On 8/17/2011 4:53 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Aug 17, 12:01 am, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 8/16/2011 6:57 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Consciousness is a very broad term, with different meanings especially
in different contexts; medical vs philosophical vs vernacular,
macrocosmic vs microcosmic, legal, ethical, etc. For the mind/body
question and Turing emulation I try to use 'consciousness'
specifically to mean 'awareness of awareness'. The other relevant
concept though is perceptual frame of reference, or PRIF. In this
case, when you put awareness under a microscope, the monolithic sense
of 'consciousness' is discarded in favor of a more granular sense of
multiple stages of awarenesses feeding back on each other.
AKA "subconscious".
Yes. The basement level of consciousness, not unconscious.
When you
look at electrical transmission in the brain over milliseconds and
microseconds, you have automatically shifted outside of the realm of
vernacular consciousness and into microconscious territories.
Just as the activity of cells as a whole is beyond the scope of what
can be understood by studying molecules alone, the study of the
microconscious is too short term to reveal the larger, slower pattern
of our ordinary moment to moment awareness of awareness. Raw awareness
is fast, but awareness of awareness is slower, the ability to
awareness of awareness to be communicated through motor channels is
slower still, and the propagation of motor intention through the
efferent nerves through the spinal cord is quite a bit slower. It's
really not comparing apples to apples then if you look at the very
earliest fraction of a second of an experience and compare it with the
time it takes for the experience to be fully explicated through all of
the various perceptual and cognitive resources. It's completely
misleading and mischaracterizes awareness in yet another attempt to
somehow prove for the sake of validating our third person
observations, that in fact we cannot really be alive and conscious, we
just think we are. I think it's like a modern equivalent of 'angels
dancing on the head of a pin'.
So you admit that what happens that determines you behavior occurs
before you are aware of it, i.e. conscious.
No. Your behavior correlates directly with your awareness of the
stimuli and with the earliest neurological activity.Your awareness of
your behavior, and your awareness of your ability to report on it, and
the reporting itself (and their neural correlates) come later.
And what happens first is
the activity of neurons.
It's all neuron activity, and it's all different scales of detection-
sense-awareness-cognition experience. You are not able to let go of
the idea that it's a sequence where first the physical happens and
then the 'consciousness' happens. It's two parallel sequences which
can and do run inductively. Your motive current of intention pushes
the electric current in the brain - they are the same thing. Like
this: http://www.splung.com/fields/images/induction/transformer.svg
But they are not all consciousness = awareness-of-awareness. And the
decision to act precedes the awareness of the decision - which is
evidence against the idea the consciousness is in control of one's
decisions, c.f. Grey Walter carousel experiment. Even in common
experience one makes many decisions without being aware of them, even
decisions that require perception. So it is not plausible that
consciousness makes the decisions. Consciousness may indeed occur in
parallel and sometimes correlate with decisions and sometimes not. But
the correlation is due to a common, subconscious, cause.
Not like an assembly line - like a living, flowing interaction amongst
multiple layers of external relations and internal perceptions, the
parts and the wholes. Without perception and relativity, there are
only parts.
The rest of the above paragraph seems to be an
attempt to save dualism by saying why the casual spirit comes after the
motor effect. I have no problem being alive and conscious with
consciousness coming after the decision. The decision was still made by
me. I just don't conceive "me" as being so small as my consciousness.
You're applying a broad definition of consciousness at the beginning
and a narrow definition to consciousness at the end and using the
mismatch to beg the question.
I didn't refer to "consciousness" at the beginning. I said what happens
first is the activity of neurons - not necessarily conscious. You are
attributing inconsistencies to me to create a strawman. At the end I'm
using your definition of consciousness "awareness of awareness".
I have no problem with recognition
coming after cognition after awareness after detection, but I have a
problem with conflating all of those as 'consciousness' and then
making a special case for electromagnetic activity in the brain not
corresponding to anything experiential out of anthropomorphic
superstition. Just because 'you' don't think you feel anything doesn't
mean that what you actually are doesn't detect it as a first person
experience.
If moving my arm is like reading a book, I can't tell you what the
book is about until I actually have read it, but I still am initiating
the reading of the book, and not the book forcing me to read it.
Another non-analogy. Is this sentence making you think of a dragon?
A dragon? No. Why would it? Why is it 'another' non-analogy? Is this
'another' ad hominem non-argument?
It's a non-analogy because no one proposed that your actions were
determined by a book or other external effect. The hypothesis was that
they are determined by neural processes of which you are not aware.
They are determined by neural experienced of which you, at the .1Hz
level of 'Brent' sitting in a neurologist's office are not aware. That
doesn't mean that the groups of neurons at the 0.001 Hz level are not
aware, and it doesn't mean that that awareness is not part of your
total self's awareness.
Now you've introduced another concept "total self's awareness" of which
you are not aware. Logic requires the consistent use of words. And it
did nothing to explain your analogy of the book that didn't force you to
read it.
Brent
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