phone ringing

You know how you hear the phone you are calling ringing when you call? You're not really hearing the other person's phone ring. Your phone is making a ringing sound, and that sound does not even coincide (in time or in tone) with the ringing phone's ring. Metaphor for consciousness and brain processes.

cast-offs

What if consciousness is just a stream of no-longer-needed mental cast-offs? Tokens used by brain systems to made decisions and orchestrate actions, tokens that are of no further use. Burnt out light bulbs.

bottleneck

What if mind and consciousness are the result of processing bottlenecks in the brain? The honking of a traffic jam.

by-product

If mind and consciousness are mere by-products of massive parallel processing by brain regions, this would account for the disastrous track record of explanations of mind and consciousness.

warm-up comedians

Consciousness and mental images as the brain's way of occupying the body while it processes lots of information. A sort of warm-up comedian for the body while Johnny Carson prepares his material.

discontinuity???

"For the time being it is not unreasonable to conceive of the mind as emerging from the cooperation of many brain regions. This occurs when the sheer accumulation of details regarding the state of the body that is mapped in those regions reaches a 'critical pitch.' The knowledge gap we now recognize my turn out to be little more than a DISCONTINUITY in the complexity of the accumulated detail, and in the complexity of the interactions of the brain regions involved in the mapping" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 209).

Mind emerges when brain regions co-operate and detail reaches a "critical pitch."

But what on earth is a "discontinuity in the complexity"? Is this the idea that when a decision becomes sufficiently complex, the brain must resort to mental images to make processing possible? My idea is that the mental images are either a way of processing more information at higher speed or a kind of delay tactic that allows the brain more time. Are mental images useless by-products or crucial devices? That is a big question. I would suspect they are useless by-products.

timely fashion

"In brief, without mental images, the organism would not be able to perform IN TIMELY FASHION, the large-scale integration of information critical for survival, not to mention well-being. Moreover, without a sense of self and without the feelings that integrate it, such large-scale mental integrations of information would not be ORIENTED to the problems of life, namely, survival and the achievement of well-being" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 208) emphasis mine.

Mental images are needed to speed up processing of information. The sense of self is needed for orientation. Consciousness is a by-product of faster processing.

sense of self

"Now, we should consider what the sense of self brings to the process. The answer is an orientation" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 208).

looking for damasio

"But what exactly is the indispensable contribution that the conscious-mind level of biology brings to the organism?"

"perhaps the sheer complexity of sensory phenomena at the mental level permits easier integration across modalities, e.g., visual with auditory, visual and auditory with tactile, etc. In addition, the mental level also would permit the integration of actual images of every sensory stripe with pertinent images recalled from memory. Moreover, these abundant integrations would prove fertile ground for the image manipulation required for problem-solving and creativity in general. The answer, then, is that mental images would allow an ease of manipulation of information that the neural-map level (as described so far) would permit" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 207).

Is this like saying that it would be easier to make a presentation using a virtual reality simulation rather than long-winded descriptions of every aspect of a scene? Mental images summarize current information for faster processing in other brain regions? The image keeps getting updated as is passed around to different brain areas?

looking for damasio

"in the absense of consciousness in the comprehensive sense of the term—a process that includes both the movie-in-the-brain and the sense of self—we know for certain that life cannot be properly managed" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 207).

Damasio gives horrific examples of patients with brain damage who are perfectly intelligent but incapable of functioning in the world because they are disconnected from their feelings.

This is his idea that most of what the brain is working on is body stuff. The body stuff guides us from survival to planning ahead, even to social stuff.

looking for damasio

"The brain's body-furnished, body-minded mind is a servant of the whole body" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 206).

If mind is a servant of the body, then "mind" may only serve as the time-delay that the body and brain need to process complex decisions. The brain occupies the brain until the brain can process a complex decision. Or is this processing experienced as thinking? Passive/active: the brain processes decisions while giving another part of the brain the illusion that it is thinking things over. Two sides of one coin?

buying time

Consciousness and free will may be an illusion our body needs to hold us in limbo while the brain processes complex decisions. "Thinking" buys the body time to work out solutions. To make matters more confusing, the feeling of choice is made to co-incide with the brain's ordering a body action.

time delay

How to explain the fact that our conscious decision to move our arm happens quite a long time after the brain decides to move it? We have known this since the 1970s. I think this is central to the mind-body problem. Most people assume that consciousness is thus an after-effect, body english, or an illusion. Or they argue that the timing works out to give us the illusion of autonomy. I think we need to flip everything over. Maybe the illusion of autonomy and the fact that consciousness happens after the brain decides to move the arm are what enables the brain to make a better, slower, more complex decision, without turning us into klutzes or Hamlets.

looking for damasio

"We are so biologically similar among ourselves, however, that we consctruct similar neural patterns for the same thing. It should not be surprising that similar images arise out of those similar neural patterns. That is why we can accept, without protest, the conventional idea that each of us has formed in our minds the reflected picture of some particular thing. In reality we did not" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 200).

Last sentence sounds like Stephen Dedalus on aesthetics!

His idea is that we each see a unique world according to how our body responds to things. We all have a quite similar (though ultimately unique) response, similar enough for us to agree on one reality.

looking for damasio

Damasio writes, "body, brain, and mind are manifestations of a single organism" (Looking for Spinoza, p. 195).

I like the idea of consciousness as a kind of time delay that allows the body/brain more time to process complex decisions. A stretching out of the "present."

Could this time delay be achieved by brain areas circulating information, re-routing it and processing it at each stage until a critical mass is reached? Thinking as brain regions processing, modifying, forwarding (to multiple other areas), the action centers holding off until a neural "consensus" is formed (enough neurons firing to make a decision one way or another)?

solving the mind-body problem

Damasio claims it "requires a change in perspective." Looking for Spinoza, p. 191. I agree.

He writes that "the critical interface between body-proper activities and the mental patterns we call images consists of specific brain regions employing circuits of neurons to consctruct continual, dynamic neural patterns corresponding to different activities in the body—in effect, mapping those activities as they occur" (p. 195).

It's all parts of the body for Damasio. He's the only one I've read who points out that neurons are living things. This is very different from some kind of electrical cable.

It's all body. Or you could say our body is all brain. I think we are close to a solution if stop separating body and brain.
I guess you also need to unite thoughts and actions. There is no separation between the brain "deciding" to move a limb and the movement of the limb. The action is the whole body moving. The whole body feels and things and the whole body responds. Our body can look ahead and imagine consequences of actions. It can also respond instinctively. It might also be caught between the two (consciousness?). Consciousness as a lag time to allow for processing? A stretching out of time to allow for a more-than-instinctual reaction?

looking for damasio

According to Damasio, feelings offer "explicit and highlighted information as to the state of different components of the organism," a kind of executive summary of the body, from the point of view of the body's best interests. Looking for Spinoza, p. 178.

He also calls feelings "gossip from deep within." (p. 179) What is gossip? It's the highlight of the most vital information about people. It's the most important thing that happened that day, or week, or month. It's also usually pretty compact.

looking for damasio

"Only the "mental level" of biological operations permits the TIMELY integration of large sets of information necessary for problem-solving processes." Looking for Spinoza, p. 177 (emphasis mine).

Our bodies/brains are so complex they don't have TIME to "let instincts take care of things." The body/brain needs process info faster. Maybe the parallel processing offered by different brain areas was not even enough. Feelings and consciousness were needed to speed things up. Consciousness allows the brain to process huge amounts of info from memory and also from instinctual areas. Maybe consciousness is where higher mental processes duke it out with lower ones.

looking for damasio

"Feelings help us solve nonstandard problems involving creativity, judgment, and decision-making that require the display and manipulation of vast amounts of knowledge." Looking for Spinoza, p. 177.

Feelings are again a kind of summary of vast amounts of body information.

looking for damasio

"The maps work for problems of a certain degree of complexity and no more; when the problem gets too complicated—when it requires a mixture of automated responses and reasoning on accumulated knowledge—unconscious maps no longer help and feelings come in handy." Looking for Spinoza, p. 177.

Feelings seem to be a kind of shorthand for a huge mass of body monitoring information.

multiple brains

It might help understand how the brain works if we thought of it as 50 or 100 minibrains, interconnected in complex ways. The explanation of consciousness or working memory would then have something to do with selection, a paring down of the activity and information buzzing around these 100 brains. Consciousness as the brain's executive summary!

brain, emotion

The brain creates emotion (physical reactions of body to environment). The brain also registers these changes: that's what happens when we feel an emotion.

feedback loop

Consciousness is a kind of multisensory virtual reality played in one part of the brain so that other parts of the brain can watch it and react in various ways. These (unconscious?) reactions feed back into the virtual reality and modify it. Then it's played again and reacted to again, over and over. The updated version is what we experience as consciousness. The unconscious updating takes place without us noticing. We watch the consequences of our unconscious brain processes. We see these consequences as our thoughts and "decisions."

edelman, damasio

What I get from Edelman and Damasio is that the brain is about endless feedback loops. Feedback loops to the body, to other parts of the brain, to memory. Parts of the brain are constantly "getting feedback" and "re-assessing" the situation. When a threshhold is passed, actions or emotions are initiated. These set off more rounds of feedback and re-assessment.

go to the videotape

What happens in moment to moment consciousness is that a streamlined, simplified version of the current situation ("go to the videotape") is "played" in one part of the brain to be evaluated by other parts of the brain (various thermostats) that will go on to "make decisions" about emotions, actions, etc.

sorry, you're brain's a thermostat

From what I'm gathering, the brain is less of a computer than a very sophisticated, multi-level, multi-function thermostat with, at best, computer-assist through a database of past experiences.

damasio, looking for spinoza, p. 58

"Note that they select a preexisting lock, rather than instruct the brain on how to create one." In this way, the pathways of the emotions are pre-established in the brain. There are a restricted number of pathways open as a response to emotionally competent stimuli. Not to get too reductive, but it does seem as if a not unlimited number of stimuli travel down a not endless number of pathways in the brain on the way to creating a limited range of emotions.

space/time

Hypothetical space/time: reality reconstructed (pre-diegested) so the brain systems can act on it.

managing complexity

Consciousness = complexity simplified to a biologically manageable stream (one that can be managed by brain systems). External reality impiges on the senses which relay info to brain systems. The brain creates a reconstruction of reality in the form of a manageable stream of information (one that can be "digested" by brain systems already in place). These brain systems will then order actions based on the emotions evoked by this reconstruction and its effects.

consciousness explained

When it is, the answer will be counter-intuitive, much like Humphrey's solution.

brain/body

The brain tells the body what the senses are perceiving. The body's reaction (via brain processing and back to body) is emotion.

language

We tell ourselves things with words and we see how our body feels when it hears/experiences/imagines these scenarios.

ulysses / brain moods

The styles of Ulysses unconsciously mould our response to each chapter. We see the world through 18 different brain moods.

ulysses / styles

In James Joyce's Ulysses, the time of day and the "mode" of each chapter seem to affect how characters behave. The time of day and mode seem to affect how their brains respond. Likewise, for the reader, the styles of the chapter affect how we respond, affect our brains.