The nature of consciousness?

[Jeff Kelly]

Since I'm partially responsible for the lock on the other thread, I hope to rekindle the discussion about consciousness in this thread.

A few people said they regretted the lock because of the interesting side discussion on the mind and the nature of consciousness so I thought that we could discuss about that topic here.

I'll start by quoting my initial opinion on the matter. Please be polite.

this discussion has me wondering, in a general sense, is how much objection to the idea of mental illness having physical causes, and psychatric medication in general is rooted in people not wanting to believe that so much of their personalities is ultimately just the result of chemical interaction, and can be changed by changing those interactions. I mean, it really eats away at people's general notions of identity and even the soul and such.

My personal explanation is this: The vegetative part of your brain works faster and more efficient than the consciousness part. You'd probably asphyxiate if you had to consciously remember to breathe. You'd die if you had to remember to make your heart beat.

Consciousness helps us tackle the most difficult and complex tasks but that part of our brain is single-task and not very quick. Everything we need on a daily basis is pushed down to other parts of our brain. This is what training does.

When you learn to read, to write, math or a new language you start out by consciously and deliberately "thinking" about every small step. With time and repetition you "stop thinking about it". Your consciousness is free to do other things because part of your new capabilities are now controlled by other parts of your brain. Parts that you are now no longer in conscious control of.

Humans don't have a single brain or a single consciousness, it's layers and layers of specialized systems that are beyond the control of the conscious and that work together most of the time but also might work against each other some of the time. You can also directly tap into some of those vegetative systems if you know how. Buddhist monks do that, retail companies that employ psychologists unfortunately do this too.

90% of the things that keep anybody alive are controlled by parts of your brain that are NOT your consciousness. Every time you come back from groccery shopping with too much crap in your cart some psychologist working for retail took advantage of that.

I think this scares most people (it does scare me). You did something with repercussions (if you buy too much crap there is just a consequence for your account but still) without consciously acting. The number of ways our brains fuck with us is outright scary. There is the famous experiment where people replaced the person you'd talk to mid conversation (Person A vanished from view for a short time and was replaced by a totally different person B) without most people even realizing it.

[Kitsune]

I'm not super concerned about that.    I consider 'me' to consist of the gestalt of life experiences that led to my current state, not just the 'me' that is the voice in my head when I think.  Consider your body.  In the space of ten years, most every cell in you has died and been replaced.  The 'you' of a decade ago is now completely gone save the skeleton, not a smidgen remains.  Are you now completely distinct as a person from how you were a decade ago?  Well, some people are, especially the young and people undergoing sudden changes, but most adults haven't undergone a massive revision in ten years.  If you get too hung up on your identity of self on one aspect of your being, be it your body or the mechanics of your brain, you're missing the overall big picture of your existence. 

[MuffinMan]

There is the famous experiment where people replaced the person you'd talk to mid conversation (Person A vanished from view for a short time and was replaced by a totally different person B) without most people even realizing it.

I will provide visual aid.

[ghost]

This is certainly an interesting subject.  Again, I think a lot of it will stem from alternative RNA splicing and extra DNA type cellular activity.  I believe that there will be a biochemical basis for it.  When you think about it, there is so much that we don't know about how the body works.  The encoding of the human genome was supposed to give us the answers for everything, but in many instances it has brought up as many questions as answers.  Sure, there are genes that encode for bone proteins, but there is no "femur" gene, nor is there a nose cartilage gene.  Embryology is truly an amazing field.

[Khaldun]

I think it's clear that consciousness is a classic emergent property of a complex adaptive system. The folks who either want to argue that it doesn't exist at all or who are still trying hard to reduce it to a simple biomechanical artifact are really missing the point, imho.

[Kail]

Consciousness in the sense of "being a sentient being" or "having subjective experiences" is different from "am I (or is my consciousness) in control of my mind" which is more a "Free Will" kind of question, in my opinion.  Even if your thoughts are caused by something outside your awareness, it doesn't change the fact that you have an awareness.

[MahrinSkel]

Consciousness is a lie.  More precisely, a story, a fiction you make up to help make sense of the world.  "You", that sense of self that lies awake and wonders about the universe, is a useful illusion to paper over the cacophonous parallelism that really is most of your thinking.

Your remembered stream of consciousness is just the stuff that stands out of the noise enough to get remembered.

--Dave

[Kail]

Consciousness is a lie.  More precisely, a story, a fiction you make up to help make sense of the world.  "You", that sense of self that lies awake and wonders about the universe, is a useful illusion to paper over the cacophonous parallelism that really is most of your thinking.

I'm not sure I'm following this.

It's difficult to fool something that doesn't have conscious experience.  It would be like trying to fool a tape recorder or a stapler.  You can get it to say "Yup, I'm conscious" or "nope, just an inanimate tape recorder here" if you want, but it's not really "fooling" the tape recorder either way.  In order to decieve something, it would have to have beliefs, and beliefs entail consciousness.  It sounds like you're just moving the problem down a level.

If what you're saying is true (and I haven't seen any evidence that our brains, alone out of all the chemical and mechanical systems in the known universe, needs to be "fooled" into working) then there's still a consciousness that's being fooled.  Or if the word "consciousness" bugs you, call it a ghost or spirit or thinkbox or spacegoblin.  But whatever you call it, this spacegoblin is capable of percieving things in a way that things without a spacegoblin (rocks, TVs, helium atoms, etc.) cannot, because it makes sense to "fool" a spacegoblin but it doesn't make sense to fool a hamburger or a paper clip.

I'm thinking this is not really a semantics issue, either, because I can't think of a way to describe what I think you're proposing without resorting to words like "decieve" or " fool" or "trick" which imply some subjective experience (specifically, a subjective belief).  I don't think you're saying that we're tricked in to just "saying" we're conscious, or tricked into having a memory of being conscious, but that our subjective experience of consciousness is itself the deception, and I don't see how that can be true without being able to subjectively experience the deception, which makes the whole thing seem contradictory to me.

[MahrinSkel]

Let me try this another way: You, I, everyone, we are philosophical zombies.  Things that act like they are conscious and self aware, insist that they actually are, but are not.  You make up a story to explain what you're doing, convince yourself that it is true, that you took actions as a result of conscious choice.  But you didn't.  You just went along for the ride, narrating.

--Dave

You want to experience the deception?  Hold up your index finger.  Twitch it.  You remember making the decision to twitch that finger, the exact moment you did it?  No you don't.  The nerve impulse that would make that finger twitch started around 100-120 milliseconds before your "decision".  Your consciousness got that impulse about 20-30 milliseconds before the muscle, and predicted your finger would twitch as a result.  You "decided" to twitch the finger more than a 10th of a second after the actual nerve impulse to do so occurred, to explain why your finger was about to twitch.

[Kitsune]

I fail to concur, Mahrin, and hold up as evidence something that you should be rather familiar with: Stars!

It serves no purpose whatsoever to any deep or subtle part of the mind, it's solely an exercise for that illusory part of you.  If that outer wrapper of consciousness was only incidental to the things going on beneath it, then why would those deeper parts waste time on something not providing any benefit to them?

[Ghambit]

Mahrin is spot on with his definition.  The human mind works well before you have any real choice.  You're really only "conscious" of things happening when they do and most of the time not even that.  Hell, most genius' will admit (Maxwell, Einstein, and Mozart to name a few) that they really didnt DO anything... they were just along for the ride.  The equations literally fell out of their primordial grey matter, the composition from some netherworld already thought of.  That is, their best works were always ones where they just "got out of the way" of their own minds.  This was so shocking to Maxwell that on his deathbed he admitted he really didnt deserve any kind of real recognition... 'cause it wasnt HIM that thought of electromagnetism.

If you're a talented musician you've probably experienced something along these lines:  you get to a certain skill level and you can just blankly stare at sheet music while your fingers, mouth, throat, and everything else go on autopilot... while "you" are either dozing off or "thinking" about something else entirely.  I've had this happen to me before while sightreading a piece in symphonic class.  It seriously phreaked me out.  This wasnt some kind of "muscle memory" thing going on here, this was literal "lower order" brain function taking over the music w/o me even really doing anything.

Ever walk a complex path towards a destination and wonder how in the fuck you even got there?  Same thing.  Ever drop game on a beautiful girl (one way out of your league) in a bar and in the morning wonder how you even ended up next to her?  Again, same thing.

Get yourself so drunk that the gamma brainwaves are barely there (likely the frequency where consciousness resides) and then the next day wonder how you even made it through the night.  And on and on.

[ghost]

In the end it's all a biochemical phenomenon.  The human race just doesn't have it all sorted out yet.  Mahrin Skel is right, but in a horribly cryptic sort of way.

[pxib]

If that outer wrapper of consciousness was only incidental to the things going on beneath it, then why would those deeper parts waste time on something not providing any benefit to them?

Because while they can waste time for the individual, those pointlessly poetic imaginings help create the single evolutionary advantage most responsible for our success on this planet: Culture. Yes, consciousness is wasted on the lonely, but no man is an island. It allows for language and interaction at so complex a level that it's worth maintaining brains so large they can only barely be born... because those brains can handle theory, society, and history. Then they can command the manpower of hundreds or thousands or millions for generations or centuries or millenia.

Consciousness helps turn the absurd complexities of experience into manageable, understandable  chunks of words like this... a pretty sweet trade-off for the species. And neither the deeper parts nor consciousness care that they are wasting effort: they're just parts of a machine doing the jobs they were made for -- just like a heart or a length of intestine. As Khaldun says, the important part is the emergent phenomena they engender.

Also, consciousness isn't much of a waste. It's not even the varnish on the railing. Compare the amount of brainpower required to contemplate the stars to the amount required to accept, processes, and selectively attend or ignore every impulse from your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin (while decoding pieces of languages you recognize and rejecting bits you don't) while simultaneously calculating the trigonometry involved in walking on two legs through a crowd in a subway station and humming Beethoven. Casually imagining you have complete conscious control is small potatoes.

[Kitsune]

It doesn't take as much brainpower to perform complex tasks as one might think, given that bees outperform supercomputers at calculating the most efficient paths.  The fact that we can handle a lot of stuff without conscious effort doesn't mean that the unconscious mind is a towering pillar of power, if bugs can perform feats of thinking that give our best technology pause.

[Lantyssa]

You want to experience the deception?  Hold up your index finger.  Twitch it.  You remember making the decision to twitch that finger, the exact moment you did it?  No you don't.  The nerve impulse that would make that finger twitch started around 100-120 milliseconds before your "decision".  Your consciousness got that impulse about 20-30 milliseconds before the muscle, and predicted your finger would twitch as a result.  You "decided" to twitch the finger more than a 10th of a second after the actual nerve impulse to do so occurred, to explain why your finger was about to twitch.

That's silly.  I can choose to twitch my finger.  I can choose not to.  I can choose how many times it twitches.

It doesn't matter that it takes time for the impulses to travel.  Even light takes time to travel.  All that means is that the decision you made reaches your extremity.

Ghambit's example just shows the sub-conscious taking over.  Routine develops sub-conscious patterns.  Those are rote, but we can consciously choose to alter them.  Some people mostly follow their basic instincts.  They don't have to though.

Sure it all boils down to a bunch of electrochemical reactions to environmental stimuli, but it's not as if every action is pre-destined.  It's not as if we're computers that will react the same way to a given situation every single time.

[Sand]

Let me try this another way: You, I, everyone, we are philosophical zombies.  Things that act like they are conscious and self aware, insist that they actually are, but are not.  You make up a story to explain what you're doing, convince yourself that it is true, that you took actions as a result of conscious choice.  But you didn't.  You just went along for the ride, narrating.

--Dave

You want to experience the deception?  Hold up your index finger.  Twitch it.  You remember making the decision to twitch that finger, the exact moment you did it?  No you don't.  The nerve impulse that would make that finger twitch started around 100-120 milliseconds before your "decision".  Your consciousness got that impulse about 20-30 milliseconds before the muscle, and predicted your finger would twitch as a result.  You "decided" to twitch the finger more than a 10th of a second after the actual nerve impulse to do so occurred, to explain why your finger was about to twitch.

What if I hold up my finger, tell it to twitch and then dont allow it to twitch?
What then smarty pants! 

[Ingmar]

Oh good, bio-Calvinism.

[Morat20]

I think I'm going with "If we can define it and understand it, it's not conciousness".

A lot of the near future sci-fi writers (and a surprising number of computer scientists, cognative theorists, and philosophers) are sort of viewing this as a pressing problem.

I suspect 40 years ago we'd have said anything that could win at a TV trivia show or beat a grandmaster at chess was 'concious'. Now, well, we'd say it's not.

Or the Overlord is already here, and likes chess and Jeopardy.

[Khaldun]

Consciousness is a lie.  More precisely, a story, a fiction you make up to help make sense of the world.  "You", that sense of self that lies awake and wonders about the universe, is a useful illusion to paper over the cacophonous parallelism that really is most of your thinking.

Your remembered stream of consciousness is just the stuff that stands out of the noise enough to get remembered.

--Dave

See, this argument drives me nuts because it rests on a really crude positivism: that fictions aren't real, that stories just blow away if you point out that they're stories. Consciousness may be a postfacto story that our minds are generating to make sense of experience, ok, but that's phenomenologically real to us. That an atom of methane on Titan doesn't interact with consciousness, that it is a different kind of "real", is important if you're an atom of iron on Titan, maybe. But you're not and neither am I. For us, consciousness is a real story. And stories that human beings tell whether in their own minds or to other human beings have recursive effects on what human beings do. The story of consciousness affects the action of mind; the story of consciousness affects the systems and institutions that human beings build in social interaction. A prison is a real, material thing accompanied by real, material practices and real, material bodies are locked within in: a modern prison was built to service the story of consciousness and is maintained by our belief in it.

[UnSub]

In the end it's all a biochemical phenomenon. 

I've always viewed this viewpoint as only half right. Conscious may be a biochemical process, but that doesn't explain what it can do nor what it will do. You can know how a car works perfectly, but that knowledge doesn't help you predict where that car will travel.

We are biochemical puppets, but we're a lot more than that too.

[NowhereMan]

One interesting approach to this followed by phenomenologists like Husserl (and in his wake Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) is the intrinsically embodied nature of consciousness. The distinction between consciousness and rationality on the one hand and unconscious processes and irrational aspects of thinking like our emotions (the bodily feelings) is a false one. Essentially the Cartesian style Dualism is a misreading of the situation, although in fairness to Descartes that's something he was quite aware and he never suggested that that hard distinction came to play in our actual lives but rather it appears when we stop to analyse our own being. I'm going to try and avoid going into nerdy word salad mode here and start referencing dozens of different philosophers because all that results in is people having to comb Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclodaedia to get more detailed information on the different philosophers.

The whole 'Consciousness doesn't exist' thing (if you're a fan of this you'll love reading the Churchlands, whose breakfast conversations I can only imagine as bizarre) and insisting that because you can identify a conscious state with a physical one means that the 'conscious' state doesn't exist only makes sense if you begin approaching the question from the angle Morat does, that once you can explain consciousness it stops being consciousness. In terms of brute intellectual hunch I don't buy that being able to identify a corellating physical state means we can reduce conscious experience to a non-real and so irrelevant status.

An illustration of one of the consequences of this kind of thinking is that it would reduce consciousness to a purely human thing as e.g. we identified the experience of pain with C fibres firing, it would mean any animal or being which lacked C fibres would be unable to experience pain. We could then move to say, "Well when dogs get kicked their D fibres fire, so pain in dogs is the same as D fibres firing." At that point we either have to say that these are all categorically different things or we can talk about them as different but equivalent states. In that case we still seem to be left with a commonality that seems to suppose something called pain that isn't the same as all these physical states and we're back at square one.

The term philosophical zombie also doesn't mean quite what Mahrin used it to mean (at least in the academic literature). It refers to a being that acts and talks in exactly the same way as conscious beings without qualia. Qualia are the phenomenological aspects of properties, so when experienceing red the qualia would be the actual 'redness'. The argument was that you couldn't conceivable distinguishe between a zombie and a normal person and so talking about qualia was utterly nonsensical and we should do away with them as metaphysical properties. So philosophical zombies represent an argument against the existence of qualia as metaphysical properties (and so the experiental side of consciousness) but there are other strains of philosophy of Mind that go along with the phenomenologica stuff without arguing for the existence of qualia.

On the finger example I had one lecture who holds to metaphysical dualism (making him a pretty rare specimen nowadays) who argued that in the case of those decision points that occur prior to conscious decisions, there's a large number of neurons firing to create the decision but there's no single physical state we can identify as that decision. In other words there's no single specific neuron, rather there's a brain region that fires up and 'decides' but the decision part seems to be an emergent property of all those individual neurons. He argues that this means we can't equate decisions with brain states and successfully enough that he isn't ignored by the academic community (as much as it values people nitpicking, etc. if your argument can't be logically sustained people will generally ignore you, especially if your position is unpopular). Holding a position very few people agree with and not being considered provably wrong is a pretty good feat.

[MahrinSkel]

The term philosophical zombie also doesn't mean quite what Mahrin used it to mean (at least in the academic literature). It refers to a being that acts and talks in exactly the same way as conscious beings without qualia.

Actually, a philosophical zombie is a perfectly spherical substitute for a human being that lacks qualia, sentience, consciousness, and/or self-awareness, a "null hypothesis" for navel gazers.  If there's no way to tell the difference between the philosophical zombie and an actual human being, then the question you're asking cannot be meaningfully answered.

I'm saying that based on current work with fMRI, along with some classics of neuropsych like the split-brain patients and the plasticity of our sense of physical self (as demonstrated by phantom limb studies, the rubber arm experiments, and the way that both real race drivers and serious racing game players will neurologically respond to damage to the vehicle, even a simulated one, as if it were happening to their flesh and blood), that the null hypothesis is correct: Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, agency, however you want to term the essence of being a person, as it has been almost universally defined, does not exist.  We are all zombies.

That doesn't mean our stories about ourselves don't have power.  But only indirectly, when lower-level interrupts don't force us to ditch the plot and improv our way through an explanation of what we're doing and why we're doing it.

--Dave

[Khaldun]

Why should we? Why should a zombie be able to tell a story about its own consciousness? Or for that matter be able to research and understand that it's a zombie? You want to invoke experimentation and science: if you want to believe that science shows "truth", you believe in consciousness in some fashion: that there is a rationality that makes science and can understand science. Rationality in whatever form you want to peddle it has consciousness as its necessary silent partner. Otherwise we're just zombies who peculiarly enough autonomically have been investigating our own zombiehood, and science is just a meme that's infected some of our brains. At which point there's no real argument: either you're a zombie who has been infected with a recursive story about your own zombiehood or you're not. The reasons why you get that infection have nothing to do with truth or experiment or rational understanding.

Why should having a theory of mind enable us (as it demonstrably does, in experiments, if you like those) to make pretty fair predictions about what another human is going to do? A lot of that comes down to intuition or lower-brain cuing (watching facial expressions) but some of it involves inferring more ineffable motivations, drivers, even what the other human is thinking about doing but might not do.

[ghost]

Oh good, bio-Calvinism.

I wouldn't go quite this far, but I think that once more is understood you'll find that your choices are really much more limited than you might think.  For instance, take religious idiots.  I don't think they have much of a choice in the matter, they have a physiologic need for the protection of a group and the mental safety net of salvation.  Just like I couldn't stand to be bothered with religion.  It's in my genes.  I come from a long line of atheists. 

[Ghambit]

Put simply, consciousness only really entails "awareness."  The choice aspect is basically null, you have none as far as the mind is concerned.  The conscious aspect is simply being aware of said choices at a certain place and time, which varies dependent on state of mind, acuity, disorders, drug use, etc.

If we are to believe Hammeroff, who says consciousness resides in dendritic microtubules and it's a quantum process during gamma synchrony, then the reality is that a relatively small portion of the mind is even devoted to it.  BUT, so small that it's huge - quantum huge.  In this sense consciousness is really just a purveyor of information into/out the greater universal complex.  Not a chooser of information, but simply a self-aware quantum storage mechanism.  Choice is a bit-level process, awareness a qbit one.

[Khaldun]

I repeat: if you want a zombie, the zombie here is the continuation of crude mechanical reductionism to explain away emergent properties arising out of a complex adaptive system. Something like "religion is in my genes" (or crime or violence or sex or rape or concern-trollism or finding a sunset beautiful, you name it) is only a slightly vulgarized and crude version of what happens when you accept that kind of reductionism so that you can draw a blazingly clear line between one or two simple and understandable determining causes and a massive range of subtle and complicated effects. Consciousness, sentience, awareness, pick your words, are an emergent property that comes from a gigantic range of simultaneous interactions within a human body and in the surrounding environment. It's not reducible to any of them, and not readily measurable or locatable in terms of any one major component or element of that complex system. Like a lot of emergent effects and structures in nature and society.

Making the intellectual shift to complex-systems theory means accepting that some properties and behaviors found in nature and in human societies are neither fully predictable nor can they ever be fully understood, especially not by reducing them to atomistic components or underlying determinants. Some complex systems can really only be examined through repeated observation of processes over time, and what we can know about them will always therefore be at least somewhat subjective and observer-dependent.

[pxib]

Why should we? Why should a zombie be able to tell a story about its own consciousness?

Because the zombie is a pack animal, and being able to tell stories improves its Darwinian fitness. Telling stories lets me turn an enormous sequence of events and contexts into a sentence speakable in seconds: "I'm writing a post about consciousness." Quite by accident that gave the zombie the ability to create stories without speaking them, to create stories for its own enjoyment and enlightenment. Linguistic shorthand is how I think, and "I" is what I call the storyteller riding on the zombie.

I wouldn't be surprised if other social animals have something very similar to our storytellers on their zombies as well, but the lack of complex language prevents them from using them quite the way we do.

The potential for religion, crime, violence, sex, rape, concern-trollism and finding a sunset beautiful are in our genes. As are a gazillion other potentials. Finding the impulses that lead to each is a fascinating journey... so I hope there's no reason to abandon the scientific method just because the answers to a few overlu specific questions are currently outside of our ability to observe.

[Khaldun]

"Darwinian fitness did it" at that level of specificity isn't any different than JK Rowling covering up plot holes in Harry Potter with "Magic!"

Telling stories of any kind, let alone ones about consciousness and the mind, is an accidental consequence of having intelligent brains. The content of those stories more so. Story content isn't arbitrary. It wasn't specifically selected for in human evolution. Hell, big brains are a late arrival on the scene of human evolution as it is.

Even the evo-psych maniacs don't maintain that everything that humans have done culturally and socially in the last 4,000 years is specifically selected for or adaptive. Their typical argument is that most of what we do now is indirectly a consequence of selective pressures on early Homo sapiens, but that Neolithic humanity is kind of "off the rails".

It's a pretty funny kind of story-telling that is somehow able to manipulate physical reality with greater and greater accuracy and efficacy over time. That kind of suggests a non-arbitrary relationship between what we think and say and what's true, which in turn has got to be something a bit more than just "lol my brainstem just invented a particle accelerator".

[Ghambit]

Unfortunately/fortunately the natural order of the Universe is different than the natural order of our planet.  In this sense, the planet itself must evolve to keep up with an iterative, conscious existence that uses it, because said consciousness is aware of something greater.

[Count Nerfedalot]

So have you guys already covered what exactly is and is not included in consciousness?  It sounds like a term that's supposed to have a very specific meaning, yet it seems much broader than such wonderfully fuzzy terms as "sentience" and "intelligence". 

Like what exactly is it about consciousness that excludes my cats (or your dogs, or a hamster, or anything with much of a brain at all) from having it? Or do they?  They certainly seem quite self-aware at least.  And they exhibit a wide range of emotions from playful to annoyed, angry to pleased, bored to excited.  And folks who claim that is just anthropomorphizing mechanical/instinctual responses that have no relationship to human emotions are idiots who obviously never actually lived with an animal and/or have their head stuck so far up their ass due to being invested in their pet theories/belief systems that they refuse to see the obvious in front of them.

[Ingmar]

Every year another study comes out showing that animals have <some trait that we thought only humans have>, so there's definitely not a hard and fast line there, basically everything turns out to be on a continuum.

[hal]

So where is the areguemt for a soul. The whole eternal life stick? So when you die your no longer active? Your like just dead. I have no problem with this but I understand I am not exactly mainstream here. It's just what I experience.

[Ghambit]

So where is the areguemt for a soul. The whole eternal life stick? So when you die your no longer active? Your like just dead. I have no problem with this but I understand I am not exactly mainstream here. It's just what I experience.

The latest argument has to do with what I cited earlier in regards to quantum processes within dendritic microtubules.  Supposedly, since this proposed seat of consciousness resides in balled up dimensions it's possible that the information (which can never truly be destroyed) gleaned therein may also exist outside of a corporeal body.  That is, a Soul.  Rather than the Universe simply storing your information as shared memories or random gobbledeygook after you decompose, it actually stores it somewhat organized in "sub-space."  Whether this stored consciousness actually has viable "awareness" is something of a stretch.

I prefer to think of it as what happens when a Borg drone dies.

[Aez]

The concept of soul doesn't stand a chance if you throw it against neurological diseases and drugs.  Would an alzheimer patient regain his intelligence once he's dead? Would a new born suddenly gain the maturity of an adult or would he drink milk at a magical tits for eternity?

There is no afterlife - unless you suddenly wake up in another life and look at your score

[Ghambit]

The concept of soul doesn't stand a chance if you throw it against neurological diseases and drugs.  Would an alzheimer patient regain his intelligence once he's dead? Would a new born suddenly gain the maturity of an adult or would he drink milk at a magical tits for eternity?

There is no afterlife - unless you suddenly wake up in another life and look at your score

Since the entirety of your existence is hypothetically stored in the Aether then yes, even if you had alzheimer's you would indeed regain your intelligence.  Same for a newborn, although they'd have no need to drink milk obviously.