Human Consciousness: musing re hive consciousness (Humans)

by David Turell , Friday, January 01, 2016, 15:46 (3247 days ago) @ David Turell

A long rambling essay which raises some interesting points about possible origins of consciousness, self-awareness and brain plasticity as shown in animal experimentation:-https://aeon.co/essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=1c607c0235-Daily_newsletter_Friday_1st_Jan16_12_22_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-1c607c0235-68942561-"It would be a lot easier to answer that question if anyone knew what consciousness is. There's no shortage of theories. The neuroscientist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison claims that consciousness reflects the integration of distributed brain functions. A model developed by Ezequiel Morsella, of San Francisco State University, describes it as a mediator between conflicting motor commands. The panpsychics regard it as a basic property of matter - like charge, or mass - and believe that our brains don't generate the stuff so much as filter it from the ether like some kind of organic spirit-catchers. Neuroscience superstar V S Ramachandran (University of California in San Diego) blames everything on mirror neurons; Princeton's Michael Graziano - right here in Aeon - describes it as an experiential map.-***-"If physics is right - if everything ultimately comes down to matter, energy and numbers - then any sufficiently accurate copy of a thing will manifest the characteristics of that thing. Sapience should therefore emerge from any physical structure that replicates the relevant properties of the brain.-***
"Then again, if physics is right, we shouldn't exist. You can watch ions hop across synapses, follow nerve impulses from nose to toes; nothing in any of those processes would lead you to expect the emergence of subjective awareness. Physics describes a world of intelligent zombies who do everything we do, except understand that they're doing it. That's what we should be, that's all we should be: meat and computation. Somehow the meat woke up. How the hell does that even work?-***-"What we can get a handle on are the correlates of sapience, the neural signatures that accompany the conscious state. In humans at least, consciousness occurs when a bunch of subcortical structures - the brain stem, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the anterior cingulate cortex - talk to the frontal lobes. Integration is key. Neurons in all these far-flung regions have to be firing in sync, a co?ordinated call-and-response with a signal lag of no more than 400 milliseconds. -***-" A blind rat, wired into a geomagnetic sensor via a simple pair of electrodes, can use magnetic fields to navigate a maze just as well as her sighted siblings. If a rat can teach herself to use a completely new sensory modality - something the species has never experienced throughout the course of its evolutionary history - is there any cause to believe our own brains will prove any less capable of integrating novel forms of input?-Comment: Something for everyone on this website: physics to consciousness, Romansh uses illusion. dhw likes panpsychism; I like plasticity.