Roger , rclo...@verizon.net
8/12/2012
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-08-11, 09:52:29
Subject: Re: Libet's experimental result re-evaluated!
On 10 Aug 2012, at 14:04, Russell Standish wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 12:10:43PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> On 10 Aug 2012, at 00:23, Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It is plain to me that thoughts can be either conscious or
>>> unconscious, and the conscious component is a strict minority
of the
>>> total.
>>
>> This is not obvious for me, and I have to say that it is a point
>> which is put in doubt by the salvia divinorum reports (including
>> mine). When you dissociate the brain in parts, perhaps many parts,
>> you realise that they might all be conscious. In fact the very
idea
>> of non-consciousness might be a construct of consciousness, and be
>> realized by partial amnesia. I dunno. For the same reason I have
>> stopped to believe that we can be unconscious during sleep. I
think
>> that we can only be amnesic-of-'previous-consciousness'.
>>
>
> With due respect to your salvia experiences, which I dare not
follow,
> I'm still more presuaded by the likes of Daniel Dennett, and his
> "pandemonia" theory of the mind. In that idea, many subconscious
> process, working disparately, solve different aspects of the
problems
> at hand, or provide different courses of action. The purpose of
> consciousness is to select from among the course of action
> presented by the pandemonium of subconscious processes - admittedly
> consciousness per se may not be necessary for this role - any
unifying
> (aka reductive) process may be sufficient.
>
> The reason I like this, is that it echoes an essentially Darwinian
> process of random variation that is selected upon. Dawinian
evolution
> is the key to any form of creative process.
The brain parts I was talking about must be enough big and
integrated,
like an half hemisphere, or the limbic system, etc. What I said
should
not contradict Daniel Dennett "pandemonia" or Fodor modularity
theory,
which are very natural in a computationalist perspective.
Only sufficiently "big" part of the brain can have their own
consciousness as dissociation suggests, but also other experience,
like splitting the brain, or the removing of half brain operation(*)
suggest.
The sleeping or paralysis of the corpus callosum can also leads to a
splitting consciousness, and people can awake in the middle of doing
two dreams at once. This consciousness multiplication does echoed
Darwinian evolution as well, I think.
Yet, I am not sure that Darwin evolution is a key to creativity. It
might be a key to the apparition of creativity on earth, but
creativity is a direct consequence of Turing universality. Emil Post
called creative his set theoretical notion of universal probably for
that reason: the fact that universal machine can somehow contradict
any theories done about them, and transform itself transfinitely
often.
Or look at the Mandelbrot set. The formal description is very simple
(less than 1K), yet its deployment is very rich and grandiose. It
might be creative in Post sense, and most natural form, including
biological, seem to appear in it. So very simple iteration can lead
to
creative process, and this echoes the fact that consciousness and
creativity might appear more early than we usually thought.
I was of course *not* saying that all parts of the brain are
conscious, to be clear, only big one and structurally connected.
Bruno
(*) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSu9HGnlMV0
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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