I found an interaction on social media about the brain and consciousness, and I'd like some help understanding it better:

@dioscuri: [*attached image of a human brain*] Btw this is the thing that makes consciousness

@AnnaCiaunica: Nope 🙂‍↔️😊 
This is part of …

@JohnKubie: Nope. brain both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Damaging parts of brain eliminates aspects of consciousness. Stimulating brain (as in Penfield) elicits conscious percepts. Theory is interesting, but it’s not data.

@SOPHONTSIMP: Can’t hammer this point home enough. Thinking the brain is where consciousness happens isn’t “dualism”, it’s the conclusion most in line with the evidence

stalkerofmusik: Don't you count collective stress signaling or grasping for food in brainless organisms as features of consciousness?

@JohnKubie: no. just as I don't count the withdrawal reflex to a prick on the hand in humans with spinal transection as conscious. People with spinal transections report no pain, or feeling at all.

@AnnaCiaunica: Your approach tacitly assumes that brains pop out like Athena from Zeus head. They develop. And they can’t do it without the humble body. Oh - actually there are TWO bodies 😊

ilinxing: so you predict that if we remove a fully developed brain from a body while perfectly artificially maintaining all stimulus to and fro, that would affect consciousness how?

SOPHONTSIMP: Yeah, because the body supplies oxygen and nutrients to the brain. If it doesn’t get those it dies. There are of course innumerable more regulatory factors I gloss over but even those doesn’t imply consciousness is generated by your kidney. If it was we should observe that replacing the kidney would produce a marked disorder of consciousness, but we don’t.

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@More_Kat_Moore: Where is your data that brain-in-a-vat is “sufficient” for consciousness?

@JohnKubie: No data. In part because brain can’t live in a vat in current technology. But sufficiency comes from Penfield stimulation. Although these brains must be in a living body, no indications that the body is part of the response to stimulation. Here’s a philosopher-type hypothetical. Perhaps human consciousness cannot exist, and is dependent on,  the planet mercury, since there’s no data for human consciousness without the planet mercury.

@AnnaCiaunica: Mercury is planet of Hermes! 😅😎 Right?? Brain/ body dualism is the new mind/ body dualism .

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@unouney: What about cases where specific structures are damaged or wiped out to the extent we can perceive it, but plasticity moves the required function to some other part of the brain?

@JohnKubie: yes. points out that not all function is consciously perceived or mediated. Difficult or impossible to use behavior to demonstrate consciousness (there are always other explanation). IMO, the key is to use behavior to test theories of a function for consciousness.

@MultiVChristian: Behavior doesn't predict consciousness, I can drive without being conscious of it. People sleep walk, sleep drive even etc. the only measure of phenomenal consciousness is first-person reporting.

@unouney: Ok what am I missing? Isn’t the data produced from temp removing function of specific structures thru elec. stim still behavior? Like the subject has to tell us they don’t have that perception anymore ?