On 9/17/2014 5:02 PM, Russell Standish wrote:
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 01:09:38PM -0400, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 3:35 AM, Kim Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
Consciousness is “all or nothing”.
Then why can't you remember the split second before you fall asleep? If
it's all or nothing why would anybody say "stay alert" instead of "stay
awake"?
Probably because time (the psychological phenomena, not the
physicist's coordinate) is fundamentally discrete. You remember the
last moment that makes it into your long term memory.
And you may also remember dreams. So you're not unconscious then. And even when you're
not dreaming, you will wake up if there's a strange noise, e.g. glass breaking, or if
someone says your name, but not if there's a familiar noise, e.g. a clock striking. So
there's a lesser level of awareness, which is not zero.
Also, for those who argue that consciousness must be some kind of
continuous quantity, in my view it is more like the connectivity of a
graph (or network to non-mathematical types). As you remove links from
a fully connected network, at some point it falls into two pieces, and
is not longer fully connected.
Whilst this is just an analogy, I think there is something in
this. Toffoli characterises conscious states by brain-wide
correlations in neural activity, or "integrated information".
That's easy to talk about in physical terms where "integrate" means bring together in the
same structures in space-time. But what can it mean for CTM? Every step of a Turing
machine executing a program is equally integrated as part of the program and it is also
equally discrete.
Brent
Once you
start suppressing neuronal activity neuron by neuron, at some point
the activity becomes non-correlated as there is insufficient
connectivity. That is the transition between consciousness and
unconsiousness.
I doubt Toffoli has the _answer_, but I do think think his idea might
be part of the answer, and a fertile area of research.
Cheers
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