[MD] Consciousness Once More

[Arlo Bensinger]

I always find it interesting when after several exchanges on a topic, 
my issue of Time arrives with a featured article on the very same topic.

Time this week has several articles about Mind and Consciousness.

To start, here is a short essay (included as a sidebar to the first 
article below). Written by Antonio Damasio, it is entitled "A Story 
We Tell Ourselves" 
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580386,00.html).

"Some philosophers maintain that solving the problem of consciousness 
is beyond the reach of human intelligence. This is very odd and, I 
believe, untrue. It fits a sensible intuition that the mind is 
something special and different, separable from the brain, but the 
fact that the intuition is sensible does not make it right.

All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now 
readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene 
networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose 
brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of 
those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that 
represent the environments they interact with; additional 
evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each 
other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism 
interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those 
interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and 
continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and 
being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without 
words and is later translated into language when language becomes 
available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)

This natural knowledge amounts to the emergence of a basic self, and 
its presence changes the status of the brain's sensorimotor maps from 
nonconscious mental patterns to that of conscious mental images. 
Constructed knowledge is a solution to the problem of consciousness. 
It does not require a homunculus in the control room of the mind* and 
is not scientifically harder to imagine than the long march from 
genes to culture."

* Arlo notes, this sounds very much like Pirsig in LILA.

"The Mystery of Consciousness" by Steven Pinker. 
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394-1,00.html)

"The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from 
neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a 
solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific 
problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees 
that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on 
many features of both of them, and the feature they find least 
controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the 
most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing 
hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches 
consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the 
brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses 
the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain."

"How the Brain Rewires Itself" by Sharon Begley 
(http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580438,00.html)

"But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its 
place has come the realization that the adult brain retains 
impressive powers of "neuroplasticity"--the ability to change its 
structure and function in response to experience*. These aren't minor 
tweaks either. Something as basic as the function of the visual or 
auditory cortex can change as a result of a person's experience of 
becoming deaf or blind at a young age. Even when the brain suffers a 
trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of 
urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor 
cortex that moves the right arm, a new technique called 
constraint-induced movement therapy can coax next-door regions to 
take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired."

* Arlo notes, this is a central thesis in Hofstadter's "Goedel, 
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", "My belief is that the 
explanations of "emergent" phenomena in our brains-for instance, 
ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free 
will-are based on a kind of Strange Loop, an interaction between 
levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom 
level and influences it, while at the same time being itself 
determined by the bottom level." (Hofstadter, GEB)

"The Gift of Mimicry" by J. Madeleine Nash 
(http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1580423,00.html)

"Indeed, there are multiple if still tenuous lines of evidence to 
suggest that neural networks with mirror properties may be 
responsible for the empathetic response that forms the root of social 
behavior. They may also help explain how human language emerged from 
the more primitive communication systems of monkeys and apes*. Almost 
seven years ago, Vilayanur Ramachandran, head of the Center for Brain 
and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, went so 
far as to declare that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what 
DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help 
explain a host of mental abilities."

* Arlo notes, this is similar to Tomasello's argument that "joint 
attentional activity" (which mirrors Pirsig's notion that social 
patterns underlie intellectual patterns) is the biological-historical 
origin of cognition.

"Marketing to Your Mind" by Alice Park 
(http://jcgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580370,00.html)

"To scientists, it's all part of the larger question of how the human 
brain makes decisions. But the answers may be invaluable to Big 
Business, which plowed an estimated $8 billion in 2006 into market 
research in an effort to predict--and sway--how we would spend our 
money*. In the past, marketers relied on relatively crude measures of 
what got us buying: focus-group questionnaires and measurements of 
eye movements and perspiration patterns (the more excited you get 
about something, the more you tend to sweat). Now researchers can go 
straight to the decider in chief--the brain itself, opening the door 
to a controversial new field dubbed neuromarketing.

For now, most of the research is purely academic, although even brain 
experts anticipate that it's just a matter of time before their 
findings become a routine part of any smart corporation's marketing 
plans. Some lessons, particularly about how the brain interprets 
brand names, are already enticing advertisers."

  * Arlo notes, scary stuff indeed, reminds me always of the "vendors 
of style" passage in ZMM.

There are other, shorter articles, if interested.