c. Consciousness consists of the conflation (experience) of awareness of space and time, produced by the hierarchy of memory beginning with the shortest term to longest term (hippocampal, entorhinal, perirhinal, parahippocampal, inferotemporal, and cortical) controlled by attention (thalamus), given priorities calculated in a competition then released (basal nuclei) according to timing (parallel order) calculated by the cerebellum. In other words, consciousness is a spatial model into which we conflate sensory information through massive parallelization. Or in simple terms, consciousness consists of short term memory of the past few moments of short term memory. This brief explanation refers to a set of theories the narrowest of which is ‘thousand brains’ model of the cortex, and the broadest of which is the “Thalmo-cortical resonance theory”, in which the frequency of oscillation determines the narrowness of focus, urgency and rate of resulting action. This science is rather current but it is pretty well understood (and I am current with the research).
Space and Time. Existence and Experience. Brain and Mind.
The experience we call mind exists temporally as the result of action. And that action is the result of the persistence of vision (up to 2-3 seconds) exceeding rates of iteration (around a 25th of a second), between the thalamus and the generations (layers) of the brain. Thus we perceive a constant state (consciousness) of changes in state by continuous refreshing of perception and continuous temporary persistence of the stimulation.
There is a reason we encode only the differences between frames when streaming video. Because those changes in state are all we detect, and we continuously assemble and model the world around us from those continuous changes in state.
REGARDING THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF QUALIA
—“You categorize like an engineer”—
(As if that was an insult rather than compliment beyond measure.)
I categorize and articulate as a scientist who prosecutes pseudoscience and pseudo rationalism: in operational language.
And that is because science has adopted operational language to prevent the fictionalisms: pseudoscience, pseudo rationalism, pseudo-wisdom-literature.
And that is because operations provide a universally commensurable standard of measure, that is free of pseudoscience (pretense of causality), pseudo-rationalism (inflation, conflation, loading, framing, suggestion, obscurantism), pseudo-wisdom literature (mythology, supernaturalism), and the various deceits of the self and others in exchange for attention and signals.
In mathematics there exists a pseudoscientific practice in that we call positional names ‘numbers’, to maintain the fiction that the square of two exists, when it cannot except for the name of a function (operation in a context).
In economics there exists a pseudoscientific practice by in the use of the term ‘Utilis’ as a label by which the incommensurable is rendered to the commensurable.
In philosophy, during that era in which philosophers attempted to ascend philosophy from reason, to logic, to science, we saw a host of attempts to formalize logic into mathematics, rather than to restore mathematics to language (grammar and semantics).
All of these disciplines categorize ficitionaly in order to obscure the triviality of the underlying phenomenon that they describe.
Qualia is, as i stated, a fictionalism ascribing to states that which consists of the neural persistence of vision of accordant and discordant state changes in continuous time.
Qualia can no more exist than nothing, since nothing requires something to contrast with.
Qualia developed out of wittgenstein’s attempt to cast the mind in the form of movie consisting of frames, rather than the persistence of vision between a host of fragments.
Dennett proposed four criteria for Qualia:
1 – ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
This is false because we both share the same experiences but often lack introspective vocabulary to transmit xperiences. We can however, as in all forms of communication, construct complex experiences from universally simplistic forms. (this is the function of all storytelling).
2 – intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience’s relation to other things.
This says precisely nothing other than the our senses provide us correct information about the real world, at human scale, within th elimits of our ability to act (because it would be an evolutionary disadvantage to have senses beyond one’s ability to act. Hence why we lack thermal vision.)
3 – private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
This is false otherwise we could not empathize. If one says, that the range stimuli and excitement(intensity) that I experience from similar sensations, and the associations in memory that are stimulated by that experience, then yes, they are not identical but they are both marginally indifferent AND communicable. The problem is that we are usually unwilling to pay the high cost of that communication given the low value of stimulation beyond marginal indifference.
4 – directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.
This is a definition Scope limitation) rather than a description, in that he’s stating that he’s demarcating those experiences open to self reflection from those not. And it is this last that informs us to the real purpose that philosophers are trying to achieve: a literature of experience. However, we have that literature of experience: the novel.
And that is precisely what has occurred in the 20th century:
Math is the rather trivial study of positional relations (the logic of ratios) – a grammar of positional relations.
Logic has been found to be a grammar in which we study litte more than constant relations of some subsets between states (phrases).
Science consists of measurement in constant relations in the grammar of action.
Law consists of measurement of investments decided by reciprocity.
Economics consists of measurements of the consequences of reciprocal exchange, and the process of removing frictions to that exchange by the use of institutions.
And The novel (Of which Dostoyevsky and Orwell are probably the greatest example man has produced ) the study of experiences.
And we have seen philosophy, starting with Kant’s attempt to reject anglo empiricism by conflation of the experiences and measurements, and continuing with the anti-empirical evolution of the Continental > Boazian > Marxist > Freudian > Postmodern schools, descend into pseudoscience and fictionalism in desperate attempt to preserve what is no more than the literature of pseudoscience, false wisdom lit, and anti-real (destructive) mythos.
We know why philosophy is attractive: it’s cheap, and it lacks means of falsification against reality within perceivable time frames, and as such, causes the orator to attract attention from those who commiserate, and those who disapprove, and those who defend against such falsehoods.
There is a reason operational (Scientific) language has evolved into the universal language of truthful speech. Because it is the only language of universal commensurability that prevents the great deceits of ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion (loading), obscurantism(framing), fictionalism (pseudoscience, pseudo rationalism, and pseudo-wisdom-literature/myth).
Truthful statements are possible and small in number. But fictionalisms are endless means by which those who cannot tolerate reality create a fiction to describe it on their terms.
Literature is at least honest. Economics is finally fairly honest – although some of us work to correct what remains. But it is more honest than all political philosophy that has come before it. Law is at least honest, even if legislation and regulation are not. Science has spent a century preserving its social status, by incrementally suppressing pseudoscience.
However, philosophy has been descending – at least since kant, into nothing more than a conflation of pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, and pseudo-wisdom literature.
It is little more than moral fictions to entertain those who are unsatisfied by the reality of reality: the markets for association, cooperation, reproduction, production of goods, services and information, production of commons (politics), production of group evolutionary strategy (nation and civilization).
Hence why it is increasingly unfunded, and relegated to theology – even classified with theology in libraries and book stores.
As far as I know the disciplines are approaching completeness given the operations we describe at increasing scales, and as such the domain of philosophy is not simply empty verbalisms by which we attempt to signal wisdom we do not possess, but the determination of personal preference, and communal good, given the resources (choices) made available by the disciplines that measure that which is not preference, but truth: science.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine.
THE MOST REDUCTIVE MODEL: COMPUTATIONAL EFFICIENCY GIVEN THE HIGH COST OF BRAINS.
As far as I know the hemispheres are the result of bilateralization. The dominance of one over the other a necessity of bilateral coordination. The specialization of hemispheres due to the computational demands of observing, forecasting, searching (prey) and acting (predatory). The costs of left and right differ and we work at spending very little time ‘calculating’ as it’s costly. We spend most of our time daydreaming (searching, modeling) and emoting, relying on intuitive free association rather than planning, calculating, and now, computing.
The simplest reduction is a funnel where the senses are collected in the right to make a model (prey), and the right and left negotiate a direction of candidate action, and the left performs the action of manipulation (predator). This solves a host of problems of computational efficiency if or no other reason than both prey(world) and predator (actor) can maintain state at the same time, without falling into the problem we see in many animals, which is that they are vulnerable when concentrating, and therefore toggle between concentration and observation limiting their concentration.
The simplest reduction of consciousness is simply the product of additional recursion and memory (‘distance’ as the author suggests). The fact that this is produced by frontal lobes is something that is fairly new. I would have thought that it was not localized but a function of scale.
The simplest reason for achievement of western civilization is the specialization in left functions. The simplest reason for angst in western civilization is marx’s critique of alienation – although it is just alienation from a known role in a band or tribe, and the loss of calculability and exhaustion of calculating and frustration of trusting when cause and effect are so disassociated in time. The simplest means for the limits of western model are demographic – the cost of abrahamism for the underclasses was something not at the time possible to pay for training in classicism.
The simplest need for binding narratives is to reduce the effort of calculation. The simplest need for ritual is relieving the pressure of calculation. the simplest need for community events (feasts, festivals, rituals) is to reduce the calculative cost of trust. In other words, the neural economy is expensive and needs vacations. And while we may vacation from calculation of work somewhat easily, it requires social order to take a vacation from the construction of trust such that we do not fear we are ostracized or left behind, and can counter the feeling of alienation caused by the division of knowledge and labor.
This problem of ‘computational efficiency’ by funneling is simply a brain structure mirroring neural hierarchy. It is this model that scientists (particularly those that study language) make use of. Certainly Chomsky does.
CONSCIOUSNESS A BYPRODUCT OF RECURSIVE MEMORY
The idea that consciousness is introspection isn’t new. But he has done perhaps the best job so far of making a case for it. IMO I think his theory is weak, since consciousness will always deterministically result from sufficient recursive forecasting power (memory). I would say instead that consciousness as introspective is a product of the evolution of language, only because by talking we make categories commensurable and calculable and therefore testable to ourselves. In other words, it reduces computational costs.
THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY RATHER THAN SATISFYING THE MARKET DEMAND FOR THE COGNITIVE SPECTRUM.
His second half of the book seems a bit of a Naturalistic fallacy. **Neurons Like Numbers Are Very Simple Things** They have profound plasticity and what we can create with them is bound only by computational efficiency (costs of using them). If we can somehow construct a model, we an imagine the previously inconceivable (relativity being the best example). Most of us cannot imagine that time is merely a function of entropy in space. Our ability to theorize through recursive introspection demonstrates rather vividly that – while costly – we can train at least some humans almost infinitely, and we can be happy as long as socialization is sufficient – by lack of diversity (competitors from cognitive thresholds that are lower).
We can adapt our thinking as have each of the major civilizations: west, semitic, indian, and east asian. And the difficulty appears to arise ONLY when socialization is not maintained along with analytical thought. In fact, the central problem of great thinkers and even prodigies, is the tendency to exit the polity out of frustration – because there is no socialization possible. (not like there was prior to the 20th century, when pre-marxism-communism-postmodernism we were all ‘the same but different’. (a common lament among early 20th century intellectuals.)
Need for training of the intuition for adaptation to modernity, and it’s this lack of training that stoicism / epicureanism provide, and the spectrum of deflationary grammars and inflationary grammars can all be trained – assuming we prohibit the fictionalisms (lying grammars). The fact that all this ‘woo woo’ is flying around still is contrary to the evidence of the adaptability of man, and the utility of adapting to the demands of the era.
Now, the argument that Ghichrist is making, is that the wholistic mind needs greater exercise, and I agree, I just disagree that it needs supernaturalism, sophism, and pseudoscience. And I disagree it needs archtypes and narratives that are counter to the western heroic ethic – the one that dominated the greco roman world, prior to it’s antithesis in semitic abrahamic reliigons.
The similarity I see between Gilchrist and Peterson is that they are both therapists and deal with the many broken people that industrial era and later modernity has produced – and in the states it’s rather obvious that the destruction of the family by mobility, scale of country, diversity, and independence from inter-generational care-taking has been catastrophic. The problem is they are working with the hammer they know how to nail – therapy – rather than removing the conditions that make desocialization and ‘incalculability ‘ (the right can’t model a favorable world).
The point of stoicism was to use reason and discipline to train the intuition. Epicurean-ism to take the opposite route – a materialist and social version of eastern (buddhist) individualist escapism from reality. It is however far easier to teach the dim buddhism’s rituals that stoicism’s rituals (self authoring), but we teach people mathematics which is pretty unnatural and there is nothing unnatural about teaching people disciplined pursuit of virtues as a means of creating the ‘mindfulness’ I intuit Ghichrist and Peters on are trying to construct.
SIMPLE SOLUTIONS
My understanding of our current plight is the need to choose between reconstructing a hallucination (religion) or reconstructing classicism (civic life). My understanding is that only westerners have been able to construct civic life. But that there are bad people in this world who want to reconstruct religion (hallucination).
This is a far more reductive (simple) explanation.
Falling backward into ‘falsehoods’ rather than training people to make use of modernity and organizing society to eliminate alienation is, in my understanding, the choice that separates the west from the rest.
Satisfying demand for computational efficiency across the spectrum of human computations both rational, intuitionistic, and perceptual is simply a market problem
The naturalistic fallacy is that we regress to the past rather than satisfy the market demand that allows us to produce continuous transformation of man from animal to the gods we have the possibility to be.
NOTES: (this page is just notes to integrate into the topic if useful.)
NOTE: To say ‘consciousness’ is an illusion is something I have to deny for the simple reason that I have a multi-decade experience with frequently losing consciousness under the right (not rare) conditions. And each stage of ‘awareness’ is relatively obvious. There is a base ‘you’ which may or may not be in the lower or mid-brain, that awakens slowly as more and more information is available to it as you return to consciousness by full use of your senses and memories, generating some semblance of a model of yourself in the world. Now, that base consciousness doesn’t do much more than wait and feel and react, but in my experience, it is definitely ‘me’ with my memories and current context, continually altering ‘me’ through various stages, which I notice are less happy and more skeptical as each stage begins to fully participate. I assume that ‘me’ is ‘womb me’. So for me, this isn’t a theory. it’s an experience I go through with painful frequency.
THE RULES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
WHEREAS
1. Our attention rotates in a competition between sensation(observation and construction by prediction and reward identification), imagination (possibility by association), holding attention on a goal (possibility by continuous opportunity seizure), and releasing predicted actions (in pursuit of the goal).
WHEREAS
2. We rotate between sensation (observation and construction by prediction), anticipating (goal prediction), and storing (remembering by stimulating and rehearsing), on a 1/10th of a second rotation (Theta) creating competition and choice.
AND WHEREAS
3. There is no observer, other than the memory of an observation.
4. There are no observations other than sequences.
5. There is no comparison of observations other than to previous sequences.
6. There is no order in sequences other than that created by sequences.
7. There are no sequences other than those of sensations.
8. There is no existence sensed, other than those changes in time.
9. Without change we cannot sense time.
THEREFORE
Existence is a verb
Experience is a verb
Imagination is a verb
Consciousness is a verb.
Because Acting is a verb – and we can only act in time.
AND THEREFORE
Without action, we produce no existence, no experience, no sequence, no memory, no consciousness.
AND THEREFORE
There is no observer other than the observations (hierarchy of increasing of sequences of memories in time.
AND THEREFORE
We see what the camera sees.
We do not record images, but sequences of related stimuli.
“I AM, MEANING, I EXIST AS, THE HIERARCHY OF MY MEMORY IN MOTION”
Higher Resolution
Mar 9, 2020, 2:44 PM
Nerves (Sense-Perception)
Cortex (model, prediction, recursion)
Hippocampal Region (auto-association, intuition, recursion)
… … … … Emotion (valuation)
… … … … … Desire (incentives, acquisition)
… … … … … Fear … etc
… … … … … Dominance … etc
Thalamus (Attention, Direction)
Frontal Cortex (Reason, consciousness, permutation-recursion)
Basal Ganglia (Action, release, demonstrated preference)
Senses (Observation, consequence)
Loop.
“Emotions are reactions to changes in state of resources.”
That’s the physical sequence that our brains go thru.
The Opportunity for Consciousness
The cortex functions as a competition for potential.
Consciousness provides a buffer for the purpose of recursive continuous recursive predictions.
Ergo, it does not issue commands but RELEASES them as they emerge during competition.
An example of Via-negativa in everything.
This is why we maintain the spectrum from reacting to certain phenomena without conscious analysis to acting recursively (incrementally) in time in pursuit of goals.
We only get the choice to recurse if the temporality of the threat is ‘later’.
Thank you for the opportunity to illustrate the criteria for a conscious agency. ?
Consciousness
Oct 14, 2019, 9:35 PM
Consciousness: awareness of change in state of self (non-body), of spatial model of self (body), of space around self, of objects in the space around self, of place and location, of others, as the spatial movement of others, and the model in the mind of others. This is the sixth sense (biologically it is, this is how the mind constructs experience – just like a 3d video game.).
We can imitate (act masculine bias), sympathize (incentives), empathize (feelings – feminine bias).
We divide the the world into locations, boundaries, objects, places within the location (space), direction of movement, head direction, speed, and distance.
We do this all predictively with about two seconds to compose a context, and updated about every tenth of a second.
So we are continually predicting everything including the actions (imitation), thoughts (sympathy) and feelings (empathy) of others.
The male brain is specialized from back to front (speed) independent of empathy, and the female brain is specialized laterally (context) independent of speed. All of us vary from masculine to feminine brain structures. This difference is large, and I think it’s on the scale of 1.5SD. Empathizing is time consuming. And it biases you to consensus, just as systematizing is consuming but biases you to truth. This is why women are better at telling you what an individual thinks or feels, and men are better at predicting the behavior of groups. (about .2-.6SD) averaged, with wide variation in individuals.
So the female mind process vastly more information and communicates vastly more information between individuals and the male mind is far more concerned with groups and urgencies.
In other words, ancient stereotypes are correct. Like all stereotypes – they are the most accurate measure in the social sciences.
Thoughts on Consciousness
Dec 28, 2019, 9:09 AM
Consciousness is deterministic with scale, and biased by body form. Any being with sufficient neural capacity will develop similar intuitions and behaviors. Consciousness means modeling recursive future states by grammar of action. And we are programmed by action in reality.
There is no mystery to consciousness.
The nervous system is a lovely, profoundly simple thing, and there is trivial difference between a transistor and a soma, and the organization (adaptation) of the nervous system by dendritic wayfinding is indifferent from wiring circuit boards other than the infinite untraceable unmeasurable complexity of any given set of excitements. I am pretty confident of the structure of each major region of the brain and how it processes information, and there is no magic to recursive memory by thalamic preservation of state, and hippocampal production of indexes, and hippocampal rehearsal to store memories during break, rests, sleep. The experience of awareness is just a concert, like the experience of consciousness and it’s all just a constructed spectrum of preservation of networks.
And anyone who has written an A* search for way-finding a maze can simply relabel variables and functions with brain regions and grasp the concept. Neural networks approximate that complexity, functions abstract that complexity, classes abstract that complexity further, but the underlying process is the same. Software must make address connections between simulated neurons and serially process calculations, while the brain only makes physical dendritic connections in infinite, inexhaustible, complexity and permutation. At present I dont know (maybe no one does) the provisioning of new episodic indices, and whether they are permanent or temporary.
And the reason we can only produce robots at present is simply one of scale given the problem of serialization. I suspect we will solve that problem as evolution solved vision, which is to break the problem into pieces producing a symbolic input to a hierarchical system of prediction. I don’t see why we can’t do that other than the current cost would be ridiculous although it’s clear google is trying to use pre-processed information (search content) the way the financial business uses pre-processed information ( prices). I don’t know what they’re doing but as far as I know, it requires the development of symmetries (think, metaphysics) and a grammar (think thought, emotion, action) and a vocabulary to do that for the same reason humans needed language to think more deeply (system of measurement).
Right now all I see is categorization (identification), and prediction and I don’t see anyone producing a metaphysics, grammar, and vocabulary bounded by similar rules to language, which will be necessary for machines to communicate because shared hierarchical memory would be slow (other than for the predator-prey division of labor), and protocols (languages) are necessary to encapsulate patterns such that access to (chaotic) underlying memory structures (neural networks and the training that got them to a given state) is unnecessary.
Yes, we know what consciousness consists of.
Of course we know what consciousness consists of. We’ve known for at least the past ten years. The effort of teaching the average person enough neurology so that can they understand it is a bit of work, but I’m producing a course on it, and the research is all out there. Even a populist like Michio Kaku answers the question.
Kuhn makes a living NOT answering the question of consciousness, and interviewing marginal characters (mostly old folks) and many of whom are intellectually embarrassing (philosophers and theologians) – thereby preserving the supernatural bias in the majority population while satisfying curiosity among both materialists, idealists, and supernaturalists.
Roger Penrose has a particular strength in that he follows einstein and uses mental models in addition to his mathematics. But otherwise, Roger is a mathematical platonist. Most physicists are stuck in what we call ‘mathiness’ – no mental model.
The research on consciousness is done today by those of us who rely on both neurology and computer science to reproduce it. In simple terms, consciousness is just the merger of sensation with memory of memory into a competitive set of predictions.
Qualia is just a vast parallel hierarchy of variations on embodiment. Consciousness is simple. Most of our brain predicts a continuously updated (revised) world model, then indexes salient experiences as episodes, and predicts candidate episodes from a competition between episodes, and we regulate that function with attention. When people say consciousness is an illusion that implies an observer that doesn’t exist.
The only observer is a hierarchy of memory that we perceive as constant, just like we perceive movies as constant. The root “you” is in the brain stem that’s concerned about orientation, homeostasis, and reward-seeking. All the “you” in the sense you know yourself is distributed around the neocortex as memories. The experience of being you is integrated across the brain and organized into the hippocampal region. Qualia is rather trivial to explain from there onward.
If you were to ask if other species would experience the same qualia we can only say that their qualia would be understandable if they were at least able to communicate at our level. But that vibrations in the universe whether through solids, gasses, space, and from subsonic to sonic to electromagnetic, would be the same. Some people see impossible colors even today. Some are color blind. A different creature might experience time differently (faster or slower), or instead of having two hemispheres might have, four, or six, or eight (or more) – and that would be the only substantive difference. But to ACT in the real world generates demand for convergence on similar range of senses and qualia.
Consciousness Does Not Demarcate Man from Animal – Agency Does
CONSCIOUSNESS DOES NOT DEMARCATE MAN FROM ANIMAL – AGENCY DOES
—“We seem to have this intuition that we are more than mere animals. What’s your take on this, Curt?”–Josh Gonzalez
Can you ask that a little more precisely?
My point is that consciousness and agency are different things, and the point of demarcation between human and animal appears to be agency not consciousness.
There are many humans that are still largely animal, and without domestic training are no better than any other farm animal. There are others that with very little training continuously develop agency.
Western civlization is organized to recursively produce agency, in order to increase the numbers of the aristocratic noble, and middle classes (those with agency).
Western civilization is not organized to preserve lack of agency – That’s judaism, christianity and islam. The failure of the jews to accomplish anything other than parasitism before conversion to aristotelianism, the christians to accomplish anything other than dark agees, and cathedrals that drained the economy, and the muslims the destruction of five great civilizations of the ancient world like cancer in human form.
The Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese are right to insulate. The Europeans are right to domesticate. The europeans should also insulate. The africans have done nothing we can blame them for, except being outside of trade routes. THe persians may or may not be lost. The christians have converted christianity into a germanic folk religion(finally). The world faces only one remaining cancer, and that is abrahamism in jewish undermining, and islamic destruction. Otherwise Eurasian and African People are united in working for a better world for all.
Animals, Sentience, Consciousness, Reason, And The Illusion Thereof.
Animals don’t reason other than it is clear that the very smartest can in fact do so (Corvids) and many predators. And the demarcation between sentience and consciousness is the mirror test. And some animals can pass it – even possibly pigeons.
Many animals dream so they must ‘think’ at whatever level it is that they dream.
But when we say ‘think’ we can mean ‘feel your way thru something’, visualize your way thru something, plan your way through something using tools, reason (talk) your way thru something, and explain to others how to act through something.
To say animals are sentient is true, to say they are conscious –
well there are some that appear to be.
To say they are rational, it is not clear that all people are rational, or that we are fooled that they are rational because they are capable of language, and language creates the illusion of similarity.
The more we learn the more the gradual progress from nervous system to sentience, to consciousness is just as continuous as the spectrum from feminine pschosis to feminine solipsism to normal balanced personality, to male aspieness, to male autism.
Explaining Consciousness Indirectly
October 28th, 2018 1:03 PM
EXPLAINING CONSCIOUSNESS INDIRECTLY
—“Where does “the present” (initial, whole experience) as opposed to memory and the rest (post hoc, partial translations) fit into your model?”— Ben Quimby
We create the latter in order to increase our chose and volume and intensity of consumption of the former.
—“But it *is* something that stands alone outside of all these categories, yes? Part of each moment, necessarily, does not carry over into any translation, making said parts, by definition, “ineffable”, correct?”— Ben Quimby
Well, you know, if you ask it that way I have to defend against misinterpretation. “experience” is our ultra-short-term memory continuously learning and forgetting the cacophony of stimuli from our nervous system, and the ‘echoes’ that they produce in from our memories, and the consequent chemical responses (feelings) that those echoes produce
Memories require we merely ‘choke’ our senses and focus on (not sure how we do that, but I assume it’s the hippocampus) the echoes rather than the perceptions (senses). I know it’s related to how we focus our vision, and I know it’s an evolution of the prey drive, but that’s all I know.
So there is no difference except focus. All experience is RECONSTRUCTED from the combination of sensation and memory. We just bias our focus on present(sense) vs past(memory) within that stream of stimulation.
So there are not two separate things, but simply the resources devoted to senses vs recalls so that we experience greater now than the past.
GIven that our brains allow us to do both of these at the same time only enhances the illusion.
Dennett’s Literary (platonic) Explanation of Consciousness Is a Pseudoscientific Interpretation
Jan 30, 2020, 4:12 PM
—“I think Daniel Dennet regards consciousness as purely illusory which I have not in the past found comprehensible.”– A Friend
I think Dennett’s literary (platonic) explanation of consciousness is a pseudoscientific interpretation of the information we have at our disposal, but that I can interpret what he’s saying as simply primitive or romantic, or platonic narration of what is better explained in engineering terms.
To say consciousness illusory makes no sense if Dennett means false. I don’t know what he means unless he is using a definition or standard that is nonsensical – and I think that’s the case.
The experience we refer to as consciousness exists as experience that we can recall. But, instead of reforming philosophy and defining the term scientifically, he’s not reforming the term as it’s used in philosophy and therefor saying it’s illusory.
I do the opposite and reform the term in philosophy as an error, and define it operationally (scientifically). In P what we do is reform all terms in all disciplines so that they are universally commensurable across all disciplines – or falsified.
Operationally, predictions of fragments compete for attention and those that persist (aren’t falsified) cohere (survive) into what we consider experience.
As far as I know we know the physical structure of the brain, how information is processed across, how coherence is produced by it, how memories are formed by it, and how attention is directed to control it, and what motivates(causes) our attention – at least at sufficiently to explain it in terms that are understandable as a mechanical process. the only difficult concept to explain is how our experience is coalesced into a stream of experience and momentary recursive comparison of changes in that memory – really, really, fast in real time. It’s so wonderful that it works that it’s terrifying.
I think one of the aspects of mental existence we have no name for yet that we need to is the degree to which we grant precedence to sense(intuition), imagination(self), empathy (others, social), or reason (the analytic) – and whether we can even switch between them.
Or put another way – the degree to which people are able to distinguish between an imaginary and non-correspondent perception of existence, and a predictive and correspondent perception of existence, and the priority we give to the sensory-emotional, physical, social, operational, or empirical experience of the world.
It is very hard for me to imagine the world of hindus and muslims and not at all difficult the chinese or africans – even africans who still believe in magic. The degree of illusion created by mythologies somewhat amazes me and the addiction to these mythologies is something I have finally come to understand – it’s a very high cost to correct them. this is why theological abrahamism must never take root.
Doolittle vs Dennett on Consciousness
—“You know, P language reminds me of a direction I think Danial Dennett was going with how to study consciousness (Phenomenology), but P is more complete. It was in his book “consciousness explained”.”— Adam Jacob Robert Walker
Yes, well we are all subject to the same information and converging on the same solution. And I’m just the one who put it all together first.
Probably because I started with ai, programming and economics instead of philosophy and psychology.
So as the neurological revolution unfolded over the past twenty years I had less of a paradigm shift than the other thinkers.
And I don’t have pressure to publish. So I just kept working without anchoring myself.
—“If Dennett built more on cog/sci and less on phenomenology. Dennett also made the mistake of using colour for uniformity of qualia as opposed to geometry (ancient Greeks). The qualia of geometry is uniform; the qualia of colour is not. *Uniform across human personal consciousness.”—Andrew M Gilmour
Well done. very few people have that insight. Nice.
Well, what we call consciousness: that continuous change in state between perception, search(perception-memory-prediction), focus, impulse, decision, and action – serves almost entirely as ‘the search for opportunities’ for acquisition of the host of things that are valuable to us.
It’s not complicated.
I am not sure why consciousness is so hard to understand. It’s not. Brains are not gears. Our various charges are affected by momentum, resistance and capacitance, and continuous iteration (echoes) create persistence of perception just as much as our eyes create persistence of vision. That’s consciousness.
We seize opportunities for reward.
The Hard Problem Was But Isn’t Any Longer. 😉
Sorry, but the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness is solved. It’s taken me a year and a half to figure out how to explain it but once you understand it, like many things, it’s not a hard problem at all – it’s rather simple and obvious. (Philosophers look like idiots in retrospect.)
Funny, but computational irreducibility (the inability to provide a mathematical description for some phenomena), isn’t any different from the impossibility of introspection.
However, once you know the function (operations) you can describe all of human experience.
We can’t talk about consciousness – aritifical or not – without agreement on terms:
Sensation(nerves/neurons), “Regulation(root)”, Modeling-Prediction, Intelligence(capacity), Awareness (Sentience), Qualia, Consciousness, Reason, Calculation, Computation.
NOTE: CD: Does this belong here or in the summary of the series on the brain?
The Bicameral Mind Is the Result of Two Hemispheres Needing to Time Their Movements
Jan 27, 2020, 10:10 AM
A rather strange bias we see in archaeology tries to explain everything they don’t undrestand as mystical or religious in origin.
We watch horror movies and tell campfire stories, and we enthrall each other with suspension of belief and woo woo, but that does not mean we are not eminently practical in real life.
While reading the ancients – even though it is very difficult – it’s very clear that they thought as rationally and practically as we do while still ‘going all woo woo’ over the same nonsense.
In fact, most letters are pretty tedious and could have been written a century ago.
It’s one thing to read the iliad today in translation and another to hear someone recite it in its rhyme and tempo. When you hear that tempo and rhyme you realize that homer whether one person or many, and shakespeare are the same man.
The difference that we cannot imagine today is the pervasive violence in everyday life of the ancient world,and how dependent we were upon family structures for mere survival, and how terrifying it was to be left along without their support – ostracization was a death sentence.
As for the general bicameral mind, this story has not played out well against the evidence. It’s true that each of us varies in cognitive agency, and we may even say that what differs most between us is agency (or ‘executive function’). It’s true that all language is a means of calculation and the more precise and non-false the terms and complete the linguistic transactions the more we are able to devote the processing power of our frontal cortex to yet another iteration of thought. So it’s more that language and knowledge increase the radius in time, space, population, and permutation of our thinking, just as prices assist us in imputing, and managing our resources and time.
But my understanding is that the wooo wooo apparent in ancient myth is just a tool for holding attention under suspension of disbelief so that the narrative is accompanied by sufficient emotional novelty that the story is remembered.
That does not mean that a tribe of warriors conducting a raid or a set of 10k bc flint miners were doing or thinking any differently than we are.
I am old enough to remember that class of our fellow white men that could not read. They did not think any differently. They simply had less accumulated knowledge, and less confidence in their knowledge.
So you know, I don’t buy the whole thing because I see that there are woo woo people and empirical people in every generation across time.
As far as I know language will eventually emerge in any creature with sufficient cognitive capacity (neural density in relation to body weight), that has a body that can move through space (because that is the origin of consciousness – spatial modeling).
Once you have language it is such a fucking competitive advantage every competitor is screwed.
So the bicameral mind is the result of two hemispheres needing to time their movements using the cerebellum.
But in our brains the corpus callosum especially in women ensures that the hemispheres are working on concert.
The major difference is that men are more longitudinally connected (fast, limited info, and time) and women more horizontally (slow, lots of info, in present moment). And even as such these are only limited biass not complete differences.
Consciousness and Understanding ‘the Grammars’ Is About as Important as Understanding Basic Physics.
(a) This Paper uses the “lego” system of postmodern pseudoscience by accumulating cites while proposing no operational dependencies just loose analogies. (b) it’s true we don’t know if frequency ‘matters’. (c), slow speed of human memory feedback(recursion) in hierarchies …
… explains the persistence of experience. (d) economics(information, delay) rather than physics (energy, immediate) better explains brain function for the same reasons. (d) geometric (spatial) modeling in the hippocampal region explains consciousness. (e) the same for …
… competition for attention (economics). (f) action is calculated along with prediction, so explains why we detect choice before aware of it – explaining reaction times. (g) dorsal interrupt allows capture of state (control) for impulsive reactions. (h) cerebellum appears to…
… produce timing across actions (very complex), (i) We know the brain structures …that produce each of these phenomena. As far as I know, the mind including consciousness is solved, variation in geometry trivial, variations in experience minor, …
… weights (personality) limited, and the primary difference in experience due to predictions (imagination), given wide variation in experiences. So while task performance is marginally indifferent between individuals, predictive performance and emotional reaction to ….
… those predictions account for what we perceive as wide variation in experience. In other words, we vary greatly in prediction and evaluation, but not sense-perception. This is rather obvious in retrospect.However, it allows not only adaptation but division of cognitive labor.
.. and this division of cognitive labor is just as important to our evolutionary history as is language to transmit information between us.
… To understand the operational function of the brain it’s better to follow Jeff Hawkins, and Joscha Bach, etc. and the research they cite. Computational and economic(real) thought is a profound improvement over mathematics and physics(ideal) b/c accounts for causality and time.
… FYI: I was asked to comment on this paper b/c it’s an area of my work. And the author blocked me for this thread. But just as physics is supporting a vast population of pseudoscientists, so is almost every other area of the academy other than applied math, compsci, and biochem.
… If you can’t state it’s dependencies (realism, naturalism ) measure it (categories) or operationalize (transformations) you don’t understand it (narration).
… It’s this difference between verbal-idealism(words), mathematical-physical idealsism(existence), and computational-economic thought (action).
… At this point I’m convinced that understanding ‘the grammars’ is about as important as understanding basic physics.
RE: Author Complaint: I wasn’t responding to you, but to the audience that asked me to comment, given that I do work on the operational explanation of mind. You claimed you presented a ‘theory’ but didn’t. I explained why, as another illustration of what’s wrong with the academy and how to reform it.
No. Don’t Conflate Arousal and Consciousness
Gak. No. Confusing Arousal with Consciousness is like confusing the light switch with the light. Just ’cause we can turn off the switch doesn’t tell us how the light is created.
We can interfere with any number of parts (Colostrum) and shut down experience. That doesn’t tell us anything.
The question is, how does that mushy wetware synthesize past memory present experience, and future prediction, from millions of nerves (measurements) into our rather amazing conflated experiences of past, present and future? (cortical hierarchy, parahippocampal, perirhinal, entorhinal cortices and subiculum.)
How do we shift between narrow focus, near perception, environmental perception, self perception, and deep introspection and imagination? (thalamus)
Why is it we can react so quickly that we can hit a curve ball with a bat? (basal ganglia, cerebellum, and cortical prediction)
How do we Assemble memories and experience them? (Hippocampus)
What is that feeling of me? (mostly, hippocampus)
Why can’t we pin it down.
“Cause it’s a verb not a noun”.
The continuous change in state in a hierarchy of ever smaller cycles of time….
Arousal
Arousal is not Consciousness
Confusing Arousal with Consciousness is like confusing the light switch with the light. Just ’cause we can turn off the switch doesn’t tell us how the light is created.
We can interfere with any number of parts (Colostrum) and shut down experience. That doesn’t tell us anything.
The question is, how does that mushy wetware synthesize past memory present experience, and future prediction, from millions of nerves (measurements) into our rather amazing conflated experiences of past, present, and future? (cortical hierarchy, parahippocampal, perirhinal, entorhinal cortices, and subiculum.)
How do we shift between narrow focus, near perception, environmental perception, self-perception, and deep introspection and imagination? (thalamus)
Why is it we can react so quickly that we can hit a curveball with a bat? (basal ganglia, cerebellum, and cortical prediction)
How do we Assemble memories and experience them? (Hippocampus)
What is that feeling of me? (mostly, hippocampus)
Why can’t we pin it down.
“Cause it’s a verb not a noun”.
The continuous change in state in a hierarchy of ever smaller cycles of time….
Attention
SEQUENCE
Cover the sequence of increasing consciousness
