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Consciousness May Be the Product of Carefully Balanced Chaos (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical. But the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a bit easier to measure. In a new study (abstract) of how anesthetic drugs affect the brain, researchers suggest that our experience of reality is the product of a delicate balance of connectivity between neurons—too much or too little and consciousness slips away. During wakeful consciousness, participants’ brains generated “a flurry of ever-changing activity”, and the fMRI showed a multitude of overlapping networks activating as the brain integrated its surroundings and generated a moment to moment “flow of consciousness.” After the propofol kicked in, brain networks had reduced connectivity and much less variability over time. The brain seemed to be stuck in a rut—using the same pathways over and over again.
a feedback loop.
When you realize that schizophrenics can't visually track a pencil waved in front of their eyes, you wonder if their brains aren't in a different strange attractor of their chaotic process.
http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/10/31/eye-test-identifies-people-with-schizophrenia/46930.html
Anyone familiar with psycho-metaphysics has been aware of this since the revelations of the Brunswickian sect.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
"The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical."
I have a philosophy degree and I have no idea what this sentence means. I think they mean whether consciousness is the product of a deterministic process or some kind of dualism (a soul, whatever that is). Either way, the experience of consciousness must be objective because what the thinker experiences IS the consciousness. In fact, I would argue that consciousness is the only thing that can be experienced objectively, since all other senses and experiences are filtered through consciousness. Cogito ergo sum and all that jazz.
But that's all rubbish anyway because as far as I'm concerned the question itself doesn't make sense.
A collection of organs that evolved to work together and achieve homeostasis despite an environment trying its best to the contrary. We know that there are areas of the brain predisposed to certain activities, and we can call those "organs of the brain" striving for homeostasis as well.
What's interesting about the brain as opposed to other body systems is how malleable it is. The brain can keep functioning normally despite severe disruptions like aphasia and injury, and can even recover to some extent (see recently blind patients using their visual cortex to interpret braille, for example).
*intelligently designed
Consciousness is just G-d's will, my friends. May the L-rd be with you!
prefer the propofol. my brain ruts were not bad at all.
But, the title is clickbait.
Who made the Lard conscious then?
Typo: "conscientious" should be "consciousnesses".
Clarification re: "usually based on observations, computations, and/or past knowledge"
Reworked: "usually based on observations, computations, and/or knowledge gained from an external source."
Table-ized A.I.
I thought it was pretty much established that anything interesting happens on the border between chaos and stagnation. Had an old book about it once.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Consciousness is just evolution figuring out that sex is more interesting if you know you are doing it.
I'm totally using this next time someone say something about the mess in my office desk.
Is "Carefully balanced" chaos still chaos?
sig: sauer
"Consciousness" is passive. "Control" is active and predicates someone doing something.
My camera phone is conscious of light bouncing off of images. It isn't saying, "This is what I'm going to do with my days on the earth!"
Call me when a bot can pass a Turing test without shenanigans.
I recently watch a Documentary TV series on PBS called "The Brain WIth David Edelman" which I thought was excellent. There was a place where the series talked about consciousness. First, it pointed out how most of the activity in the brain is unconscious. When people are learning a skill, they are doing things consciously and badly, but later, it becomes an unconscious activity and is done more efficiently.
I was going to call this Edelman's definition of consciousness, but decided that it's really his description of the function. Still worth considering I think. According to the documentary, the function of consciousness is to deal with unexpected and novel events. Edelman compared it to the CEO of a big corporation, and there was a scene of him in a power suit on the top floor of some building. This executive doesn't know about all the goings on on the floors below, maintenance, processing sales orders, etc. The executive is there to handle the unusual matters. In the same way, consciousness doesn't usually involve itself much with breathing or walking. A person might not remember anything about going to the kitchen to get a drink of water unless something unusual happened on the way for example.
So, thinking about the function of consciousness might shed light on what it is exactly.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The brain seemed to be stuck in a rut—using the same pathways over and over again.
Man, this really struck a chord with me. This is almost exactly how I would describe being really high on THC...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Trivially? I don't think so, at least not well.
And we don't know what "feel" is exactly. It's easier to feel "it" than define it.
Since neither of us have been an ant, perhaps it's premature to comment on it. (Although I've had a boss who treated us as ants.)
And as I suggested, "consciousness" could a matter of degree. Humans can adapt to changes in environment better than ants, and thus could be considered "more conscious".
And maybe ants do have a "collective consciousness". They seem to adapt fairly well at colony level. They've learned to make their trails around areas we've sprayed with insecticide around our house, for example. At first they fell for it, but somehow learned to go around.
Perhaps it's a "distributed consciousness". Just because individual ants seem dull and drone-like, doesn't mean that as a group they don't "perceive" at a higher abstraction. We have to be careful not to let our human-ness bias us against other possible forms of consciousness.
There's a lot we don't understand about other creatures.
Table-ized A.I.
It is amazing that modern anesthetics work so well to control a process (consciousness) we understand so poorly.
like the last grain of sand on a pile that tips it into a landslide, consciousness exists at that "critical instability" point. that's according to a friend of mine - dr alex hankey - who has been studying consciousness in a formal mathematical way for over a decade. i am _delighted_ to see that other people are finally catching up.
My whole life is the product of carefully balanced chaos!
this doesn't address the hard problem of consciousness. The only people that have come close are Hameroff and Penrose with Orch OR. No one else has a mathematical model for it.
"Every good regulator is a model of the system it regulates.." Therrs yiur bread crumb..
There, FTFY
If you know about neural nets this is pretty much an "obvious" conclusion. It can be obscured if you've only ever worked on neural nets in computer simulations (which must have an iterative "clock" tick both the stable result per a given input but also must tick over changing inputs. This is where the analog world is more informative: neural nets are necessarily differential equation based. Given that, they are also high-order and nonlinear so their instantaneous state amounts to moving through an N-space of peaks and valleys of stability and instability (like any other such system). Further chaos is an essential part of their behavior though not even a necessary one.
Like I said - sort of a "well, duh!" thing if you are in analog technologies or math intense or both.
consciousness from chaos comes from an intellectual attachment to the universe being strictly material (and completely explainable through precise language), as if everything unknown is actually knowable or as-yet-unknown. leave a little room for mystery is all i'm saying