On 13 Sep 2005, at 11:17, georgelburgess wrote (to Lee?) :
> As two things can't be both identical and distinguishable you seem
> to be saying that consciousness is a physical process; that is, not
> a property or a consequence or a deduction or an interpretation, but
> the physical process itself. Yet consciousness appears to be
> utterly different kind of thing from a physical processs. Can you
> give an example of something else which has a similar relation -
> appearing to be entirely different but actually being identical - to
> a physical process?
I tend to think that consciousness is related to an instinctive
(automated) ability to bet or anticipate on a reality. Somehow
consciousness is unconscious science, beginning usually with the
discovery of the planet MAMMY and the planet DADDY. Its role is that
it makes possible to highly complex entity to build an efficacious
high level description of a world-view, and this makes possible for
that complex entity to make decision with incomplete knowledge and
many (anj infinity) default assumptions. The net result is a self-
speeding up ability relatively to the most probable (comp-)history. I
think this has been made indispensable for self-locomotion, if only
to anticipate possible (but not actual) collisions with the
anticipated neighborhood.
Now this makes consciousness quite close to the logician notion of
consistency (more or less equivalent with the existence of logician
"models" or "mathematical realities". It can be shown that a machine
can speed up itself by infering its consistency. The first to see
this is Godel, in his "lenght of proof" paper you can find in the
bible by Davis 1965:
DAVIS M. (ed.), 1965, The Undecidable, Raven Press, Hewlett, New York.
If you read Hobson physiological theory of dreams, they are reasons
to think that the trigger of that anticipating phenomenon could be
associate with the cerebral stem, the cortex would do the
anticipation and the claustrum would integrate it and makes coherent
the available information. But since one or two years I am
accumulating evidence, mainly through the "placebo effect" that
similar anticipation could already be implemented at the chemical level.
Here is the last paper I found, in the journal of neuroscience of
this week:
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/34/0-i
Endogenous Opiates and the Placebo Effect(*)
Now, some materialist could take the theory of consciousness, I have
sketched above, as a theory which does not need anything non-
physical. But I would like to insist that this is not the case. If we
really take seriously such an explanation of consciousness, then,
looking at the detail, it makes the notion of "matter" very hard. I
will not develop this here, but it is the entire content of a
"theorem in theoretical cognitive science" I got, and allude to in
many posts (see my url or the everything mailing list:
http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list%40eskimo.com/maillist.html
Nevertheless, note that this theory of consciousness is locally very
coherent with Darwinism. It is obvious that an ability to genuinely
anticipate the probable neighborhood will enhance survival,
especially for moving animals. It is just provably incoherent with
the idea of some temporal or dynamical substance.
Self-consciousness appears logically after consciousness, when the
entity begin to bet on a stable distinction between itself and the
neighborhood. This helps for better avoidance of the possible collision.
Bruno
(*)Jon-Kar Zubieta, Joshua A. Bueller, Lisa R. Jackson, David J.
Scott, Yanjun Xu, Robert A. Koeppe, Thomas E. Nichols, and Christian
S. Stohler
(see pages 7754-7762)
Much to the chagrin of drug designers and sometimes to the benefit of
patients, placebos can have powerful effects on medical management.
This week, Zubieta et al. add to the evidence that the placebo effect
on the subjective assessment of pain involves the endogenous opioid
system. During a pain challenge, volunteer subjects were given an
intravenous injection that they were led to believe might have
analgesic properties. The painful stimulus, the infusion of a few
milliliters of hypertonic saline into a jaw muscle, was adjusted to
maintain constant pain intensity and to prevent tissue swelling. The
authors used positron emission tomography in combination with a µ-
opioid receptor-selective radiotracer to examine the brain regions
activated and the contribution of µ-opioid receptors. The placebo
induced activation in the rostral anterior cingulate, dorsolateral
frontal cortex, insular cortex, and nucleus accumbens in parallel
with lower ratings of pain intensity.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Tue Sep 13 2005 - 10:34:13 PDT