Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Properties of a conscious entity
Hans Ricke
Saturday, 30 August 2008 05:07 UTC
Dear all,
I just have split this off the “quest” thread: because it is one of the most interesting theoretical topics.
What are the properties of a part, an entity within human beings, that enables consciousness? Can a network of cells have these properties? Can a single cell have these properties? What other conceivable structures could “do the trick?”
Yours friendly
Hans
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Hi all,
On Sept 4 Otmar began his post with the question “Are fundamental entities such as cells and networks of cells individuals or not?”
This harkens back to the age old question of universal and particulars and a dynamic defining relationship between them. Meaning depends on this dynamic relationship.
In several posts I have tried to communicate that the universal and particular aspects of phenomenal experience are mutually essential to the structural integration of experience at every level. If you open the website you will see that System 2 necessarily follows from the unique requirements of universal wholeness, without which there can be no integration. System 2 relates universal to particulars. It subsumes and transcends System 3 which dynamically relates Host, Organ and Cell in an integrated fashion. This includes quantum correlation because of the structural relationship bewteen Universal and Particular aspoects of Host Organ and Cell.
Molecules are not street smart. They can not produce consciousness. They do not integrate experience. We are talking about organized energy patterns at three hierarchically subsumed levels that recur at further subsumed levels and that are consistent with the physical universe, yet transcend and subsume it.
At the cellular level the hierarchy involves cell, organelle, and catalysed molecular synthesis. It can be read down inside the cell to genetics and allows of scientific verification. It is a complementary methodology to traditional approaches. The website article Unified Theories, Fantasy & Cosmic Order is a readable introduction to this problematic question of universals and particulars that pervades the history of human thought since antiquity. There are other website articles on the human nervous system that show how this works synapse by synapse at the spinal and cerebral levels according to the subsumed level of System 4.
The subsumed level of sentience at the cellular level is extremely limited compared to a human being, but is related to human integration by the triadic relationship Host, Organ and Cell defined by System 3.
This approach takes some careful reflection and tends to go over one’s head. The approach can not be readily assimilated into tradition thought patterns, since it transcends and subsumes them. It is worth some careful intuitively penetrating thought.
Best regards,
Bob
www.cosmic-mindreach.com. -
Bob, the issue is not so much on the ontological but on the influence of the epistemological on our perceptions that form derivations of meaning used in the ontological.
Thus the process of deriving an ontology is recursive but the reason for such is identified in the method used by our neurology to map out reality.
Basic information processing dynamics covers oscillations across, and so the self-referencing of, the anti-symmetry/symmetry dichotomy. That oscillation covers asymmetry in that the elements of the dichotomy are part/whole (particular/universal etc etc) and so set down a set of categories we use in the derivation of meaning. Implicit in this is the roots of language, and consciousness, through the use of mediation and so asymmetry.
The chaos game bring this dynamic out and spanning all scales s it is differentiating/integrating all the way up/down TWO forms of hierarchy – the anti-symmetric (syntax bias) and the symmetric (semantics bias) – the tool that generates the language to communicate all of this is the asymmetry in our brains (and so the pragmatic)
The main issue with consciousness is its asymmetric nature (and so transcending stimulus/response) and need for bandwidth – only possible with highly developed neural systems both in mass and especially connectivity.
From an AI perspective we can identify what the brain is TRYING to do and so REFINE such in that natural selection gives way to conscious selection but all around the core distinctions of differentiating and integrating aka particular/general.
Universality is then present in boths sides in that words, particulars, universalise. What is implied by this is the self-referencing of the particular/general dichotomy to give us our languages etc. – as covered in the work Categories of Mediation
Chris.
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Jonathan and Hans,
Jonathan wrote:
“If cell A has inputs relating to a nose and cell B has inputs relating to a mouth then the putative experience shared by A and B cannot have any causal effect. Cell A can only report on nose and B on mouth regardless of whether this putative experience has occurred. Thus a retinoid hypothesis that places experience in this net cannot explain anything that cannot be explained some other way because the putative experience would not change behaviour.”
“In contrast, if experiences occur in cells that receive information about both the nose and the mouth then these cells can report on the specific combination. Even if we forget the vexed issue of what really is an ontic unit the functional/behaviourist story gives the answer.”
And Hans wrote:
“Neural networks may be in principle incapable of having an input together. Each cell of a network has its separate input. Which would be the structure of a neural network, that could receive the whole content of each conscious moment?
If it is argued that the content enters the network in parts, the question would be, how and where would 1. the integration of the parts happen and 2. how and where would the realization of that content happen?”I have already answered these questions several times. I will try again. You seem to be unable to comprehend the critical distinction between having a phenomenal experience and reporting a phenomenal experience. In every moment of alert consciousness (C3) you have a global transparent phenomenal representation of the world from your own egocentric perspective. The occurrent conscious representation must be a spatially distributed parallel pattern of decomposable features (parts) of the phenomenal world manifold. The global unanalyzed content is your immediate phenomenal experience of the world. Since this global content must exist over an extended coordinate space, an internal representation of this space must require a discrete unit at each spatial coordinate. In the retinoid model, I assign an autaptic cell to each internal coordinate of our egocentric space. The pattern of activation over this set of retinoid cells constitutes the content of consciousness (having a phenomenal experience).
Now, reporting (or having knowledge) about your conscious experience must depend on an attention-driven analysis or decomposition of your preexisting global phenomenal representation. This requires the integration within a single cell/unit of the selected features/parts of your global conscious content. The output of such cells (I call them filter-cells)
enables you to detect, classify, build up knowledge, and report about objects and events in the real world. In terms of Jonathan’s example, when retinoid cell A which has inputs relating to nose, and retinoid cell B which has inputs relating to a mouth converge as a joint input to maximally excite filter-cell #734, this discharge can be a cause for the report “There’s Granny”. But the activity of the filter-cell per se is not a part of our conscious experience even though its causal effects can be sensed and back-projected to the retinoid system to become a part of our ongoing phenomenal experience of the world, namely, the experience of something somewhere.Best,
Arnold
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Arnold,
sadly you are NOT addressing the topic, even though you are sure that you are doing it.
Leave all reporting aside and all possible notions of activity that you keep throwing in.
What solely matters in this context is experience. And that means input in the first place. The content we ( James, Jo and myself ) are addressing is NOT C1 of your retinoid system ( I am not that much interested in it anyway ), the content is the complex content of a human beings conscious experience at any given moment.
This complex content has got to be experienced somewhere and somehow in the human body, in the human individual because that is how we experience it.
Now: a network of cells has NO input as a network, each cell has its own input. So where would the experience, that has to happen right after the input, where would it happen, inside a cell?
There is NO inside a network of cells!!
Come to terms please!
Yours friendly
Hans -
Hans, for clarification purposes only, I think you are perhaps limiting the topic to physical experience, properties etc.
In so doing, you discount the metaphysical experience and properties etc…
Consciousness and especially more complex aspects of consciousness
-i.e. accessing of mind- is the complementary pattern to our physical experiences.Networking is also a metaphysical pattern, within cells and between cells, which pattern may change due to physical changes yet maintain the previous funcitons of metabolism, if only at a lesser degree.
There is also the 3, 5, 10 percent placebo effect, which is blatant example of metaphysical mind over physical matter.
I think ergo I think, that, I dunno.
Rybo
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parallel processing includes the dynamics of prism neurons (found, for example in the ear); combined with local distinctions of cells contributing to a network responding as if a single neuron (one with a big bandwidth and so able to process complex data) allows for resonances and the elicitation of experiences.
Hierachy builds sensations where any mediation is elicited by data being passed ‘up’ the hierarchy. This will elicit the delay we see in consciousness mediating with context – instincts OTHO have no delay.
the language of the neuron is dominated by AM (wave) and FM (pulse) dynamics and allows for summing of sensory experiences into a superposition of experience as whole.
This holistic, ‘all is connected’ experience is best ‘felt’ when the regulating consciousness side of the brain is disabled (e.g. by stroke). It is this regulating ‘side’ that enables the sorting of a whole experience into a dimension of ‘best-fit’(most noticable)/‘worst-fit’ ordering and so the discretisation of experience, of the immediate.
The WHOLE we experience in consciousness is NOT the WHOLE we experience unconsciously – see comments/refs in my wave-dichotomy page
Chris.
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Hans,
You wrote:
“There is NO inside a network of cells!!”
No matter how many times you (or Jonathan) repeat this mantra, there is no logical or empirical basis for your passionately-held belief!
There are innumerable electromechanical and biological systems in which networks of cells receive patterns of input distributed within the confines of (INSIDE) the network. Just for example, would you claim that the network of cells that constitutes the retina of the eye cannot have an integrated pattern of input and a response (within/inside the retinal network) that constitutes a coherent cellular representation of some part of the visual world?
Best,
Arnold
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Hi Chris,
I read your reply of September 8 with interest. You begin by saying quote: “ the issue is not so much on the ontological but on the influence of the epistemological on our perceptions that form derivations of meaning used in the ontological.”
You are entitled to this view of course and I agree that it is a view generally held in the scientific community. In my view that is why there is endless circular discussion and multiple mutually exclusive interpretations in various branches of science including this one. There is no universally acceptable epistemological resolution possible that can coherently demonstrate how experience is meaningfully integrated as a whole, only largely disjointed fragments of empirical evidence without any clear way of mending them into an ontological whole.
Universals and particulars are properly complementary aspects of the same thing, not dichotomous. It comes down to personal belief systems which are generally arbitrary although some may make more common sense than others.
I see it from the alternate perspective that direct intuitive insight into the ontological structure of being is more primary than epistemology while also subsuming it consistent with the empirical evidence. It is personal intuitive preferences regarding the nature of ontology that bias belief systems that interpret epistemology accordingly. There is currently no rigorous ontological discipline that can guide intuitive insight into the dynamically structural foundations of being in a coherently integrated fashion.
That is the core of my message. There is a way to do this that is not itself dependent on assumptions implicit in the nature of language but from which the specific meaning in language necessarily derives consistent with the evidence of phenomenal experience. There are articles on the website that explicitly demonstrate this as pointed out before, but they take a lot of patient reflection on one’s own intuitive and emotional processes. The article Unified Theories, Fantasy, & Cosmic Order explores the relationship between epistemology and ontology.
I acknowledge that there is a regenerative mode to how the “System” of delineating the cosmic order works in which knowledge precedes the root of being and in this sense some of your points have a limited degree of validity. But this variant is within the overriding context of the structural dynamics of the ontology of being as a whole. There is also an involutionary variant that shares the same perceptual referents as the evolutionary variant such that there is a bi-polar moral disparity at the roots of perception. This presents us all with a dilemma associated with how we make value judgments. All possible structural varieties of thought and behavior are encompassed consistent with how the nervous system is structured to function synapse by synapse.
The System is not a belief system but rather a rigorous intuitive tool that can facilitate meaningful expression in the languages of science. The focus is on science as an unconditioned intuitive search for truth. It is not on belief in basic axioms that are assumed to be self evident as the basis of reason and language based logic. It requires that belief be suspended.
This is the divided house of faith and reason. Reason and logic are founded on assumed beliefs, in science just as they are in religion. Contrary to general beliefs, genuine faith is founded on question and the intuitive realization that there must be meaningful answers. We need a worldview of some kind to integrate our experience and cope in practical ways with the flux of circumstance. We implicitly adopt one with our every thought and action.
The debate over worldviews has been going on for millennia and in my view it is rather pointless to pursue it in rational epistemological terms without a rigorous discipline to facilitate direct intuitive insight into the ontological structure of being.
Where I live here in Thailand the phone lines are overloaded which prevents me from uploading replies to the Nature website without going to an internet shop some distance away, so I would be pleased to reply privately by personal email to any comments you may wish to make in response.
Very best wishes,
Bob
Bob@cosmic-mindreach.com -
bob, you wrote:
“Universals and particulars are properly complementary aspects of the same thing, not dichotomous. It comes down to personal belief systems which are generally arbitrary although some may make more common sense than others”
you are mistaken, probably due to not understanding the term dichotomy in that it covers three forms of self-referencing dichotomies where the complementary format is part/whole (asymmetry) as compared to the oppositional format (both elements are anti-symmetric, part/part etc) and the symmetry form of whole/whole (brings out equivalents) – the Asymmetric form of dichotomy is in fact an energy-conserving form of trichotomy.
For someone who promotes brain dynamics I am surprised at the lack of understanding of brain oscillations and the generation of meaning – all covered in the link I supplied in the last post (with references you may find of interest)
I am not the only one with the dichotomy focus, see Scott-Kelso’s “The Complementary Nature” (and its website) or John McCrone’s website
MY focus is on the generation of language and so the filter with which we map/mediate reality in that all we can know is categorised by the filter – methodology determines all that is meaningful so map out all that is POSSIBLE given the neurology and we have the foundations for all of our maps ;-) This GENERAL/VAGUE level is them customised for local contexts through use of labels and so creations of metaphors.
Chris.
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Hans,
Most belatedly I would like to add my 2 cents worth – you did long ago suggest I do so – my apologies for being so tardy!
I can only address your question in simple terms and must confess I have not read much of James, but I have seen Johnathan E’s exposition of James’s pronouncements before so I think I have the gist of it; and simply put, I think the proposition is flawed. However, I think Arnold Trehub is better qualified than me to address the particulars of the arguemnt, and it does also [anyway] seem to come down mostly to just asserting that a collection can never be a unity.
So my simple stuff goes like this:
- ‘Consciousness’ [ “C” ] is normally about the world I am in
- it is also normally about me and what I should be doing now, and what next I should do
- there is lots of subtle information and evidence available to show that C is uniquely associated with and correlated with the activity of brains
- there is also lots of information and subtle evidence available to show that very often a person is in fact not aware of an enormous amount of what is going on around them or even within themselves and that in fact this is our normal state of affairs.
Because of the above, and because I have read some very helpful and interesting books and articles, discussion lists, etc, I have adopted the view that a key feature of the processes that accompany, indeed that are, our awareness is that they embody
- information about important features of the environment,
- informaton about important features of self at the moment, and
- information about the currently important relationships between the features of environment and features of self.
I believe that these three kinds of information are necessary and sufficient, when combined into a singularity which embodies them all, to be an event which could be reported as an instance of personal awareness. Such a singularity occurs as what I like to call a dynamic logical structure. By this I mean a pattern of interaction amongst assemblies [groups, complices [sp?], repertoires] of neurons which is self sustaining for a certain minimal transient period. How long it lasts for and how big the assembly is depends of the facts of the case: big thoughts take more space and may last much longer than less important thoughts, perceptions or movement drivers. The information content of each dynamic logical entity is embodied in the locations of the neuronal sub-groups ie Vernon B Mountcastles cortical ‘mini-columns’ and analgous micro locations in other regions such as brain stem, cerebellum, etc. Important also is the temporal sequencing of the impulse waves back and forth between all the widely distributed regions containing active members of the population of neurons which constitute the neuron substrate – the pathways if you will – of the activated complex.
A key point to understand about each dynamic logical structure which exists is that while it exists it can affect the rest of the brain. This can be by
- denying access to its component neurons and thus preventing certain other assemblies from activating
- by stimulating other regions of the brain in [maybe] systematic ways whilst remaining discretely whole in itself, or
- by evoking different logical structures into activity due to them sharing a significant [ie threshold] number of neurons in common.
Perhaps all sorts of other ‘logical’ causative effects are possible. We can note that the energy needed to keep cell assemblies functioning is provided by the component neurons pumping sodium, potassium, calcium and other ions back across their membranse after each depolarisation, and by recycling neurotransmitters at their synapses.
It is because such dynamic logical structures exist while the cell assembly in question is active that there is something it is like to be the awareness in question.
Above I have concentrated on the tripartite dynamic logical structures which embody conscious awareness – because that is what Hans has asked for. I think it is fairly clear however that most dynamic logical structures which exist [ie while active] do not embody enough information to be part of C. None the less they exist and affect the rest of the brain. I think Global Workspace model is one way of addressing how it is that we can have as many as half a dozen activity themes or storylines active at any moment and how they can be switched in and out of central focus.
More later if anyone is interested.
Cheers,
Mark Peaty
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