I'm reminded of Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" whenever the subject
of consciousness and the elusive "I" comes up. I've read it more than ten
years ago, so the detail has largely faded and I'm unsure how well the book has
aged. At the time, I thought it was an excellent read and my impression is
that the avalanche of cognitive neuroscience results, coming in thick and fast,
mostly supports the central idea -- i.e. "I" is an illusion born from the
automatic assembly of a coherent, after-the-fact, serialised account of a
inherently parallel process with multiple foci.
If Dennett's model is accurate, one should not be too surprised at results like
the following, which shows that simple decisions can be detected and decoded on
fMRI *10 seconds* before the subject consciously experiences making a decision:
http://tinyurl.com/lcym4m -- Abstract. Full text requires subscription.
http://tinyurl.com/l7go77 -- But the web features wild redundancy.
http://tinyurl.com/kn3mmo -- Just-discovered video lecture by one of the
authors. Haven't watched it myself yet.
And some vaguely related material:
http://tinyurl.com/374x4k
Apologies for jumping into this conversation from nowhere. I've been lurking
on the list for more than two years, I think, and am frequently tempted to
contribute. Time pressure, precognitive plagiarism of my thoughts, and knowing
that politeness demands (well, encourages) an extra moment spent on a short bio
has kept me from contributing beyond the odd chirp here and there. Since I've
come this far:
I live and work in Cape Town (South Africa) where I'm one half of a modest
two-man software development venture. My background is in electronic
engineering with postgraduate specialisation in pattern recognition and
software engineering. Sadly, I've allowed my career to stray from the
intellectually rewarding content that tends to pass through this list (but mean
to fix that). I've been deeply interested in machine intelligence since high
school, which led to an interest in psychology, neuroscience, biological
systems, social systems, complex systems and ultimately left me interested in
life, the universe and everything.
This list manages to reach an itch I rarely get to scratch otherwise. Thanks
for that.
Regards,
Rikus Combrinck
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