On 6/26/2014 9:28 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
*From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] *On
Behalf Of *LizR
>>Yes, according to this view we are just "along for the ride".
One way of looking at it. However it seems to me more apt to think of ourselves as the
loci of the consensus of our brain/minds; to view ourselves as the dynamic manifestation
of a consensus quorum, which is the wellhead of our coming into being.
We are in some sense operators as well in this neural consensus network, influencing its
vast number of constituent neurons with what we feel, believe, conclude and so on.
However all this “feeling”, “believing”, “concluding” is actually happening in the
brain/mind and mediating through what we sense as being ourselves back through the
quorum network (that I suspect is operating beneath our conscious selves) looping back
to us as “doubt”, “certainty”, new thoughts or focus of attention or whatever beautiful
or ugly turn our mind’s eye takes.
In my view our common view of ourselves, of our “I” is incomplete. We are more than we
are conscious of being and the part of ourselves, of which we are conscious – IMO -- is
the narrating loci of the executive decisional consensus network that I am arguing is
our actual “self”…. Even though we are unaware of the existence of by far most of its
constituent activity.
I quite agree. Conscious thought is only a small part of our "thinking" in the more
general sense of information processing, problem solving,... It seems to be the part
associated with language and visualization. If I were designing a Mars rover and I
provided it with memories to use in learning I would want to filter out the rovers sensor
data and store it only succinct chunks that can be easily found by association. And I'd
only want to store one that indicated something different, something the rover didn't
already "know". So I'd have it continually look at new data and compare it with what it
would have predicted based on old data. Only new data that was not easily predicted would
get filed in memory. I think this would instantiate consciousness in the rover. Of
course this could be at different levels depending on how much the rover itself was in its
predictive models. It might be only aware of it's position, temperature, battery
charge,... Or is might also be aware of its relation to JPL, its predictive algorithms,
its learning algorithms, ....
Brent
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