Consciousness

[fromderinside]

So what are the operations of experience?

First you need operations creating something capable of experiencing.

Then you need operations creating the things that can be experienced.

Then you need operations to inform one of the other.

Wow. You repeated my analysis almost completely. Now, if you'd read what I said about them you'd know you are the one who knows next to nothing.

Really. A sensing organism, one that has capability to organize objects and follow them to it's benefit is the first thing you missed.

The things that can be experienced exist in the world when the capability exists to make use of them to the advantage of the living fit being you missed.

So all you missed was the facts that objects found were connected to the ability of the organism to make use of them to protect itself and to use them for sustenance, reproduction, and other essential fitness demands.

Headline posting doesn't really work for you since you don't read the story behind them. Do you have any idea what is an operational definition.

 

[untermensche]

First you need operations creating something capable of experiencing.

Then you need operations creating the things that can be experienced.

Then you need operations to inform one of the other.

Really. A sensing organism, one that has capability to organize objects and follow them to it's benefit is the first thing you missed.

These basic functions have been around hundreds of millions of years.

But limb buds do not explain how a human walks upright. They do not explain the biomechanics of the foot. They do not explain how a brain controls the foot to maintain balance.

Just as the origin of brain functions do not explain how I move my arm at will.

The things that can be experienced exist in the world when the capability exists to make use of them to the advantage of the living fit being you missed.

The stimulus for the things experienced exists in the world.

But the brain must convert the stimulus into some presentation that consciousness can experience.

 

[DBT]

Completely mistaken. For example, in the moments when you can't recall a name or where you put your keys it's because the neural connections/memory recall was not made in that instance in time (but maybe a few seconds or minutes later). You don't generate your thoughts or feelings, these enter consciousness in response to inputs. You don't will consciousness into being, the brain does that featuring 'you' as an aspect of that activity...nor is awareness of self always present; one may be absorbed in a movie or a book, awareness being focused on the object of interest.

You can't explain what memory is or how we use our will to remember things.

You have no idea how any of that occurs.

All we know is that when we want to remember a name we so "something" in our mind and many times the name comes to us.

The same as when we move our arm at will.

Your assurances that we don't move or remember at will are hollow unsupported absurdities.

Oops, there goes the trip lever for the ''we know nothing, nothing, nothing'' mantra of denial of Mr Untermensche.


I shouldn't have to remind you, Mr Untermensche, that the consequences of progressive memory loss for consciousness is very well understood, and that is the point.

 

[bilby]

If there's an absurdity here, why are you unable to demonstrate it?

You claim it's absurd. Why the fuck should anyone take your word for it?

Prove it, or retract it.

Your inability to understand something, again, is no reason to retract anything.

To have experience requires a thing that can experience AND the things it can experience. TWO things are required.

There is no other way.

Which is why you can't give any explanation for another way that makes any sense.

If one thing is aware of another you have two things. If there is awareness you need two things.

If something is aware of some part of itself then the thing and the part are two things.

You are such a waste of time. Just a random idiot they let in here.

If a thing is aware of itself then the thing and itself are ONE thing.

That's really not so challenging that you have to reject it - unless in unveils a fatal flaw in your dogma, and you cannot bring yourself to admit that you might be wrong.

 

[fromderinside]

But the brain must convert the stimulus into some presentation that consciousness can experience.

Well there you go again, missing what I wrote.

First problem for you is to read, then understand what is written.

But I'll simplify by repeating myself in untermenche form:

Neuroans have evolved to provide information about boundaries.

Brain structures have evolved to define and compare these structures,

Memory has evolved to store these findings.

And interpretation processes have evolved to compare and contrast all of this.

Decision processes have evolved to sort among what is sensed and what is stored =ab out what is sensed. And all of this has evolved under pressure for remaining a living thing by optimizing each of these above activities and structure for being useful enough that the organism reproduces and passes on information about how all this is put together and used.

At the same time movement and manipulation attributes have evolved to move the organisms and to permit it to exploit the environment about it. These functions are controlled by a descending nervous system used to control the evolved movers and manipulators.

All of this has taken place under rules which limit outcomes to those individuals that exploit the environment most effectively (are best at finding, hunting, gathering, mating, and learning).

That an organism is aware of what it is doing and about to do comes from development of superior species and within species tools with which to do all the above. As bilby points out it is enough for one to know organisms have the capability to structure what is sensed into usable arrays to produce the fact of existence of shape and usability experiences. There need be no Maezel deciding because the organism is performing those evolved functions. Who's to say what the Manta experiences. It has the capacity to sense and make use of that it senses and we know the mechanics and dynamics of these processes. That we believe we are conscious and we are using it to decide what we do and to what we care to respond is our own private convenient fiction.

But it is clear the processes and capabilities exist within us to do all these things and we understand how most of these processes work, where they are can be revealed to be working, and how outcomes are attained from us using these capabilities.

Information is organized by nervous processing of sensed data that is wired in and modified with repeated exposure. Output from organisms arise from coordinating activity produced to move and manipulate movement and appendage that is wired and modified by repeated action. How it is done has little to do with what we experience beyond what what is done produces evidence of experience which are globally accessible by our senses. Our conscious experience is no more than a history of accessible elements which we can exploit in rehearsal and speech.

 

[untermensche]

You can't explain what memory is or how we use our will to remember things.

You have no idea how any of that occurs.

All we know is that when we want to remember a name we so "something" in our mind and many times the name comes to us.

The same as when we move our arm at will.

Your assurances that we don't move or remember at will are hollow unsupported absurdities.

Oops, there goes the trip lever for the ''we know nothing, nothing, nothing'' mantra of denial of Mr Untermensche.


I shouldn't have to remind you, Mr Untermensche, that the consequences of progressive memory loss for consciousness is very well understood, and that is the point.

My "lever" gets tripped when people try to tell me nonsense.

When people make claims about things they do not understand in the least, like talk of the mechanics of memory.

The problem is, you have no such lever.

You believe many things without thought or question. You believe a lot of nonsense to be truth.

 

[untermensche]

Neuroans have evolved to provide information about boundaries.

Neurons have evolved to be able to somehow make sense of incoming "information" and respond in many ways to it. To "choose" How they will respond to it.

You put a trillion of these suckers together and you can have a consciousness that can move an arm at will.

You are not saying anything.

 

[fromderinside]

No, no, no,. Not neurons making sense.

It's how neurons function that has evolved. Information from one synapse transmits a substance that when bonded to another' neuron's synapse inhibits it from firing whiles that self same neuron transmits another substance to another neuron that facilitates it firing producing an inhibitory field and an excitatory field about it up the nervous system from the sensor. This produces an enhancement of stimulus transitions which are used to define boundaries between patterns in the visual or auditory or somatosensory field from which they were sensed. this is a principle of conduction called lateral inhibition which was first discovered by Helmholtz in the 1860s. This was later verified by von Bekesy in the thirties by placing stimulators producing patterns on the arm and back and, in the late '50s by Hartline and Mountcastle in visual and somatosensory nervous system neurons in cortex, respectively, at the same time they were defining the six layer neural organization at the cortex.

This is just one of the principles of neural conduction found. Others include firing rate limits depending on neuron type, baseline rates for quiescent, inactive neurons, producing ideal baselines for sensing minimum stimulation. All of these have been shown to be evolved developments from primitive systems which were pretty much untuned.

another misstep in your comment that neurons make sense of incoming information. They don't make sense. They just work in a particular way that leads to such as minimum stimulus sensitivity, edge detection, etc. They are just machines after all, part of a much more sophisticated machine called Manta ray or human being. It is pretty clear that much information processing in the NS is compartmentalized. it is also pretty well established much processed information is readily available to other processes for further processing, that processing is shared and adjusted.

Finally it is pretty clear that memory is both integrated and particular. It is particular in that detail is continuously refined and it is integrated in that it is continuously shared between processes. It really makes no sense to use the ability to render spatial information into a searchable timeline arena (theater) and then to use another process to render it for some conscious process which would be exactly the same. It is the same information at the same time shared with skin, sound, taste, smell, and propreoception processes in the visual theater linked with articulation theater all producing summaries upon which are made social decisions. In other words there is only one being doing.

It is strange for one to externalize what the human or manta is doing as something standing there making sense when the human and manta do this all the time without some emergent being running the show. It is how they are evolved to function and that evolution did not include the emergence of some control system overlord.

 

[DBT]

Oops, there goes the trip lever for the ''we know nothing, nothing, nothing'' mantra of denial of Mr Untermensche.


I shouldn't have to remind you, Mr Untermensche, that the consequences of progressive memory loss for consciousness is very well understood, and that is the point.

My "lever" gets tripped when people try to tell me nonsense.

When people make claims about things they do not understand in the least, like talk of the mechanics of memory.

The problem is, you have no such lever.

You believe many things without thought or question. You believe a lot of nonsense to be truth.

It's quite clear that you are wrong. Not because I happen to say you are wrong but because the evidence, mountains of it, does not support your claims....hence you become defensive and regularly reset to your mantra mode; ''we know nothing'' we know nothing'' yet all the while claiming to know something, that consciousness has autonomy from the brain. So it's not what I happen say, but what the evidence tells us, which is something you cannot accept.

The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates what happens when memory function breaks down, and that's just one factor (a major factor) tht clearly shows that consciousness has no autonomy in relation to the brain. The brain being the agency of consciousness.

 

[fromderinside]

The agency of experience perhaps, but, the agency of consciousness? Consciousness is an internally defined construct made by men afraid they were actually just animals who happen to do many of the same things men do with the possible exception of speech. Self evident yes. Subjective self evidence. All the rest is just clock works keeping time as built.

 

[untermensche]

No, no, no,. Not neurons making sense.

Yes, try to make sense of a bunch of transmitters binding to it.

The neuron takes this "information" and responds by spitting some transmitter itself.

But this is happening on a massive scale, billions of cells.

Working in some kind of synchronicity according to some kind of "programming" or "plans" to produce a living consciousness capable of moving the animal at will.

Order does not arrive from blind chaos.

There have to be very robust and specific "programs" in the cells that tell them how to respond to stimulation so that the entire activity of many many cells is not chaotic nonsense.

 

[fromderinside]

What you write if applied to pebbles would read: "they, the pebbles, need form a coherent plan to create a landslide".

Not happening.

the neuron is a probabilistic machine in every mammal, bird, warm blooded and cold blooded reptile, every fish, every crustacean, every insect, every multi-cellular being with nervous tissue that ever existed.

There is no such thing as blind chaos, There may be blind randomness, but chaotic systems are deterministic, ergo not blind. Even with random systems, sufficient execution of them produce characteristics of the systems (ie the random number distribution as result of dropping balls through a random array).

So there need be no plan. There need be just properly grouped activity of neurons treating information producing internal replicates of what is sensed in a way it can be used by decision processes and executed through effector processes.

Rather than a synchronicity, there arises templates from evolved processes suitable of deciding and acting. It need not produce some tuned underpinning. It may appear random or chaotic when viewed as martians would view Times Square with a microphone above it. The tell them is the fact they are connected to previous processes which are connected to them.

None of what you write is mysterious . It is well understood by experiment of structure and function. Our current problem is that which is 7 to 11 synapses from receptor has too many possible inputs and pathways for us to model or control so what we get is Martian output.

But, at a more detailed level every process is tested and understood. We just aren't to the place where we can do much more than model suites of processes which yield very human like results. Check out Big Blue's Watson. Check out speech recognition and generation models.

 

[untermensche]

Nothing reflexive about it.

You confuse neurons with cardiac cells. Or maybe you know nothing but neurons.

Cardiac cells operate on reflex. But they only do one thing. They contract.

Neurons create the visual experience, they create thoughts and emotions.

And a consciousness that can move the arm at will.

The same neurons do many many things.

This is not reflexive activity.

It is "programmed" activity.

 

[fromderinside]

When a neurotransmitter is captured at a synapse that synapse either contributes or detracts from ongoing depolarization at the neuron's axon hillock. That is a reflex pure and simple.

Had you moved up a bit in your analogy you'd have said the gripping or loosening of cardio muscle cells either contribute to the contraction or relaxation of this or that heart chamber muscles. More apt donchano. I'll give you that muscles in the heart tend to operate in groups just as do neurons receiving the same transmitted inputs, say conduction of sound at thus and so frequency.

But the neuron, differing from the muscle, has many synaptic terminals which receive information from further distant transmitted sound information. So a particular neuron, which might be expected to signal this frequency to the next neuron in it's chain, instead remains quiescent, leading to an overall separation between different acoustic events at the next stage in information transmission toward the cortex.

The neuron is just doing what it is told, but, the effect is more texture to the overall message going forth. The neuron doesn't decide to do anything. It is driven to do what it does. It's just that because of the nature of neurons having many synapses can use both positive and negative information in it's individual activity producing more information upstream about the nature of the underlying signals being transmitted. Still reflexive, yet because of it's nature more information becomes available to decision making centers.

Way, way, different from your model sir. Things go from complex input to multiple transductions over similar pathways producing textured information about the existence of a complex , or several simple events ongoing at the same time at the receptor. The decider isn't deciding about the nature of the input arriving, it is reacting to it as it has been processed up the neural chain.

The nervous system has evolved to make us of the texture of what it receives to make discrimination about that texture based simply on the proportion of neurons active at any instant. Thinking? Maybe sometime later when all the information is analyzed and organized into a model of what has been received, but never do neurons decide in the process of presenting information to parts of the brain tasked to build models, consider alternatives, articulate, remember, etc.

You aren't going to get to conscious from where you are because you are making the wrong presumptions.

 

[George S]

Nothing reflexive about it.

You confuse neurons with cardiac cells. Or maybe you know nothing but neurons.

Cardiac cells operate on reflex. But they only do one thing. They contract.

Neurons create the visual experience, they create thoughts and emotions.

And a consciousness that can move the arm at will.

The same neurons do many many things.

This is not reflexive activity.

It is "programmed" activity.

The brain is programmable. Yes, and we call that learning. When I have learned a fact I have been programmed. At one time I could find 8 x 7 only by adding up 8 copies of 7. Then I remembered -- learned -- the answer. It had been made unconscious.

When a deaf person uses sign language to communicate his or her arms, hands and fingers move in certain configurations. Much meaning is included in posture and expression. They have learned their signs and move their arm to convey a coded message without thinking about the individual arm movements required. The "conscious" control is by a conscious idea. It may be to communicate with a gesture. It may be to take a drink. The details, though, are left to the unconscious mind. The unconscious operates at close to reflex speed. That is the very point of learning. Once the dance is learned the conscious can engage in conversation with the partner while letting the bodies dance on their own.

The chain from idea to motor neurons operates at reflex speed after learning, but operates slowly while learning occurs. Repetition programs a portion of the brain. Repetition programs a portion of the brain. Each time you repeat a mantra it programs the brain.

A 91 year old man I played bridge with a couple of weeks ago would have the idea of playing a card from his hand. His arm and hand would miss sometimes. He could not move his body entirely by will. He was clearly conscious, though. Still, he couldn't move his arm (as he desired) at will.

Here's an idea. Is a person with total locked-in syndrome conscious?

 

[untermensche]

When a neurotransmitter is captured at a synapse that synapse either contributes or detracts from ongoing depolarization at the neuron's axon hillock. That is a reflex pure and simple.

Had you moved up a bit in your analogy you'd have said the gripping or loosening of cardio muscle cells either contribute to the contraction or relaxation of this or that heart chamber muscles. More apt donchano. I'll give you that muscles in the heart tend to operate in groups just as do neurons receiving the same transmitted inputs, say conduction of sound at thus and so frequency.

But the neuron, differing from the muscle, has many synaptic terminals which receive information from further distant transmitted sound information. So a particular neuron, which might be expected to signal this frequency to the next neuron in it's chain, instead remains quiescent, leading to an overall separation between different acoustic events at the next stage in information transmission toward the cortex.

The neuron is just doing what it is told, but, the effect is more texture to the overall message going forth. The neuron doesn't decide to do anything. It is driven to do what it does. It's just that because of the nature of neurons having many synapses can use both positive and negative information in it's individual activity producing more information upstream about the nature of the underlying signals being transmitted. Still reflexive, yet because of it's nature more information becomes available to decision making centers.

Way, way, different from your model sir. Things go from complex input to multiple transductions over similar pathways producing textured information about the existence of a complex , or several simple events ongoing at the same time at the receptor. The decider isn't deciding about the nature of the input arriving, it is reacting to it as it has been processed up the neural chain.

The nervous system has evolved to make us of the texture of what it receives to make discrimination about that texture based simply on the proportion of neurons active at any instant. Thinking? Maybe sometime later when all the information is analyzed and organized into a model of what has been received, but never do neurons decide in the process of presenting information to parts of the brain tasked to build models, consider alternatives, articulate, remember, etc.

You aren't going to get to conscious from where you are because you are making the wrong presumptions.

Your model of pure reflex cannot produce anything functional.

And it is not how it works.

There has to more than some membrane polarization or depolarization.

We know that cells respond to excesses and deficits in transmitters by changing the number of receptors.

There is clear evidence that more than excitation or relaxation of a membrane is occurring. More than reflexive response on a membrane is occurring.

The neuron is just doing what it is told

The neuron is making decisions based on many factors.

Vision is an intricate and complex experience.

The activity creating it must also be intricate and complex.

When we look at reflexive movement it is anything but intricate. It is spastic and nonfunctional.

But when we add the "programs" of the cerebellum the movement is smooth and animal-like.

A reflexive brain would also be spastic and chaotic.

Not precise and incredibly intricate.

That takes more than reflex.

A computer chip is reflexive. That's why it takes complex, specific and intricate programming to make sense of anything.

 

[fromderinside]

All this while sitting at the table with your ragged t-shirt up looking at the lint in u pir naval? I'm asmazed.

This is like that so activity must be this like that? Indeed.

You are a child. Innocent. Disabused of anything real. A pure experiential joy to watch.

Fortunately there's an option, science. Works quite well actually.

Hold on. Expect the unexpected.

 

[untermensche]

All this while sitting at the table with your ragged t-shirt up looking at the lint in u pir naval? I'm asmazed.

This is like that so activity must be this like that? Indeed.

You are a child. Innocent. Disabused of anything real. A pure experiential joy to watch.

Fortunately there's an option, science. Works quite well actually.

Hold on. Expect the unexpected.

No.

You are just full of shit.

You have no explanations, just silly stories that make no sense and could not produce anything we observe.

If thought were nothing but a reflex then no new thought could ever exist.

You really have nothing. Nothing but stupid stories that somehow are enough to comfort you.

Again, the limb bud tells us nothing about the function of a leg.

All your talk of early development of a nervous system is worthless to explain a modern brain.

You can't even explain how three cells work together no less billions.

 

[fromderinside]

-nm

Reflex, reactive, is all we have. It has to do with constancy of light speed as determinant of how things work here.

 

[George S]

-nm

Reflex, reactive, is all we have. It has to do with constancy of light speed as determinant of how things work here.

I like Bohmian Mechanics. It is a deterministic pilot wave theory consistent with QM. Light speed? Einstein? It only works for the large. Gravity between cells is insignificant.

Reflex -- built in by genes that have survived by having that reflex while those which did not did not survive. The genes that cause the vine to reach for the sun are the result of the death of those who did not. Reactive -- systems which affect survival by accommodating the local environment in real time.
Using the fact of determinism we can predict the future. We do that by remembering. In the future the future will be like the past because in the past the future has always been like the past. It is the axiom of experience. Just as evolution trims out the undesirable, so too the failure to predict the future can lead to death.