Thought Experiment / Consciousness & Awareness

[Bitking]

@CreationTribe

I had the same thought. It feels a lot like The Chinese Room (in fact, I think I even made a reference to that in either the video or the video description).
I think Searle is wrong too. I’m convinced that a machine can be conscious. After all, aren’t we all just massive biological machines?

My bad - I did not listen to the video at work, I just read your description.
You are asking about the root of consciousness and brain operation in general. I have been preaching on what I think makes this all happen for some time now. First, it is experience; you experience everything in the temporal lobe. All the senses are available and some attention mechanism sorts though them to concentrate on some subset of what is available.You probably were not thinking about your left nipple but if you do - there it is, waiting for you to notice it.
But we all sense that this is not all, there is some mixing of volition in there. Some of our sensation is of our internal mental processes. Experiments show that the experiential parts of the brain become aware of our decisions AFTER we have made them. likewise, something makes our body experience emotions and we become aware of the effects on our body after the emotion have already fired. This is all the workings of the old lizard parts of our brain - after all this evolution it is still firmly in control and running the show.

Taking the emotions first, this is the handiwork of our older lizard brain. It does not have a direct cortical presence so we only notice what it is up to by feeling the chemical messengers released as they work on the body.

I already put up a description of the basic mechanism of consciousness in a prior post and don’t see a need to retype the whole thing so here is a link to it:

Intelligence vs Consciousness

My working theory on consciousness is fairly simple considering how complex the central nervous system is. Let me set the table on how I see the brain working: Focusing on the H of HTM. (Hierarchy) Consider this in a sensory stream general framework of (raw sense) to (collected sense/association) to (name/symbol) to (collected symbols/grammar) to (working memory) to (the emotionally colored here and now) in the tip of the temporal lobe. This is the stream of sensation that you know as your pe…

and

Consciousness - not what you might think

I have long thought that the hippocampus/temporal lobe is more of a tourist and less of a driver. [1] The driver is the midbrain/limbic system. The back parts of the cortex filter and shape perception, to be registered in hippocampus/temporal lobe as autobiographical memory. In this general view - the forebrain takes the midbrain “animal impulses” and shape and elaborate them into various actions such as “seeing” (Scanning and parsing visual perception), “hearing” (cocktail effect), and actin…

Likewise for attention and intelligence:

Intelligence vs Consciousness

Referring to my prior response - consciousness is the process of evaluation of the sensory stream and feeding back some level of planning resulting from the evaluation of the current sensory stream into part of the sensed stream, forming a loop of experience. The experience is weighted for relevance and recorded as personal biography. Attention is an orienting mechanism, and I think it fair to say that this orientation is driven by several weighting factors. Some would be simple cues like motio…

And memory:

How does short term memory work?

You did ask about LT/ST outside of the hippocampus and I did not answer your question directly but pointed you to the central nature of the entorhinal cortex / hippocampal formation (EC/HF) in the memory systems. I feel like I left your question less than half answered. There are several interrelated time scales in the memory system. The shortest is actual perception. Say what? Yes - perception is an active recall process. In the first part of perception, cells in the cortex and thalamus ha…

and

On the necessity of sleep

I have a different take on the need for sleep. The hippocampus/EC structures are tuned for one-shot episodic memory; the cortex is tuned for slower Hebbian learning. The difference between these two methods is capacity; the hippocampus can hold about one days worth of memories and the rest of the cortex can hold vastly more. Obviously - evolution has tuned the hippocampus capacity to our daily cycle. When the hippocampus is full it causes negative effects like hallucinations and is painful to…

And lastly - time. The perception of the passing of and the internal processing of:

HTMs, Time Locking, and Neural Oscillation (Brain Waves)

The basic HTM theory describes region updates as synchronous, with the SDRs as a static presence during each cycle evaluation; updated whole throughout the region after each evaluation. It is implied in all discussions for predictive dendrite segments (SDRs) that there is a “before” and “after” in regards to global states for the local region; the processing of the SDR neurons in a region could be considered as the evolution of the current region state to the next state as a coherent whole. I d…

So - it is a big distributed system with a lot of moving parts. I am trying to avoid bringing up every post I ever made to avoid the wrath of Matt, but know that there are a bunch of parts I skipped in all this. Trying to make general statements about how it all works is likely to only adresss some small part and come up short because you are missing some the contribution of some other part.