Human Consciousness: Phantom limb issue (Humans)

by David Turell , Sunday, February 07, 2016, 15:43 (3213 days ago) @ David Turell

This article presents a very stretched theory that consciousness is an illusion much like phantom limb: the brain thinks the amputated part is still there, and I've had patients who continued to have pain from the removed part. From childhood the brain develops an encyclopedia of information about its body. For example when a baby's arm is hit, the whole arm hurts. Babies cannot differentiate between two close pin pricks. What is called two-point pain discrimination (two simultaneous pricks close together) takes some time to develop. The brain has to learn about each area of the skin from the beginning of life. We are not born with an encyclopedia of knowledge about our bodies. It is learned and phantom limb is a result.-http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/phantom-limbs-explain-consciousness/459780/-***-"During his disastrous naval assault on the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Lord Nelson lost hundreds of men, and was driven from the coast in defeat. He was also shot in the arm, and had to have part of it amputated.....For the rest of his life he could sense it, as though the appendage were extending invisibly from the stump. He supposedly claimed that he now knew there had to be an afterlife because if his arm could have a ghost, then so could he.-***-"The brain needs to control its attention, just as it controls the body. To understand how, we can gain some insight from control theory, a well-developed branch of engineering theory that deals in the optimal ways for complex systems to work—whether those systems dictate the airflow in a building, traffic patterns in a city, or a robot arm. In control theory, if a machine is to control something optimally, it needs a working model of whatever it's controlling. The brain certainly follows this principle in controlling the body. That's why it computes a body schema. Since the brain can control its attention exquisitely well, it almost certainly has an attention schema, a simulation of its own attention.-***-"Here's how a brain with an attention schema might behave. First, it would have a nuanced control of attention. Second, if it had an ability to translate internal information into words, it might make some strange, physically incoherent claims based on that attention schema. It wouldn't claim, “Well look at that, my cerebral cortex has an attentional enhancement of the visual signal of that sandwich in front of me.” Instead, going off the incomplete information in its attention schema, it might say, “I've got a non-physical, subjective experience of that sandwich. You know, the feely thing inside me. Consciousness.” That's the brain's caricature of attention. Of course the process is not limited to sandwiches. The same logic applies to consciousness of any object in front of you, consciousness of a memory that you've just recalled, or consciousness of yourself as a person.-***-"This is called the attention schema theory, a theory that my lab has been developing and testing experimentally for the past five years. It's a theory of why we insist with such certainty that we have subjective experience. Attention is fundamental. It's present in almost all animals. To help control it, the brain evolved an attention schema. Because of the quirky information contained in the attention schema, the brain-machine claims to have a conscious experience of things. Consciousness is phantom attention. Without resorting to magic, mysticism, hard problems, or spooky soul energy, the theory explains the behavior of us humans who claim—who swear up and down and get testy when challenged—that we have a ghost in the machine.-"Lord Nelson may have been right when he said that a phantom arm is made of the same stuff as the soul. It's all information in the brain."-Comment: the author tries to explain consciousness but he hasn't. The brain may cling to what it knew, but most of the time it is erased.