excreationist

RW: I'm just going to quickly respond to some of the rest of what you wrote:
Yeah... we associate behaviours with an outcome (which may be an imagined outcome - and it may be a flawed version, leaving out the negative parts) and if we are looking for that outcome we'd use those behaviours.

I think the perception system requires the neurons to accurately fire according to their inputs. I think LSD causes them to fire at inappropriate times, causing strange things to be seen. The chemical imbalance could involve the chemical which transmits information between neurons in the perception system.

Well I think in the first case, they are concentrating too much on finding an instantaneous solution to stopping the pain in their leg. So their STM is overloaded with that kind of thing. The second case is where the pain is given a lesser priority so that only a small part of the STM is devoted to it, and the rest of the STM is devoted to carefully thinking through the problem in an intelligent way.

Well you would be triggering a lot of associated LTM's and from the interesting idea about being relaxed, you triggered more associated memories then carely weighed up your options. You determined that long term survival using intelligence was better than animal-like reactions in this case.

Yes, I think it is hard-wired into our brains. When we are weighing up the most desirable course of action, physical pain becomes a large negative number. In the case of masochists, they might associate physical pain with excitement - especially sexual excitement. This pleasure might outweigh the pain and so they find the physical pain desirable. There are also other kinds of pain - like frustration.

I think what happens is that your STM gets high detail representations of what you're focusing on, and lower detail compressed versions of what you aren't directly focusing on. This image just doesn't compress very well. Usually images would compress fairly well - just a little more blurry than before.
I think <a href="http://members.ozemail.com.au/~wenke/illusions/circles.jpg" target="_blank">this</a> illusion works in the same way... the circle is not in focus so it is highly compressed. This compression works ok most of the time though. But like in some early 3d games who use short-cuts to make things appear to be 3d, there can be problems sometimes.

It shows that we can only experienced processed information - not pure raw data straight from the senses. So I'm saying that our experiences aren't direct, but most of the time they can be good enough so that we can get a good idea about how the world works.

I don't think it is really an illusion - I think there is linguistic and possibly auditory data in the STM that we are aware of that can commentate our reasoning processes and also commentate itself. (Since things in the STM can use the contents of the STM for reasoning, etc)
I think that it is only an illusion in the way that I think there is no supernatural voice - like an angel or a demon or something.

Well if the "self" can be a autonomous machine, then we do have a self. If a self has to be able to make decisions without being at the mercy of its environment then I don't think there is a "self".

excreationist

JC - have you ever tried having conversations with any of the voices? Also, have you ever had any traumatic experiences, such as being raped as a boy by a priest or an uncle?

rainbow walking

Hi Excreationist,
So my question still stands: "Does this PROVE the internal voice by which we express our thoughts is real and really exists?

rainbow walking

Hi jaliet,
I guess my question now is whether you've concluded that we do indeed express our thoughts internally with a localised voice that we percieve to be "OUR" own personal identity conversing with itself?

And if you answer in the affirmative, can you prove this?

And how do you reconcile this with a theists'claim to base his faith on similar subjective experiences?

Just to lighten the mood, I heard someone recently, (I think it was in the philosophy forum), say that a person isn't considered daft when they talk to theirself or even when they answer theirself...but when they start deriding theirself for not listening to theirself then they might have problems.

Also, there does seem to be a bit of a social stigma attached to one talking to theirself. We always get embarrased when we are over heard by someone talking to ourself out loud but I think it's a fairly common trait. Yet we all acknowledge that we talk to ourselves internally on a regular basis.

excreationist

Well we can sense it, so it is real to us. In the same way, those optical illusions can only be verified personally AFAIK. In the future we will probably be able to monitor the "voice inside your head" using neuron monitoring equipment. (see <a href="http://www.hhmi.org/senses/e/e230.htm" target="_blank">this</a> article)

rainbow walking

rw: By which of our "SENSES" do we sense it?

excreationist

ex: Well we can sense it, so it is real to us. In the same way, those optical illusions can only be verified personally AFAIK. In the future we will probably be able to monitor the "voice inside your head" using neuron monitoring equipment. (see this article)

rw: By which of our "SENSES" do we sense it?

I think the "voice" in our head are triggered into our STM to commentate our reasoning using language. As I said before, the only things we are aware of are things that appear in our STM, or at least in our brain. We aren't *directly* aware of what our senses are sensing.

By "sense" I mean that we experience it - like we see those optical illusions. In the case of those black dots, it isn't our eyes that are tricking us - it is our brain. We aren't "sensing" external phenomena - it is internal.

rainbow walking

rw: Hi again Excreationist,
Not trying to beat a dead horse but am I to interpret what you mean here is that you concede that not all experiences are perceptual?

Are we truly 'sensing" this voice or just recalling it from memory and imagining it as a voice?

And is there anyway we could verify or prove this phenomenon is real?

excreationist

I think that information from what I call the "perceptions" is transferred into the STM where it can be processed. Basically these parts of the brain are in between a sensory organ like the eyes or ears and the brain. Maybe I'll change the name of that part in my model. I might call it "sensory compressor" or something. Another feature of it that I didn't point out is that it doesn't inform the STM of things that aren't in focus or that don't cross a certain threshold. So if something (touch, a sound, an image) is out of focus, our STM is only informed about it if it the delta/change is large enough. Otherwise we aren't aware of that change.
Anyway, to be experienced, the information has to be in the STM, though much of it would originate from places I called "perceptions" - though I should change that confusing name.

We're generating it by recombining memories of learnt patterns - but we are also "sensing" this voice, since it is in the STM with a large priority. (Things in STM have different priorities to determine which unimportant information can be discarded and which should be processed more)
But we aren't sensing it from our outside environment. It is an internal signal.

Well as I said, I think optical illusions such as the <a href="http://members.ozemail.com.au/~wenke/illusions/black_dots.jpg" target="_blank">black dots</a>, <a href="http://members.ozemail.com.au/~wenke/illusions/circles.jpg" target="_blank">circles</a> and <a href="http://members.ozemail.com.au/~wenke/illusions/lines.jpg" target="_blank">parallel lines</a> are in a similar boat. I think neuroscience is concentrating on visual awareness a lot more than imagined sounds though. I don't know how far neuroscience has gotten with verifying those optical illusions but I think one day they will be able to track very complex neuron firing sequences and decode them. In psychology at least, the testimony of people is sometimes enough evidence to "prove" things, so optical illusions and internal sounds can be "proven" that way.

SteveD

I would like to suggest a potential way for validating the experience of "hearing voices".

excreationist, you seem to have a fair amount of knowledge about how the brain works so you can tell me if this idea is ridiculous.

I think that we could get a number of subjects and monitor their brain activity while they were performing a structured set of mental tasks. Such as, reading a scripted dialog, giving them a specific subject to think about, using flash cards and have them think the word without saying it out loud, and other tasks of that type. We could then observe the patterns of brain activity that occurred with each of the tasks and see if we could use it to predict what kind mental activity was occuring. If we could reliably predict when an individual was having an internal dialogue by observing their brain activity then I think we would have physical evidence that the experience people describe as "hearing voices" was fairly universal.

I think that thoughts are "sensed" or "perceived" if you will. They are just sensed directly by the brain without any other sensory organ in between. Maybe we need to define another sense beyond sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I'm not sure what you would call it.

Steve