Consciousness

[fromderinside]

I said O V E R

 

[DBT]

What you said was: This idea that the body moves without the will directing it defies any observation. - which is patently false;


Introduction Involuntary Movements

Involuntary movements compose a group of uncontrolled movements that may manifest as a tremor, tic, myoclonic jerk, chorea, athetosis, dystonia or hemiballism.

Recognition of involuntary movements associated with hyperkinetic movement disorders is an important diagnostic skill. This page describes the diagnosis of the major categories of hyperkinetic movement disorders.

General Definitions

Tremor: Rhythmic oscillations caused by intermittent muscle contractions.
Tics: Paroxysmal, stereotyped muscle contractions, commonly suppressible, might be simple (single muscle group) or complex. Temporarily suppressible.
Myoclonus: Shock-like, arrhythmic twitches. Not suppressible.
Chorea: Dance-like, unpatterned movements, often approximate a purpose (e.g. adjusting clothes, checking a watch). Often rapid and may involve proximal or distal muscle groups.
Athetosis: Writhing movements, mostly of arms and hands. Often slow.
Dystonia: Sustained or repetitious muscular contractions, often produces abnormal posture.
Hemiballismus: wild, large-amplitude, flinging movements on one side of the body, commonly affecting proximal limb muscles but can also affect the trunk.

I am talking about productive movement not reflexive movement. A distinction only somebody who never had to do anything productive could miss.

Wrong again. Both motor action and consciousness necessarily require prior information processing...sensory input not being magically transformed into conscious experience, as you appear to believe.

You've never had to do anything useful. You live on bullshit.

Involuntary movement is not purposeful movement.

No, what you actually said was - ''This idea that the body moves without the will directing it defies any observation'' - which clearly states that you believe cannot move ''without the will directing it'' - and that is what I responded to, Showing why it's false.

Now maybe you just mis-wrote, it doesn't matter, movement is generated by the same agency that forms will, forms the urge to act, form the impulse to respond.

You think all movement is the same thing.

Movement refers to the motion of an object or objects, this says nothing about the source or reason why something moves. That is another issue. There are many reasons why things move.

Because you have never had to do anything useful.

Only according to you, which doesn't mean a thing.

You can spew nonsense because your nonsense effects nothing.

Try to get a stroke patient better without engaging the will. Try to do it by stimulating involuntary movement.

You are a joke.

Typical response when pressured to actually produce a rational argument supported by evidence....which hasn't happened yet.

 

[untermensche]

I believe a near 40% reduction in stroke deaths is a nice little piece of improvement information. Unless, of course, the same old same old makes huge changes from the same thing previously.

I repeat your derail is OVER!!

That has nothing to do with any increased understanding of brain activity.

It is over.

You have NOTHING!!!

In the last 40 fucking years not ONE advancement in understanding of brain activity that has any practical use.

 

[untermensche]

Because you have never had to do anything useful.

Only according to you, which doesn't mean a thing.

Yes according to me.

Somebody who was very useful to many people. I know what is useful to get stroke victims better. It involves their will regaining control.

Whereas your bullshit has never helped anyone or done anything practical.

 

[untermensche]

The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis was founded in 1985 with the help of Barth A. Green, M.D. and NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Nick Buoniconti after Nick’s son, Marc, sustained a spinal cord injury during a college football game.

http://www.themiamiproject.org/

The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation's roots stretch back to 1982 when Henry Stifel, a New Jersey high school student, was involved in a car accident that left him paralyzed at the age of 17.

What started as the community-driven Stifel Paralysis Research Foundation soon became the American Paralysis Association (APA) after the organizations joined forces around a singular mission: to challenge the notion that the spinal cord, once injured, could never recover or be repaired.

https://www.christopherreeve.org/about-us/christopher-and-dana/history-of-the-reeve-foundation

Massive efforts and expenditure of wealth has gone into trying to help people with spinal cord injuries.

What of practical use has come out of it?

Better wheelchairs. Better neck braces. Better ways to stimulate muscles through the skin.

No fixes. No cures. No improvement of function below the level of injury.

We simply do not understand neural activity.

We don't understand it in the spinal cord and certainly do not understand it in the brain.

We don't understand the activity.

What the neurons are actually doing to achieve their effects. It is more than transmission of signal.

 

[Treedbear]

...
If there were no changes in practices how do you account for a 38% reduction in stroke deaths between 2000 and 2010?
...

Might be the the result of increased awareness of the need for prompt treatment plus the use of Alteplase IV r-tPA to dissolve clots and thrombectomy which allows trained doctors to use a wire-cage device called a stent retriever to remove a large blood clot. Also more hospitals have mobile stroke units that actually include mini MRI units.

 

[untermensche]

...
If there were no changes in practices how do you account for a 38% reduction in stroke deaths between 2000 and 2010?
...

Might be the the result of increased awareness of the need for prompt treatment plus the use of Alteplase IV r-tPA to dissolve clots and thrombectomy which allows trained doctors to use a wire-cage device called a stent retriever to remove a large blood clot. Also more hospitals have mobile stroke units that actually include mini MRI units.

t-pa was approved in 1996.

It had something to do with reduced fatalities in that time span.

One thing is certain. An increased understanding of brain activity had nothing to do with the reduction.

 

[fromderinside]

Might be the the result of increased awareness of the need for prompt treatment plus the use of Alteplase IV r-tPA to dissolve clots and thrombectomy which allows trained doctors to use a wire-cage device called a stent retriever to remove a large blood clot. Also more hospitals have mobile stroke units that actually include mini MRI units.

Right.

As to untermenche's continuing whine how about there has been no change in treatment for stroke recovery in the past 40 years I present this article from the journal of neurobiology exploring how better understanding of brain function re trauma and sensory loss is impacting treatment and outcomes in stroke recovery treatment.

Motor rehabilitation and brain plasticity after hemiparetic stroke http://www.martinos.org/neurorecovery/pub/Schaechter_ProgNeuroBio_2004.pdf .

Abstract: This review intends to begin to build a bridge between our understanding of the effect of motor rehabilitation and brain plasticity onrecovery after hemiparetic stroke. It discusses the impact of intensive post-stroke motor rehabilitation on motor recovery. This is followedby an overview of our current understanding, based on human brain mapping technologies, of brain plasticity underlying spontaneousrecovery after hemiparetic stroke. These discussions lead to a descriptive review of human brain mapping studies that have begun toprovide an understanding of the neural basis of rehabilitation-induced gains in motor function after stroke. Finally, it speculates on howa solid understanding of the neural underpinnings of spontaneous and rehabilitation-induced motor recovery will permit brain mappingtechnologies to be applied toward optimizing post-stroke motor rehabilitation.

This bit is particularly interesting in that stroke creates states of brain function interacting with other processes that are more responsive if the several processes are treated. That is to say pain is a significant barrier to conditioning unless pain is reduced.

y, Muellbacher et al. (2002) hypothesized that motorfunction of the paretic hand in stroke patients would beimproved if the ipsilesional sensorimotor cortex representationof the paretic upper arm is inhibited, thus permittingincreased neuronal activity of the paretic handrepresentation. To test this hypothesis, the paretic upperarm was transiently anesthetized so that its skin lost tactilesensation and its muscles lost strength. Under regionalanesthesia, or unanesthetized, the paretic hand practiced athumb-to-index-finger pinch grip. They found that paretichand pinch strength and acceleration were increased afterpractice, more so under anesthesia than unanesthetized.Further, the gains in paretic hand pinch strength underanesthesia were correlated with increases in the amplitudeof MEP recorded from the paretic hand with TMS to theipsilesional motor cortex. The anesthesia-induced gains inpinch force were retained 2 weeks later.

If untermenche really wants to continue this discussion he should use another thread since philosophy of consciousness isn't core to such study as stroke.

 

[untermensche]

You have presented NOTHING.

No treatment based on understanding of brain activity.

None.

I can understand the desperation to move on to other topics.

 

[fromderinside]

I don't need to. Your bleat is a derail.

Relate to consciousness please.

 

[untermensche]

In terms of an understanding of the brain activity that results in consciousness this entire thread is a derail.

 

[DBT]

Only according to you, which doesn't mean a thing.

Yes according to me.

Somebody who was very useful to many people. I know what is useful to get stroke victims better. It involves their will regaining control.

Whereas your bullshit has never helped anyone or done anything practical.

The problem being that you don't respond to what is actually being said, or even asking for clarification if the meaning is not clear, instead responding to your own flawed version, a strawman. You see what you want to see and disregard the rest.

Nobody is denying the existence of will, or the will to live, practically every animal that ever lived had the will to live, the will to survive. It's built into our very structure, our genes.

Probably the only thing that erodes our will to live is protracted suffering, disease or injury, incurable terminal conditions that sap the will to live, so we come to embrace death and the end of suffering.

Neither is a freely chosen condition. That is our condition. That is what we feel and how we feel in response to what is happening to us.

 

[DBT]

In terms of an understanding of the brain activity that results in consciousness this entire thread is a derail.

That's amazing.

 

[untermensche]

In terms of an understanding of the brain activity that results in consciousness this entire thread is a derail.

That's amazing.

I could call it "magic" activity.

This cellular activity, we do not understand at all, that somehow results in the ability to have conscious experience.

The cells are doing something. Things are happening. We can measure the electrical activity of millions of cells and see that something is happening.

We can look at the metabolism of cells and see that something is happening.

We don't have a clue what specifically is happening that results in conscious experience however.

 

[Treedbear]

...
I could call it "magic" activity.

This cellular activity, we do not understand at all, that somehow results in the ability to have conscious experience.

The cells are doing something. Things are happening. We can measure the electrical activity of millions of cells and see that something is happening.

We can look at the metabolism of cells and see that something is happening.

We don't have a clue what specifically is happening that results in conscious experience however.

We can look at cellular level, chemical level, quantum level, ...

I have a feeling we will never have a satisfactory answer to what causes conscious experience. Which says to me we're dealing with a category error.

A category mistake, or category error, or categorical mistake, or mistake of category, is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is the metaphor "time crawled", which if taken literally is not just false but a category mistake. To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

I think the illusion of the passage of time is a perfect example of how stubborn and unintuitive the answer can be.

 

[untermensche]

We can look at cellular level, chemical level, quantum level, ...

We can't look at the quantum level. We have nothing that looks at the quantum level.

We have EEG. This looks at the averaged electrical activity in millions of cells across the brain.

We have PET Scans. This looks at cellular metabolism.

We have fMRI. This looks at changes in blood flow.

This is what we have to look at activity.

We have no understanding of the mechanics of how cells create an entity that can experience.

So we cannot look at brain activity with any understanding of mechanics. It is all the same thing (to us now) despite so many different kinds of experiences.

We can only see that some kind of activity takes place here and then there. And then try to correlate this activity to subjective reports.

I have a feeling we will never have a satisfactory answer to what causes conscious experience. Which says to me we're dealing with a category error.

How cells create conscious experience is a real problem.

It cannot be dismissed with the wave of the hand. It can't be dismissed as easily as labeling the problem as something.

It is a problem to be solved.

Or possibly not solved.

But it is there and can't be waved away.

 

[fromderinside]

I consistently ran electrodes to several individual neurons at different nuclei in the ascending auditory system. It was through this approach we were able to determine from whence and to whence information flowed 40 years ago. These procedure paired with behavior experiments using multicell electrodes and local transmitter substance injections in these same structures permitted us to model how auditory signals were conditioned in the brain as they traveled to auditory cortex

Analogously we can know something about how consciousness is formed by doing similar things with more modern methods like many electrode EEG and multi focus fMRI etc.

Besides I'm confident that modeling methods which so accurately reflect humans operability and control based on sensory and motor time constants can be related to the progress of consciousness in similar models based on understanding of attending and awareness onset and development constants. Understanding of beginning and complexity of awareness behavior can be used very powerfully in modelling human consciousness.

On the other hand what we do in any conscious interval is probably not reliably repeatable. What I'm suggesting is that the general process, consciousness, can be modeled based on understanding of neural and chemical mechanisms, but specific content of consciousness cannot be reliably modeled. It can only be seen in controlled conditions and then reused in models.

 

[untermensche]

I consistently ran electrodes to several individual neurons at different nuclei in the ascending auditory system.

In what animal?

 

[fromderinside]

Accepted model animals for experimentation relating to human brain structure and function.

Why? Do you believe there is some magical thing that comes with being human so that makes relatively advanced mammals unsuitable?

 

[untermensche]

Accepted model animals for experimentation relating to human brain structure and function.

Why? Do you believe there is some magical thing that comes with being human so that makes relatively advanced mammals unsuitable?

Why the coyness?

That is not the attitude of a scientist. It is the attitude of a dogmatist.

What animal?