On Consciousness

[punshhh]

This threads an amazing example of lack of interdisciplinary understanding between disparate fields of science.

The programmers assume synonymity with binary code and programming algorithms based on turing (neural, series, parrallel, or other wise)

The biologists tend to ignore the thread as consciousness is just an emergent property of the brain that means nothing of significance.

The physicists will argue based on energy, watts and quantum ideas, and say we dont really understand the physics of the brain yet.

The religious people come here laugh at how silly we are as we are not sure about this subject now, without realising the irony of their position.

The meta physicists will claim there is a field of consciousness that we tap in to but can not currently detect.

The linguistic may say that the very word "consciousness" is just an arbitrary word we have made up that has no meaning.

The psychonaut will think that consciousness precludes the brain and material reality in some way we currently do not understand and current brain > consciousness models have the cause and effect the wrong way round.

The materialist doesn't even accept that consciousness exists or means anything worthy of discussion.

I love how stupid we all are

What about mystics? I hope your not lumping us in with the religious folk.

 

[punshhh]

Things happen.

Yes I know your position on this. But your evasive perspective and syntactic smoke and mirrors do not provide you with an ontological foundation to your philosophy. Which I told you right at the outset of our discourse on this forum.

It is all very smooth, slippery and disingenuous and leaves a gapping hole in your logic. Which you try to cover over with appeals to meaninglessness, incoherence and an assertion that logically we should (can) only consider what has been verified scientifically or mathematically.

Now are we going to go around the mulberry bush a fourth time (only this time on the issue of personal philosophies)? Or are you going to accept that humanity cannot make the assumption that physical matter is the sum total of what exists and is involved in reality as we know it. But that we should realise our limitations and state that such assumptions are tentative and provisional on further discoveries and realisations and that we are barely scratching the surface of the subtle reality we find ourselves in.

Perhaps, but in that case you don't know where science begins and philosophy ends.

I know precisely. Do you, does your philosophy have sound foundations?

 

[dlorde]

The programmers assume synonymity with binary code and programming algorithms based on turing (neural, series, parrallel, or other wise)

The biologists tend to ignore the thread as consciousness is just an emergent property of the brain that means nothing of significance.

The physicists will argue based on energy, watts and quantum ideas, and say we dont really understand the physics of the brain yet.

The religious people come here laugh at how silly we are as we are not sure about this subject now, without realising the irony of their position.

The meta physicists will claim there is a field of consciousness that we tap in to but can not currently detect.

The linguistic may say that the very word "consciousness" is just an arbitrary word we have made up that has no meaning.

The psychonaut will think that consciousness precludes the brain and material reality in some way we currently do not understand and current brain > consciousness models have the cause and effect the wrong way round.

The materialist doesn't even accept that consciousness exists or means anything worthy of discussion.

I love how stupid we all are

Not only do I not agree with the majority of those assertions, but you might also pause to consider what gross over-generalisations those are, and how many of us may have experience and/or expertise in several of those areas.

 

[dlorde]

PixyMisa got slammed by Piggy (better than I could, I must admit).

Being 'slammed' by Piggy doesn't necessarily mean one is wrong.

If you follow PixyMisa's ideas than you are behind the times and uninformed (as well as probably not understanding what other people mean when they say phenomenal consciousness). I do not have time for such people. If you are one of them, good bye.

You are, of course, welcome to your opinions and misconceptions about me -an ironic demonstration of how the internal reality one generates may bear little relation to the real world.

But running from dissenting opinion speaks for itself.

Computational Literalists, comp.lit. Got it from Piggy. As far as I can tell it refers to a complex of ideas.

comp.lit == 'a complex of ideas' - as far as you can tell. Right...

Very well, what did you want to talk about?

The thread subject is consciousness. That is what I have been talking about. I assumed it was what you were talking about.

 

[dlorde]

Because consciousness creates the brain, it's not the brain that creates consciousness. Everything comes down to that basic fact.

Odd then, that the development of the brain precedes consciousness, consciousness is modified and turned on or off by physical changes in the brain, and the brain persists after consciousness departs.

How do you reconcile your statement with the observations I outlined above? are you referring to some consciousness external to the brain in question? If so, what, and based on what evidence?

 

[dlorde]

Fair enough, indeed. Here's a puzzling behavioral finding: People, rats and pigeons, as well as other animals, show the intermittant reinforcement .effect. Responses that are followed by reinfocement every time they occur, show swfter later extinction than responses that are only intermittantly reinforced. As you probably know, but others may not, extinction is a procedure where no responses are reinforced and a process that is said to be completed when no further responses are emitted by the animal.*
Several theories have been tested over the last 70 years and none have satifactorily accounted for the effect.
*Every year in Rat Lab, some student will mistakenly say "My rat is extinct!" when the rat stops pressing the lever.

This is related to, and probably involves, habituation (response decrement to repeated stimulation), a simple form of learning typically mediated by the CNS, on which I did some work for my thesis. It is characterised by:
a. Repeated applications of a stimulus elicit a decreasing response.
b. Spontaneous recovery of the response over time if the stimulus ceases.
c. Rehabituation - over a sequence of repeated habituations & spontaneous recoveries, habituation becomes more rapid.
d. Presentation of a strong but different stimulus may result in immediate recovery of the habituated response.
e. On repeated application of the dishabituating stimulus ('d' above), the amount of dishabituation produced habituates (!)
f. The more rapid the stimulation frequency, the more rapid and/or pronounced the habituation.
g. The weaker the stimulus, the more rapid and/or pronounced the habituation.
h. Habituation to a given stimulus exhibits generalisation to other stimuli.
i. Effects of habituation may begin to recover with continued application of the stimulus.

Not all these features will be present for all instances of habituation, but they broadly apply across a range of neurological complexity, from a simple spinal (e.g. flexion) reflex, to the arousing orienting reflex, and the 'startle' reflex, that involve a diffuse complex of somatic and autonomic responses.

That it is found so widely suggests it is a fundamental, and probably fairly simple mechanism; in an environment of continual sensory stimulation, it is essential - someone once said (counter-intuitively) "Unresponsiveness is the most prominent, sustained behaviour of mammalian life". IIRC, it is possible to replicate most of the above features using simple artificial neural networks.

 

[dlorde]

I think it's a lot like Dennett's examination of the painting of figures on the bridge. The mind does not fill in missing details, it creates an illusion of filling in missing details. In the case of the poll, a detail falls into a blind spot created by expectation. One could claim that the detail is filled in, by an editor in the brain replacing the existing word with the expected word, but this is clearly not the case. While focusing on the question, a critical detail is ignored.

We are conscious of far less than we think.

Yes; for a physiological example, there is no 'gap' in the visual cortex where neurons wait in vain for retina signals from the blind spot, and have to 'fill in' the missing data. The blind spot has no representation in the visual cortex, the only signals seen are from the rods & cones around it, which are processed as if adjacent to each other.

 

[Jeff Corey]

This is related to, and probably involves, habituation (response decrement to repeated stimulation), a simple form of learning typically mediated by the CNS, on which I did some work for my thesis. It is characterised by:
a. Repeated applications of a stimulus elicit a decreasing response.
b. Spontaneous recovery of the response over time if the stimulus ceases.
c. Rehabituation - over a sequence of repeated habituations & spontaneous recoveries, habituation becomes more rapid.
d. Presentation of a strong but different stimulus may result in immediate recovery of the habituated response.
e. On repeated application of the dishabituating stimulus ('d' above), the amount of dishabituation produced habituates (!)
f. The more rapid the stimulation frequency, the more rapid and/or pronounced the habitsuation.
g. The weaker the stimulus, the more rapid and/or pronounced the habituation.
h. Habituation to a given stimulus exhibits generalisation to other stimuli.
i. Effects of habituation may begin to recover with continued application of the stimulus.

Not all these features will be present for all instances of habituation, but they broadly apply across a range of neurological complexity, from a simple spinal (e.g. flexion) reflex, to the arousing orienting reflex, and the 'startle' reflex, that involve a diffuse complex of somatic and autonomic responses.

That it is found so widely suggests it is a fundamental, and probably fairly simple mechanism; in an environment of continual sensory stimulation, it is essential - someone once said (counter-intuitively) "Unresponsiveness is the most prominent, sustained behaviour of mammalian life". IIRC, it is possible to replicate most of the above feat.ures using simple artificial neural networks.

No. Habituation is a process in Pavlovian (S->R) conditioning. Any type of reinforcement involves consequences of behavior that occur in operant (R->S ) conditioning. They are two distinctly different kinds of learning and follow different laws.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Very good question. I strongly suspect, though, that the model as I've described it is to general to predict this behaviour; that is, it can account for it - but only in that the behaviour is consistent with the model; it doesn't exclude other behaviours.

I don't understand what you are saying here. How can your model "account for it"?

 

[dlorde]

No. Habituation is a process in Pavlovian (S->R) conditioning. Any type of reinforcement involves consequences of behavior that occur in operant (R->S ) conditioning. They are two distinctly different kinds of learning and follow different laws.

I agree that they are clearly different behaviours - I was intending to suggest the possibility of common underlying neurology, but edited out 'similar neurological mechanisms' (as in 'probably involves similar neurological mechanisms to habituation'). But it was only a guess triggered by similarities in the overall patterns of response; I'm happy to stand corrected

 

[Jeff Corey]

They probably do involve different kinds of behaviors (Pavlovian involving built-in behaviors such as unconditional reflexes, at least initially) while operant involvies "voluntary" behaviors, but sometimes a behavior can be modified by either procedure. Eye blinking, for example.
It's the process of changing the behavior that distinguishes the two. There is no unconditional stimulus that causes the behavior to occur in operant conditioning, for example. Often, the only way to get an operant to occur is to shape the response through reinforcing successive approximations of the target response.

 

[Zeuzzz]

Odd then, that the development of the brain precedes consciousness, consciousness is modified and turned on or off by physical changes in the brain, and the brain persists after consciousness departs.

Can you prove that first sentence? The other two are correct and don't contradict what I said.

 

[Zeuzzz]

You know what is so weird about tryptamines is that it is a cyclohexane and cyclopentane ring of carbon atoms with various other substituents on each ring in a few key places. Why does that particular chemical structure seem to have such an astounding affect on consciousness? You know what I mean Zeuzzz? It is pretty crazy.

It seems to be related to the two Serotonin 5HT1a and 5HT1b receptors.

Mescaline, DMT (and lots of typtamines) and also LSD seem to be the only ones that bind with a strong enough affinity to produce these same effects between users, despite their different brain chemistry and memories.

Explained brilliantly here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=g5XA6wtM5Io#at=10500

 

[tensordyne]

No, we can't. I don't even agree that the poll exhausts all the possible positions.

I meant among those of us who do not try to replace conscious sensation with physical or computational models and recognize that sensation is of its own and fundamental kind in terms of 'how do we know' questions. I agree that the poll definitely does not exhaust the possibilities, even in a generic sense. I would have hoped for it to at least include a physical basis for consciousness as one option, but what can you do?

 

[Jeff Corey]

... I would have hoped for it to at least include a physical basis for consciousness as one option, but what can you do?

Complain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfzLyPqko8w

 

[tensordyne]

Being 'slammed' by Piggy doesn't necessarily mean one is wrong.

If Piggy slammed him that is exactly what it means in the vernacular sense of that word. Piggy did not just slam PixyMisa, he slammed the whole computationalist metaphysical baggage PixyMisa ascribes to.

You are, of course, welcome to your opinions and misconceptions about me -an ironic demonstration of how the internal reality one generates may bear little relation to the real world.

I read your initial foray with me and could tell you are comp.lit. I have seen that line of reasoning, found it defective and now wish to move on to other topics.

But running from dissenting opinion speaks for itself.

I have had my time on the Merry-Go-Round with PixyMisa. I do not care for another round, which is my prerogative. Generally speaking, it gets you no where and you do not learn much.

comp.lit == 'a complex of ideas' - as far as you can tell. Right...

comp.lit = "Computational Literalist", the complex of ideas was to note that by computational literalist one means a complex of ideas such as those expounded, by for instance, PixyMisa.

The thread subject is consciousness. That is what I have been talking about. I assumed it was what you were talking about.

If you are comp.lit you probably do not even understand what the word consciousness means, as you have either defined it away or listened to Dennett use magic trick analogies filled with category errors to make you think there is nothing there. Either way, unless you want to talk about how brain states give rise to consciousness states, I am not interested.

 

[tensordyne]

Complain. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfzLyPqko8w

Very good.

 

[Belz...]

I'm nothing you might want to label me as.

Then stop talking like the stereotype.

 

[Belz...]

There will not be a next time. I do not have the patience of Piggy. Believe what you will, but to me when a bunch of people say the same thing without reason, it looks like a cult mentality.

Never mind the fact that they have given you reason, and that they clearly do not say the same thing.

Repeat your tired ideas as much as you want about Brain Function being 'you' and other such absurdly simplistic conceptions, I do not care.

I said this ?

Bye

Bye bye !

you are too freaking brain-washed

Another typical accusation where one does not have arguments or evidence. "Agree with me, dammit !"

Bye.

Echo ?

 

[Belz...]

What about mystics? I hope your not lumping us in with the religious folk.

Woo is woo.