Dear Johnathan,
I find this idea to be very appealing! It seesm to imply that
"consciousness" per say has more to do with the attractor in state space
that any particular tableaux of neutron firings.
This, of course, would not fit well with the material eliminativists to
be forced to extend the same ontological status that we extend to flesh and
blood and hardware and electromagnetic fields to such entities as "strange
attractors" ! ;-)
http://www.newdualism.org/papers/M.Robertson/churchl.pdf
Kindest regards,
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Johnathan Corgan" <jcorgan.domain.name.hidden>
To: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
Cc: <lasermazer.domain.name.hidden>; <everything-list.domain.name.hidden.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 10:48 PM
Subject: Re: where do copies come from?
> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>> It is likely that multiple error correction and negative feedback systems
>> are in place to ensure that small changes are not chaotically amplified
>> to cause gross mental changes after a few seconds,
>
> On the other hand, the above may be precisely how consciousness operates!
>
> Picture a system that traverses through many different states as "chaotic
> attractor" cycles, and outside stimuli act to nudge the system between
> grossly different chaotic attractors. You have a system that needs to be
> exquisitely tuned to subtle input changes, yet also robust in the face of
> other types of changes (damage, etc.)
>
> In the brain, these "state trajectories" would be neuronal firing patterns
> and synaptic chemical gradients. Determining the chaotic attractors
> themselves would be neuronal morphology and ion channel types and
> locations.
>
> The "short-term" information about a brain might not need to be stored in
> order to reconstruct a brain. That is, individual neuron on-off states
> and synaptic chemical gradients may be "how you feel and what you are
> thinking this moment"--but discarding (or not measuring) this info might
> only mean the reconstructed brain would start from some "blank" state.
> Chaotic attractor dynamics would "pull" the system into one of the
> aforementioned chaotic cycles and the system as a whole would eventually
> recreate the short-term firing patterns and chemical gradients needed for
> normal functioning.
>
> (The above might be wrong in particulars, but I strongly suspect the
> concept of small changes perturbing a chaotic system to shift between
> chaotic attractors will play a role in the ultimate explanation of how
> neuronal processes give rise to conscious experience.)
>
> -Johnathan
>
Received on Mon Jul 11 2005 - 00:17:44 PDT