They are meshed with neuroscience, but with a lot of generalization, which is not avoidable. Here’s an overview of working memory via phonological and visio-spatial loops. Working memory is whatever you are conscious of at a given time.
That’s not my task here. None of this is intrinsic to general intelligence. My definition of GI is not in terms of a brain, it’s not vague, and has nothing to do with consciousness.
I was just trying to make the point that consciousness and ‘inner movie’ or ‘inner voice’ are not equivalent. An animal is conscious when alert and active and unconscious when asleep or anaesthetised, as are we. One should not use the term more widely unless carefully defined.
It’s two levels of consciousness: active GNW (global neuronal workspace) makes you generally alert and aware, and active working memory is a dominant subset of GNW that you are specifically focused on. I happen to think that the later is far more interesting.
" GW theory may be thought of as a theater of mental functioning. Consciousness in this
metaphor resembles a bright spot on the stage of immediate memory, directed there by a spotlight" Global workspace theory of consciousness: toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience - ScienceDirect
“Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.” --Jaynes
Arcuate Fascilius mirror pathway… might allow the process to sort of stay within the cortex and not need an inhibitory block lower down (outputs from Wernicke are not activated / inhibited in the cortex)… the really interesting thought is would this then allow for the cortex “conversation” to bypass/pre-empt the sub-cortex dumb guy’s outputs… whereby the sub-cortex becomes an observer in reverse having started the process and the type of concept harmonic oscillation feedback loop ? This is maybe one of the key oddities/artifacts of the human “conciousness” illusion… the internal voice… or the guy behind the curtain as I like to think in Oz terms, lol.
Thalamus is not really a sub-cortex, much of it is practically an "intra-cortex’, nothing particularly dumb about it.
Even Wernicke alone has plenty of space for competing threads, they need to go through winner-takes-all in TRN to control or “sub-control” vocal cords.
Not all human languages are recursive:
(e.g. Pirahã language - Wikipedia)
Daniel Everett > Noam Chomsky (by far).
BTW, Everett evolutionary view of the language suggest that animals are also conscious.
Good point, the Pirahã people are also bicameral. Keep thinking animals are conscious.
An animal that is alert and aware of and reacting to its surroundings is by definition conscious. An animal that is asleep or anaesthetised is not. The distinction is easily made and widely understood. Not complicated.
The quote in the first post doesn’t seem about that kind of consciousness. I don’t think animals without neurons (or without many neurons, perhaps) are conscious.
The right definition of consciousness depends on the purpose. What purposes are you all thinking about?
I generally think about consciousness in the sense of subjective experience. The purpose is to determine whether ethics / morals apply.
One way to investigate that scientifically is by figuring out the unit of an experience haver. If the units end up being unreasonable, the definitions being used are probably wrong.
Split-brain patients might have two separate experience-havers in their brain. It might be possible to test that in an ethical manner: temporarily and noninvasively disable the axons between the hemispheres, give the two hemispheres different experiences e.g. see different things, and then re-enable the axons. It might feel like when an idea pops into your head, except far more so.
There’s also the question of whether the brain becomes two experience-havers when split, or is two (or more) and just doesn’t realize it. One way to test that might be like the above experiment, but repeated like every 10 to .1 seconds. Re-establishing a singular identity (whether illusory or real) probably has some latency, because of things like synaptic delays and network-level things. So the effects could indicate what’s going on.
You’d still need to determine whether the unit of experience-havers is smaller. For example, it might only be certain parts of the brain in each hemisphere, each cortical region, or a neuron. One approach might be to keep memory functioning during anesthesia, since that tends to interrupt global communication.
A possible tool to test theory this is trans-cranial magnetic stimulation.
Do you think a coma patient has consciousness? If consciousness is defined as sense of self?
That means, consciousness can turned on and off by having sleep or anaesthesia?
Why would you define consciousness as sense of a particular thing instead of a more general definition as sense of any thing?
“Self” is just another thing. It might seem special to many but others consider it even an illusory, acquired belief.
Yeah, its a sense of all things. But the experience is rooted in the brain not in all other things. Eg. I have a sense of a apple, but the experience of the apple is in my head not in the apple?
Yeah but being consciously aware of an apple does not need any awareness or idea of a self to make it possible.
Very young kids experience consciously whatever they sense well before their cortex pops out with the idea that the sensed stuff can be categorized into several different “things”
PS to be more specific - an image classifier is trained to recognize cats, dogs, humans and zebras. So in a sens it gets a relatively good sense of (images of) these categories. But if you show it a representation of itself it won’t recognize it and is no need to recognize itself in order to be able to recognize cats and zebras.
So the kid first becomes aware of some hands (her own) waving around, smiling faces, milky tits, plushy blankets, etc. before ever comes with the brilliant idea “wait… i think some stuff happens ‘in here’ and other ‘out there’”
Be careful. The medical definition of consciousness is along the lines of ‘aware of and reacting to surroundings’. The definition is objective (observer separate from subject) and applies to all animals including humans. Other objective states include asleep, anaesthetised, comatose, dead, etc.
The term is used here with a quite different intent, to designate a subjective internal state, a kind of ‘brain model of the brain’. This makes a good read: Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.
<Julian Jaynes, The Origin>
Ants and bees are good at reacting to their surroundings… if the definition is valid. Then consciousness is about storing informations… Is it wrong?