Human Consciousness: more guesswork (Humans)

by David Turell , Saturday, September 10, 2016, 21:36 (2994 days ago) @ David Turell

An interesting discussion of recent research:-https://aeon.co/essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6be67e34d5-Saturday_newsletter_20_August_20168_15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-6be67e34d5-68942561-"It would be a lot easier to answer that question if anyone knew what consciousness is. There's no shortage of theories. -***-"I think they're all running a game on us. Their models - right or wrong - describe computation, not awareness. There's no great mystery to intelligence; it's easy to see how natural selection would promote flexible problem-solving, the triage of sensory input, the high-grading of relevant data (aka attention).-***-"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?-***-"till, we are talking about a cadre of renowned neuroscientists, the least of whom is far more qualified than I to make assertions on the subject. One of the things they assert is that self-awareness does not depend on specific brain structures. The declaration grants ‘near-human levels of consciousness' to parrots (who lack a neocortex) and to octopuses (whose brains - basically a bagel of neurons encircling the esophagus - don't have any anatomical resemblance to ours at all). It's neurological complexity that's essential to the conscious state, they tell us. The motherboard can take any shape so long as it's got enough synapses on board.-***-"Even when the corpus callosum is severed, the hemispheres can communicate via the brainstem. It's a longer route, though, and a much thinner pipe: think dial-up versus broadband. The essential variables, once again, are latency and bandwidth. When the pipe is intact, signals pass back and forth across the whole brain fast enough for the system to act as an integrated whole, to think of itself as I. But when you force those signals to take the scenic route - worse, squeeze them through a straw - the halves fall out of sync, lose their coherence. I shatters into we.-"You might expect that an established personality, built over a lifetime and then split down the middle, might take some time to develop into distinct entities. Yet hemispheric isolation can also be induced chemically, by anaesthetising half the brain - and the undrugged hemisphere, unshackled from its counterpart, sometimes manifests a whole new suite of personality traits right on the spot. A shy, whole-brained introvert morphs into a wise-cracking flirtatious jokester. A pleasant, well-adjusted woman turns sarcastic and hostile. When the other half wakes up the new entity vanishes as quickly as it appeared.-"So while the thing that calls itself I typically runs on a dual-core engine, it's perfectly capable of running on a single core. ....the local personae are obliterated, absorbed into a greater whole; as the Finnish computer scientists Kaj Sotala (at the University of Helsinki) and Harri Valpola (Aalto University) recently declared, ‘the biological brain cannot support multiple separate conscious attentional processes in the same brain medium'.-***-"Consciousness remains mysterious. But there's no reason to regard it as magical, no evidence of spectral bonds that hold a soul in one head and keep it from leaking into another. And one of the things we do know is that consciousness spreads to fill the space available. Smaller selves disappear into larger; two hemispheres integrate into one. ...You don't need a neocortex or a hypothalamus. All you need is complexity."-Comment: These quotes are from an essay that discusses direct brain to brain communication as a future possibility. I've left that part out. I believe that consciousness requires more than brain complexity. But the discussion of split brain points out two personalities can develop. For me just interesting facts. Parrots and octopuses are not self-aware in the way we are.