MyKell

I really cannot emphasize the problem enough. How do you fill the knowledge gap that is lost when jumping from NCC to the Phenomenology. How do you objectively explain subjectivity itself. I do not know what is ambiguous about it.
For more info, check the brain mind duality, great ideas and links have been suggested.

m00ner

So cryogenic freezing won't work?

MyKell

Hard to say at the present time. But your original idea surely doesn't. Although it's good that you thought of it.

MyKell

Sweep,
I'm sorry I didn't see your edited response earlier, I just noticed it by the way...
I thought Frotiw's post was very informative. I actually learned alot of his description of qualia and the citations he gave. Although he doesn't claim it, but I think he seems to know alot regarding the philosophy of the mind.


Like I told you, LTP is a synaptic phenomenon. So it is molecular. You go up one hierarchial level, you get to the cellular. Then one more and you get to the system level. The system level is what we were discussing when we talk about the mind/brain and issues like that. If you want to relate LTP to the mind, or behaviour, you'll have to justify it by describing how it affects the levels in between. You can't just say that norepinephrine affects behaviour by acting on some synapses. It would be like describing how we get our energy from sunlight without describing the ecological hierarchies in terms of producers and consumers until it reaches us.
So when I was referring to a brain code, I was deriving the analogy from a computer code-- a computer language that is unambiguous to the computer and given in by an intelligent programmer. Now if that language in the brain existed, we should be able to observe it at the systems level, not a molecular one. A code that will aid the brain into categorizing things like a square or a cube. Such a code does not exist.
I hope that helps, it's always a pleasure to get a chance to discuss these issues.

excreationist

Maybe I'm misguided again but I thought I saw a problem in what you wrote.
What about a neural network? You can train it to classify inputs and it learns patterns between the inputs (objects to classify - like pictures of males and females) and the trained outputs (the categories - "male" and "female").
Then the learnt patterns can be used to classify unseen inputs.
These patterns are of course applied in a deterministic (unambiguous) way.
But I'd argue that the brain also uses neural information in deterministic unambiguous ways - though it is much more complex.
Maybe when you said that computer code was unambiguous you partly meant that it had standards and could be reused on other computers, etc. Well neural networks aren't like that - the neural weights are only useful in that original network - so each neural network develops its own idiosyncratic representation of things because the inputs would be different (it might have learnt the things in a different order, etc).

MyKell

There is no evidence that supports this statement

excreationist

MyKell:
Maybe by "unambiguous" you mean that computer code has a clear meaning - it is distinct... in neural networks things are a lot messier.
By "neural information" I mean information that is stored in the brain using neurons, etc.
As far as it being ambiguous or not, it depends what you mean by that word.
As far as determinism goes, I meant that two completely identical brains would act the same way to completely identical situations. Of course, quantum effects would make them diverge over time... so they aren't truely deterministic after all.
On the other hand, computers have faults too (it is rare though), so they're not totally deterministic either.

sweep

In theory, I can imagine, but can two 'completely' identical things occupy different parts of space at the same time?

Thanks for the input mykell. Where is this thread going by the way? I'm on to the neural correlates of conciousness debate & phenomenology. For those of you just tuning in:

" Susan Greenfield (University of Oxford) reviewed some brain research data regarding neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) which probably are spatially multiple, but temporally united, continuously variable, based on transient neural assemblies, etc. Nobel laureate Jean-Pierre Changeux outlined a minimal hypothesis about NCC underlying effortful tasks. He distinguished two main computational spaces: ‘a unique global workspace composed of distributed and heavily interconnected neurons with long-range axons, and a set of specialized and modular perceptual, motor, memory, evaluative, and attentional processors. Workspace neurons are mobilized in effortful tasks for which the specialized processors do not suffice. They electively mobilize or suppress the contribution of specific processor neurons.’ Changeux and his colleagues performed computer simulations of a cognitive task (Stroop task) and predicted spatio-temporal activation patterns during brain imaging, which were later actually measured in the prefrontal cortex. Changeux also discussed the role of a specific neural membrane receptor and experiments with genetically modified mice. Such studies, limited as they might be, will ultimately lead to many insights into the neural machinery underlying consciousness.

In relation to my view on feedback mechanisms, it does seem a little vague, so hopefully after a lot more reading I'll get up to date, and have a more refined view. Well, the closest so far to my view is this:

Germund Hesslow (University of Lund) took a completely different road. He revived the behaviourist idea of thought as a covert behaviour which is explainable within a stimulus–response framework. ‘Thinking that one is doing something is similar to actually doing it. Imagining that one is perceiving something is
similar to actually perceiving it. Simulation of both behaviour and perception can elicit other perceptual activity.’ If covert behaviour could function as another stimulus, the organism could simulate chains of covert behaviour and behavioural consequences. This matches neuroscientific evidence that imagining is essentially a reactivation of neural structures underlying perception, and that
many ‘cognitive’ functions are performed by motor and sensory brain areas. This simulation hypothesis does not need ontological and theoretically problematic entities like representations and images. It answers how the inner world arises (‘By simulation of behaviour and perception’) and what mental objects are (‘The
source of an image is not an object but simulated seeing’).

more later hopefully...

MyKell

By unambiguous I mean that the information has to be encoded and presented to the neural network according to rules established by the observer. The code has to mean something to the observer as well. In the case of the brain, when looking at the neurons in action, there is no reason to believe that the observer should be able to tell what kind of processing is going on. The information content has to be only meaningful for the brain itself. Of course, those are principles based on Shannon's information theory, like the measure of mutual information between a specific group of neurons and the rest of the brain to be able to lable it as a functionally distinct area of information processing, again, to that specific brain, not to an outside observer. What I mean by that for the brain, is not the objectively measured behaviour, but the phenomenology of consciousness itself, that happens to be very private. There is no way, at the present time, to measure this subjectivity. That is what I have been emphasizing throughout all the previous posts.





two completely identical brains? How would you go on constructing those two? The thing with a selectional system as complex as the brain, is that you cannot possibly form an identical copy. And for them to react identically, they should have the same developmental history in addition to being identical. I don't think either is possible, but I'm not sure if quantum effects have anything to do with it. I have posted a similar question before here and on the ISCID brainstorm forum, "Do biological systems follow quantum rules", and I got very different answers.

MyKell

Sweep,
Thanks for the post. That was awesome. I'm glad we're on the same page now. How about we carry this on the Brain/Mind duality. It is more relevant to NCC/Phenomenology than the Jet Lee Movie