Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Consciousness,what are its abilities, how can we improve?
Hans Ricke
Monday, 15 June 2009 02:52 UTC
Serge Patlavskiy has put forward a remarkable statement:“When practicing, we are improving not our consciousness, but our ability to access to its hidden potentialities.”
Could we sort this out?
Obviously something can be practiced and improved on. The outcome being apparently that people who do that are more conscious after doing that than they are before.
1. Is that so?
2. How does that happen?
My concern in this context is more what actually happens than what we call it.
Still some people claim that consciousness is epiphenomenal. Does this have to be rejected for good?
Updated 21 June 2009 07:32 UTC
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Dear Philip,
you are right: Serge does not attribute abilities to consciousness, but to us. He attributes potentialities to consciousness. Does that make a difference?
Yours friendly
Hans -
Dear all,
I must confess that the discussed statement was taken from my remarks on Alfredo and Hans’ JCS paper (my remarks will appear on the jcs-online within a day or two). It was taken by me out of context. I used it just to prevent a suicide. :)By “ability” I mean here the result of practicing or training (sometimes long and sophisticated training, or making “labs”, if one wish). There is an innate ability, but I mean here a gained ability. I do not know how the phrase “to improve the ability to do something (or, in doing something)” may be misspelled. The word “misspell” means “to do orthographic mistakes”, isn’t it? I have done none. Maybe, instead of the word “ability” I should use the word “methods”, “techniques”, “procedures”, or “know-how”? If yes, then I will make necessary corrections.
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“Chris, what are your ontological commitments? Where do you start, and how do you get here from there? Fill in the blanks, ’In the beginning _____________?” – Noise.
The CONTAINMENT of noise elicits spontanous order through self-referencing – called the Chaos Game. There then emerges hierarchy covering increased specialisation and so containment of noise within containment etc (What is order to X can be noise to Y etc)
“I try to imagine why you think only the brain is conscious. First, no one even agrees on what it means to be conscious. Are you saying you know what consciousness is?”
The focus is on all that can be communicated about consciousness and so defining all POSSIBLE forms in that communication is fudamentally through resonance. The set of POSSIBLE forms covers the full spectrum of consciousness as far as we are concerned since anything outside of the pool of possible interpretations will be interpreted from within that pool and so present as if paradox (we get oscillations etc)
“Are you saying you know how to tell if something is conscious? By what grounds, based on what scientific evidence do you assert that rocks do not have some basic awareness? How do you convince me?”
Consciousness ties to mediation and the use of imagination. The dynamics of mirror neurons etc show us a fundamental difference between us and other primates – we can deal with mime. We also have an understanding of the notion of the infinite (and so high resolution powers that, through imagination, transcend basic sensory systems) and we reflect advanced recursive dynamics that lead from the mechanistic the organic. I dont consider rocks as organic and more so it needs an organic foundation to move into increasing differentiations and with that the emergence of a strong sense of self.
“Why can’t the asymmetry go all the way down to the bottom?” – it does, the universe is asymmetric, time alone guarantees such, but it is ‘mindless’, grounded in mechanistic development. The emergence of the organic from the mechanistic and the tie of consciousness to the organic (through development of mediation skills and so language creation, imagination, rich foresight etc etc) brings out the adaptation to a thermodynamic universe of the conservation of energy and so focus on symmetry and determinism (I dont see rocks with DNA etc). the SUCCESS of the conservation has aided in development of symmetry-grounded species BUT further success has been in the emergence of mindful asymmetry from the mindless – an asymmetry used to mediate prior to a falling-back onto autopilot and the symmetric.
Our sciences etc are grounded in classes of meanings derived from recursion and symmetric foundation covering whole-parts. As such our sciences are attracted to symmetry and so all we ‘see’ are symmetric forms (those that reflect EMF where the laws of EMF are grounded in symmetry) – the rest in ‘dark matter/energy’.
Our nature as determined beings covers the use of mediation to refine skills into habits and then any awareness goes away – we fall back onto autopilot and letting context push us (more energy conservation).
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“Chris,
Is what you are calling noise the same as basic unpredictability? Your next statement, ‘The containment of noise elicits spontaneous order through self-referencing’, sounds exactly like what I would say, except I am not sure what you mean by self-referencing."
Initially it is recursion and so mechanistic. A point is reached where the mechanistic becomes organic and so, when recursion is down to this level, what is recursed is able to describe itself by reference to itself – aka self-referencing.
“Amazingly, your explanation about the ‘definition’ of consciousness squares with what I have said previously. ‘Consciousness’ cannot be defined and limited it can only be expressed and released. ‘Consciousness’ is a subjective term and cannot be identified from the objective perspective. I think ‘oscillation’, ‘spontaneous’ are critical terms when expressing the nature of consciousness.”
.. but it can be defined, within the limits of the filtering system we use to interpret reality i.e. the properties and methods of the basic neurology.
Brain oscillations covering the full extension of oscillation across the whole brain occur when we deal with the new and/or complex and reflect the act of recursing the asymmetry of left/right etc etc where such elicits language used to mediate
“Please help me understand what exactly you mean by ‘mediation’ and ‘imagination’, and why you seem to think they are only human characteristics.”
I dont say they are only human characteristics – I say they apply to ALL neuron-dependent life forms but the emergence of proactive mediations, to consider what is possible even to a level of transcending current physics etc reflects a requirement for high neural mass and connectivity that is NOT present in other neuron-dependent life forms.
An animal caught in a trap or swamp etc will, over a period of time, express all of its set of behaviours as it tries to escape, there is randomness involved – move into increasing neural complexity and reasoning emerges, the behaviours are chosen, not selected ‘ad hoc’ and the more sophisticated the neurology the more the engagement of other minds to resolve the issue.
“The mind is a subsequent outcome of the birth of awareness. I would not expect to find it below the level of animals. A broad conception of ‘mind’ may include plants. How do you define ‘mind’?” – the top level of the neural hierarchy and so a refinement of basic brain dynamics through extensions into abstractions and so symbol usage etc.
“I agree, mostly, with your comments on the law of conservation of energy and its significance. The only adjustment I would make would be to say that, since I believe all energy is awaerized, the law would be a law of conservation of consciousness and energy.” – here we disagree. Consciousness as an agent of mediation is emergent and local. Once mediation has completed consciousness withdraws/moves-on and the life form lives off autopilot – instincts/habits.
“I will tell you, I find it odd that all the so-called scientists that participate on these forums, whose goal is to discover the nature of consciousness, ignore what you and I are talking about. It is reassuring that, very early on I intuitively recognized the quality of your approach, even if I did not always completely understand what you were saying. Well, I could explain it as being a problem of being stuck inside a box, not realizing the nature of their total identity. They have failed to become conscious of their larger nature, their inner self, acessed through the experiments I have suggested. Oh well!”
All specialist perspectives are languages and so are grounded in the basic properties and methods of languages in general where such are determined by the dynamics of the neurology. The specialists have failed in understanding this and take their specialisations literally, not as metaphors for basic patterns of brain dynamics. As such Quantum mechanics is a language and will reflect all of the POSSIBLE properties and methods of such where that includes, for example, the perception of ‘wave/particle’ duality where such is a product of methodology and not necessarily ‘for real’ in all circumstances. (IOW the DESIGN of experiments based on recursion of a dichotomy in the presence of indetermincy (e.g. double slit experiments, single slit, down converters etc etc etc) guarantee the detection of wave behaviours due to the method – furthermore those patterns will be present across all scales.)
There is an article in the 18th June issue of Nature with an intro “Demonstrating that macroscopic objects display quantum behaviour, which is usually associated with the microscopic world of atoms, is a long-standing goal in physics” (p923 “Coupled Vibrations”)
LOL! These guys have no idea what they are dealing with and need a good dose of basic information processing by the neurology where such will show that we use the ONE filter across ALL scales and so ALL POSSIBLE patterns will be identifiable at ANY scale given time/depth in analysis.
IOW the ‘long-standing goal’ is completed with the understanding of metaphor creation in our brain and understanding of anti-symmetry/asymmetry/symmetry dynamics across ALL scales. LOCAL context will then determine the specific nature manifesting the patterns.
“By the way, what is the nature of your conception of personal identity? Did you say that IDM has its basis in some unpredictable aspect of Chinese philosophy? I forget offhand what its called, Yin-yang?, …I will go and check on it.” IDM is about the single context brain extending its dynamics into the abstract and so able to communicate outside of the immediate, sensed, context. The domain model is covered in the IDM Summary
The LOCAL context development of yin/yang interpretations of reality developed in ancient China and reflects the abstraction of basic brain dynamics in processing information. All covered in the above summary. A demonstration of the recursion dynamics involved is covered in the Emotional I Ching work where we can map patterns derived from recursion of fight/flight (and so emotions) to patterns derived from recursion of yang/yin (and so the I Ching). The mapping is possible due to IDM identifying the core set of generic meanings we all have as neuron-dependent life forms – as such I use IDM template to translate emotional patterns into their corresponding I Ching patterns.
“What goals do you have for the application of IDM, if any?”
(1) An intro into basic meaning derivation be brain and the abstraction of such through specialist symbol development
(2) a ground for AI systems to develop a sense of meaning
(3) a tool for psychotherapy in that the EIC can present and identify sub/unconscious influences on behaviours in situations.
(4) understanding a property of recursion – namely the ability for a well-developed system to describe itself by reference to itself in a formal way when the recursion is represented in ‘bit’ patterns that give us access to logic operators etc. My Emotional I Ching material presents an example of this by getting the I Ching to describe itself through self-referencing. See the first fifty pages of the text to get the idea.
Thus in considering the properties and methods of consciousness, in general, we will use the SAME patterns used in specialist perspectives as covered in the IDM work.
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