[MD] Consciousness Once More

[pholden at davtv.com]

Arlo:

You are prolific, a talent I admire very much. But, it barely gives me time
to read much less respond to everything you write. So please excuse my 
tardiness in responding to this new subject and post. This is just to let you 
know I am not ignoring it. In fact, I've barely had a chance to read it. I hope
to get back to you with some pithy comments before long. 

Platt


> 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.





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