On 04 Dec 2017, at 15:28, David Nyman wrote:
On 4 December 2017 at 13:16, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
On 02 Dec 2017, at 00:48, David Nyman wrote:
On 1 December 2017 at 17:45, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
On 28 Nov 2017, at 01:28, David Nyman wrote:
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-consciousness-does-not-switch-off-during-a-dreamless-sleep-say-scientists
Wonderful! Thanks! It confirms Mechanism, both the one of Descartes
and the "theology" of the machine. And the salvia plant!
I have always personally suspect this "experientially", noticing
that the reason we "miss" it is that it very hard to memorize. It
confirms the idea that non-consciousness is relative amnesia, less
neurons makes you more conscious, the brain is something like a
filter, nature is a product of contemplation (Plotinus!),...
Yes, funnily enough I've always strongly suspected there to be
a very tight relation between what we mean by consciousness, or at
least self-consciousness, and certain features of memory. One
reason was suggested by clinical cases of catastrophic damage to
short term memory, where anything beyond the last five minutes or
so is immediately forgotten. In one case featured in a BBC
documentary, the unfortunate sufferer witnessed a video of himself
conducting an orchestra (he was a professional musician and oddly
enough could still conduct music with which he was already
familiar). Since he had no memory of having done it, and ultimately
conceding that it was indeed himself that he was witnessing, he
concluded "Then I must have been unconscious".
Another aspect of this is that if, in imagination, you
progressively reduce the duration of your effective short term
memory, at some point you will intuit that you have become
effectively 'unconscious', or at least un-self-conscious,
Yes. That nuance is the key. Note that some meditation technic leads
to what you say. When we succeed in calming down our thought and
mind, short term memory becomes useless somehow, and "I" disappear.
But like sleep, one car in the street can wake you up from that state.
as you will be unable to imagine formulating an articulate thought
or possibly even assembling a coherent series of sense impressions
or intuitions.
Yes, that is where the "I" plays its role of coherence builder.
On reflection, phenomenal consciousness could plausibly be
characterised in essence as the successive, coherent construction
and 'memorisation' of momentary, dynamical perspectives. It is only
memory that links and weaves such momentary phenomenal perspectives
into coherent spatial-temporal narratives.
It is the building of the "model/reality", but it makes sense only
through some reality, and consciousness is on the side of that
reality, which lead to the utter counter-intuitive idea that to get
individual coherence, we need a brain making us less conscious in
some sense. But I will not insist on this ... today.
I do know what you mean though. In the eternal battle between
remembering and forgetting, the latter must inevitably achieve an
almost total victory. But that 'almost' is the difference between
something and nothing.
It is hard to convey with words. Translated in arithmetic/mechanism,
it is like if focusing on our "terrestrial/mundane life" makes us
forget that we are truly living there (in arithmetic), so when
forgetting about here (enough) we can suddenly remember what it is
like to be "there". It is like there a balance: there we forget here,
and here we forget there. But "there", there is no time, and although
there is an "experience", it is hard to attach the experience to
anything we are used to attach experience to. It is not memorizable,
although it changes the way we conceive things. Mathematics offers a
sort of analogy, because the personal understanding of non temporal
truth can be related with that feeling of being out of time (and
space), but that is only a very pale image. Another analogy is like if
life was a sort of movie, and suddenly you live the end of the movie +
the departure from the cinema, yet still "in" the movie somehow. Here
I was saying that "consciousness" is on the side of reality/truth, and
at the antipode of "represented". In Bp & p, it means that
consciousness side with "p", and not with Bp. I suspect that this is
perhaps why Brent want to refer to the environment for relating
consciousness to the machine, and in Artificial Intelligence, some
people defend the idea that (mundane) consciousness occur only when
the environment contradicts a little bit the quasi automatic
persistent inference we do all the time. Hemholtz developped similar
ideas. The image is that you can take your car each morning quasi-
unconsciously, but if your key drops on the ground, suddenly you wake
up "from something" (you were not here). Consciousness would be deeply
related to Truth, but we can see it only, here, when it contradicts
our mental image of what we expect to be true. It is terribly counter-
intuitive, as seen from here, and utterly trivial and banal as seen
from there.
Not sure this helps. Damascius, the last neoplatonist of the Plato
Academy wrote many volumes to try to explain that even one sentence
about this can only miss the point. We need art and poem, music
and ... some right state of mind. It needs opening the mind, at a
place we would not have believe that there is an aperture.
Bruno
David
Bruno
David
Since 2008 I write in a diary all my salvia experiences, but also
tobacco experience, occasional cannabis experience, occasional
alcohol experiences, and the usual coffee experiences and actually
any pertinent, for the consciousness study, experiences (as they
all influences the outcomes). Since 2008, the first salvia
experience, the mentions of the deep-sleep consciousness
experiences has grown up systematically, and since some years they
are mentionned almost every morning. It is very weird. I made once
two "perpendicular sort-of-dreams", which brought my attention on
relations between quantum logic and octonions, which I found also
in a very interesting paper by John Baes. This plunges me back in
my feeling that little numbers could quickly play a special role,
like the number 24, and the exceptional simple groups, and relation
between groups of permutations of solution of diophantine
polynomials. We understand the metamathematical content of
arithmetic through big numbers
(indeed Gödel represented "2+2=4", that is
"ffa+ffa=ffffa" , (with f, a, +, = equal to even numbers: f is 3, a
is 5, + is 7, = is 9)
by
(2^f)(3^f)(5^a)(7^+)(11^f)(13^f)(17^a)(19^=)(23^f)(29^f)(31^f)(37^f)
(39^a)
which is an astromical numbers. Today we use efficient coding, of
course, which adds intensional and modal relations. But it could be
that little numbers have already a rich and deep metamathematical
content, arithmetic would understand itself more quickly than our
apparent current detour through a quantum vacuum fluctuation going
wrong make us to think...
Otto Rossler once summed up Descartes Mechanism with "consciousness
is a prison". Mechanism seems a bit pernicious, as it predicts
somehow that we might get the solution of the mind-body problem
when we die, or "sleep" deep enough (cf Shakespeare), unfortunately
we don't memorize, and our billions years of prejudices can strikes
back in a second.
Very interesting (and relevant) studies!
Bruno
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