brain not a sponge

Humphries, Proust and many others are reversing the way we see the brain. Rather than a passive receptor, we need to think of it as an active outreacher. The child's brain reaches out into the world to test it. The successfully fired neurons are strengthened, the less successful ones die out. Think of the brain as being like a squid with tentacles (neurons) reaching out into the world. For Humphries, the goes back to a simple organism recoiling from a threat. Proust describes how we create our loved ones in our mind then project out into the world. This is why someone "not our type" is perfect: we need to project their qualities.

it's me because it's continuous

Consciousness persists because of the constant flow of information from our body to our brain. The continuity of the input leads to the continuity of consciousness. Mirror neurons allow us to imagine how others feel, for a short period of time. Do mirror neurons also allow us to imagine how our own body feels? Does our brain simulate what it would feel like to be us? It's the continuity of the "me" simulation that allows us to know it's "me." Breathing, heartbeat, etc.

Compare Proust (III, 645) where his love for Albertine dies but not his love of his own life. He compares this to an old mistress we can't get rid of.

those are your feelings; these are mine

This sounds too obvious to be the solution to the "problem of consciousness," but wouldn't we need consciousness in order to distinguish between what other people are saying/feeling/expressing and what we ourselves are saying/feeling/expressing? Consciousness as a necessary adjunct to the brain's empathic/lie-detector function.

consciousness

Consciousness = prioritization

Workspace = locus of prioritized processing

mimicry

Mirror neurons are freaky. The same neurons fire when we move our arm as when we see someone else move their arm. Consciousness may be all about estimating what other people are feeling (to better deceive them, probably).

ulysses and consciousness

In Ulysses, Stephen ponders the nacheinander (one thing after another) and the nebeneinander (one thing next to another) of music and visual arts respectively.

I wrote:

The styles and narrators of Ulysses add some nebeneinander to the nacheinander of stream of consciousness.

Thoughts of Stephen, thoughts of Bloom = nacheinander (we experience one thing after another)

Style of one chapter clashes/contrasts with style of previous or next chapter: nebeneinander (one thing next to another)

Character and plot = nacheinander

Typographical tricks (headlines in Aeolus), narrative interruptions (Cyclops) = nebeneinander (narrative juxtaposed to something)

Joyce's challenge: to make his novel more than a novel, he had to do more than tell a story one thing after another (nacheinander). He also wanted us to be able to contemplate the parts of Ulysses nebeneinander.

Integritas = we hear the story of Ulysses as a stream of narrative fragments moving forward in time

Consonantia = we ponder the styles of Ulysses and how the chapters fit together

Claritas = drawn in by the narrative nacheinander and puzzled by the jarring styles' gnomonic juxtaposition nebeneinander, we experience the silent, luminous stasis of aesthetic apprehension, ineluctably.

There are parallels here to how the brain creates consciousness.

nacheinander = the formation of new memories through time

nebeneinander = selected memories in neuronal workspace of working memory are juxtaposed one next to another to create a conscious scene (Edelman's "remembered present"?)

But there is also the successive nacheinander of conscious states. The brain takes the nacheinander of sequential expreiences and makes it into a smoothly flowing series of nebeneinanders to create the nacheinander of consciousness.

The key to Joyce's aesthetic is stasis. It seems also to be the secret of consciousness: our brain seizes the flux of experience to create a conscious scene in the present. The succession of these scenes is what creates the "illusion" of consciousness.

workspace

The brain's workspace can be thought of as a neural "hypothesis" space, where hypotheses about reality, desires, plans, etc. can be entertained, modified, replaced.