated for a few decades now.
At the very least we know that consciousness is *connected* to the brain, and we can even explain how certain brain states seem to effect consciousness, but these don’t necessarily tell us anything about the nature of consciousness itself.
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