excreationist

Maybe you don't like the term. I mean some kind of central planning or governing. It could be like a democracy rather than like a dictatorship, but there is still a centralized government.

What about that example involving 100 builders and enough building materials to build one building and yet they originally have different plans. How can they build a coherent building without central planning? Maybe the maximum amount of organisation you can do is to split into 4 groups - A, B, C and D. A would discuss how to integrate their building with group B. So A & B would talk. And A & C would talk. That way group A wouldn't be taking group D into account. So for each group, there would be one group that they aren't taking into account and yet the end result would be semi-coordinated - though the building wouldn't have a focused united plan since all the groups didn't get together to decide.

Well basically the brain would work out the most desireable courses of action (maximize expected pleasure/minimize expected pain) taking into account the constraints, etc. Then once it has made its decision it would set about this course of action. Then it might be interrupted and decide that the course of action needs to be modified. So if it had two possible plans - 1) to hop in the shower and 2) to answer the phone - it would need to decide which one is associated with the most pleasure or least pain, taking into account how easy it seems to achieve those goals. It can't just seek both goals simultaneously. There would need to be central planning that takes *both* plans into account then determines which is the most important.

Do not wish to be associated w/ II

Part of the difficulty with Excreationist's take on this is that he is positing a 'central co-ordinating office' that resides in some unknown part of the brain. By doing this he doesn't solve the problem, but merely creates another small 'homunculus' within the brain.

How does this 'central co-ordinating office' do all the things you suggest? E.g. take stock of the surroundings, compare it to previous events, outline plans of action, etc.

By positing the existence of a discrete centre merely results in an infinite regress of little 'homunculi' each residing within one another like russian dolls.

I would argue that to suggest this is to not solve the problem at all. There are numerous theories on philosophy of mind, and since I am not a professional philosopher I am not qualified to offer any authoritative discussion on them. The one suggested by Excreationist is an almost reminiscent of Cartesian Dualism, but rather than positing an external connection to some spiritual plain simply replaces the connection with the 'russian dolls'.

Another theory is that what we call 'consciousness' is nothing more than an epiphenomenon- that is a byproduct of the other functions and actions of the brain. Thus what is currently 'in consciousness' is the dominant neural pathway at that snapshot in time.

The brain is best regarded as a parallel processor- it runs tons of programs all at the one time, often without us being anywhere near 'conscious' of them. WE are only conscious of our heart rates or breathing when we focus our attention on them. So what focuses our attention on them? WEll by writing about them in the sentence before this one I have activated in my own and in the reader's brain the ideas of 'heart rate' and 'respiration', and so these become the dominant thoughts. When we have gone without food for some time we notice that our thoughts drift back to food occasionally at first, but as our hunger goes on we think more and more of the food situation. In a sense the hypothalamus is interrupting our other thoughts and trying to dominate 'consciousness' on the food issue, thereby bringing about 'conscious' efforts to secure that food.

This brings up another interesting angle on the whole issue- what comes first, a thought or an emotion? Do we have thoughts which arise due to the underlying emotional status of our 'self' or do our thoughts determine the emotional status of the 'self'? The literature is full of discussions on this very issue. From my point of view it is especially important in the Cognitive Behavioural therapy treatment of various disorders, such as depression or anxiety. IT is incredibly difficult to disentangle the two different things at any one time. We might feel bad for example and then have thoughts that those people who happen to have burst out laughing just then were laughing at us (i.e. the emotion--> thought), or we might be feeling fairly ok and then the same event occurs and we have the same thought, which in turn makes us sad (or angry). It can be hard for anyone to work out what came first. PErsonally I think it was the chicken, but only after the egg.

I really do wish I had more time to talk about this just now, and also more time to read up on it, but I have a clinic to attend, oh roughly 3 minutes ago- so I had better go.

tronvillain

excreationist:
I don't think it's just the term - I'm not sure there's a need for anything which is accurately labelled "central."

Why is this supposed to be at all analagous to the brain? I suggest using an example which does not require the brain to be composed of countless homunculi, each requiring an explanation.

It's not clear that the process is accurately described as "central" or even as "planning." After all, all that is necessary is for a single plan to emerge, and this could theoreticaly be accomplished in a multitude of ways. One chain of neural activity eventually leads to an action, while another does not, though it would in the absence of the first chain. Why? Perhaps one simply arrived first, or perhaps one simply overwhelmed the other in terms of size or intensity which made it more likely to activate a third chain... and so on.

excreationist

No, it is all very deterministic and computational.

This is an old diagram I made - I will have to revise it in future.
The "Perception" area should be renamed to "Sensory Feature Extractor" or something.
So the information gets offloaded into the short-term memory and this includes emotional information from the limbic system, and these are all associated together and sent off to the long-term memory. (I'm using clumsy language here). The elements in short term memory have different priorities (maybe depending on the strength of the associated emotion) and the elements with lower priorities are replaced with triggered long-term memories. These triggered long term memories are used to generate ideas so that goals can be achieved.
An example -
say a baby had the pain of hunger. Then it saw food, then it was fed the food, then the pain of hunger ended. That results in a pleasure I call "relief". Also, during the eating, the baby could get pleasure from sweet, fatty and salty foods. And also pleasure from using the sucking instinct. So the baby would learn to associate the sight of particular food to the expectation of pleasure. It might also eat some brussel sprouts and instinctually there is a uncomfortable bitter taste and the baby tries to stop that taste. It learns that the bad taste is stopped by spitting it out. After the baby has learnt to associate brussel sprouts with discomfort it can have that reaction just by seeing or hearing the word.
There could be really long chains of associations, but eventually they lead to a fundamental kind of pleasure or pain.
I think some of the main types of these fundamental pleasures and pains are:
-connectedness (love/security/belonging/togetherness)
-newness (thrills/surprises/adventure)
-relief (relaxation/end of tension)
-sucking (chewing/kissing)
-orgasm
-tastes/smell (pleasure/discomfort, though can be changed)
-hunger
-thirst
-other physical pain (heat/cold/touch)
-headaches(?) (is that physical pain?)
-frustration

These pleasures and pains would be different for different people. Some people might naturally crave a huge amount of newness (thrill-seekers/creative-types) while others crave a huge amount of connectedness (conservatives/spiritual-types) and there are many combinations in-between. And maybe laziness involves getting too much pleasure from relief.
And example of a chain of associations:
There's food->if I eat it I could get fat->ridicule->lack of connectedness->pain (-50)
There's food->I love this food->pleasure (+60)

So they'd just eat the food even though they think they'd probably get fat. The chain of associations would be much more complex than that though since many more associations would be triggered. This would be expressed in a kind of "mentalese" rather than English. It would work kind of like how a computer manipulates binary - it just works on a low-level, following simple rules, but in doing so, it can do amazing things like control very intelligent characters in computer games.

I'm a total materialist! I'm talking about a central processor - a deterministic computational machine. Except that it might be able to process the entire contents of the short term memory in one clock cycle rather than many - due to its wide "bus" (it might be 10,000 bit or something).

But I think that there would be a central pathway that switches these things on and off and takes their inputs and feeds them into other areas, etc. See information on the <a href="http://www.phil.vt.edu/assc/newman/" target="_blank">thalamus</a>. (BTW, what do you think of that link and the diagrams?)

I think that this activity is parts of long-term memory being triggered and then something determines if this fits the constraints properly. If the results fit the goals then it would be sent to the short-term memory. So basically I think that the brain does huge amounts of processing and filters this all into a few high-level patterns in "mentalese" which the processor of the short-term memory (aka working memory) processes. I think Crick talks about the brain being made up of lots of "maps" and that there are also meta-maps or higher-level maps. This is like how in computer graphics - at the lowest level you'd do it in binary, with 1's and 0's. At the highest level you'd write things like "circle(20,50,100,200)". So basically doing things at a higher level lets you abstract things and make long tasks easy to handle.
I think a similar thing is involved here:

I think that our awareness doesn't "see" what our retina detects - it just is given a list of the main features describing what we see. I think that in this picture, the thing you directly look at is shown at a higher detail, and the rest is shown at a lower detail (using some kind of neural compression), which in this case is noticeably different.

Yes, those words trigger ideas about those things and our goal becomes to try and become aware of those things. Using lots of triggered associations with STM and the constraints (including the goal) we eventually arrive at a preliminary realization that sometimes needs to be cross-referenced with other triggered memories to verify it. (Otherwise a hasty decision is made)

I had also thought that the hypothamulus was involved - it is where memories are retrieved and dispatched I think... BTW, do you think the hypocampus has a central role in consciousness. Anyway, here the attention is being directed. That's what I'm looking for - something that directs our attention.

Basically I think the emotions are used to say "this is good, seek/repeat it" and "this is bad, avoid it". Some part of the brain obeys these messages (maybe the hypothamulus or something) and directs other parts of the brain to reinforce or supress something. (This is to do with training - like how you can train a dog about what's good and what's bad without the dog really understanding why)
Associations can be triggered by anything in the STM I think, including emotional information. So if you're sad and you're lying down you might recall another time when you were in that situation. Apparently people remember things better if they are the same mood as when they learnt it.
So emotions can trigger trains of thought. And trains of thought can trigger emotions since there is a chain of associations to an intense fundamental pain (or pleasure).

Ok, well anyway, I'm a materialist and I think I'm a functionalist. I'd be especially interested in your opinions on the black & white picture and the thalamus site.

And BTW, I have a materialistic (non-mystical) definition of awareness:
"a process where a system receives input and responds according to its goals/desires and beliefs learnt through experience about how the world works"

ksagnostic

Consciousness appears to be a process of the interaction between the brain and its environment (taking place within the brain) rather than something located somewhere in the brain. So far as I know, the neurological nature of consciousness hasn't been definitively identified, but I am leaning towards William Calvin's Darwinian model myself.

excreationist

Well anyway, potential courses of actions would be associated with different amounts of pleasure and pain. And we do what is the most desirable (minimize pain/maximize pleasure). So every course of action generator would have to check with every other one.
Say that there are 10 possible courses of action, each one would compare itself with the 9 others. Then the winner would go about doing it.
If there was a central coordinator (or referee?) then it could check out all 10 possible courses of action and inform the winner. This involves less brain activity (our brain consumes a lot of energy) and it eliminates the possibility of two areas thinking that they won (there can be only one winner).

Well the cockroach and burnt food might be my best example....

A better example of planning is that burning food and cockroaches example I gave earlier. Choosing between going into the shower and answering the phone doesn't really involve planning (besides well-rehearsed behavioural patterns like navigation).
"Planning" might imply that intelligence is involved but I'm saying that a systematic process is involved. And the solution that is found mightn't be optimal. This happens a quick decision needs to be made.
e.g.
Say you have to decide what to make for dinner. You might think about yesterday's dinner - which was pizza, then a related dinner - spaghetti. Say you had to make a quick decision - so you could go with spaghetti. It is more original than pizza, but still not very original. If you had allowed your brain to search through more associated dinners then you might come up with a better answer. Then you might be in the kitchen and read something about chicken and together the chicken concept and the dinner problem combine to trigger the idea "chicken for dinner" - a valid idea. Almost... what kind of chicken... but since you're in a hurry you might just go with the spaghetti idea....
It's kind of like how creative people might need lots of time or stimuli to get ideas and if you don't give them enough time they just use any old idea - like off of a coffee mug, etc.
The decision making process is about fuzzy logic really where there are probabilities and beliefs about expected pleasures/pains involved.

excreationist

Well that pretty much follows from my definition of awareness:
"a process where a system receives input and responds according to its goals/desires and beliefs learnt through experience about how the world works"

I agree that it is about a process of interaction rather than a static object.

He sounds like an interesting author... so have you read things by Crick and Dennett? And what do you think about this <a href="http://www.phil.vt.edu/assc/newman/" target="_blank">thalamus and consciousness</a> web-page?
I found <a href="http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/" target="_blank">William H. Calvin's site</a>... there's a lot to read there... (but unfortunately I keep on getting distracted)

[ February 06, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>

Detached9

From Mysteries of The Mind by Richard Restak

"As your mind drifts (when you try not to think of anything in particular) a highly sophisticated imaging device (MRI?) observes a decrease in brain activity, particularly in your frontal lobes. But as your attention is captured by some object or thought, your frontal and prefrontal areas 'light up'."

The perenthencies (spelling?) are my words. The top of the page is called Consciousness and Cognition, so I assume he is discussing consciousness here.

[ February 06, 2002: Message edited by: Detached9 ]</p>

Detached9

Does anyone know the validity of this?

Corey Hammer

I'm going to weigh in as an experimental psychologist.

Consciousness does not reside in one place. It resides over networks all over the brain. Current theories treat consciousness as a sort of goals monitor for the current moment. The mechanisms between hypotheses differ (including some that posit that conscisouness is continually reconstructed moment by moment).

For the most part, human cognition is nonconscious, including basic associations. In fact, consciousness (& intelligence) may have arisen in part to help deal with social interactions.

However, this is not my field of specialization and not what I usually read about in the journals I get (experimental social psych). If anyone is up on current theory, please take over.