🚀 go-pugleaf

HARRY R. ERWIN (herwin@mason1.gmu.edu) wrote:
: What is consciousness? What is the mind? KIBO questions. Let me lay out 
: some ideas, though.

  Sure. I'm an outsider, but I'll play too.

: The initial processing of sensory data involves both sensations of
: external objects (afference) and internal expectations (reafference).

  Ahh, the single person alone in the universe model... More as you get
to levels, below, but I suspect that when you have two or more people in
a tight feedback loop that it becomes difficult if not impossible to 
tell from the math where one "consciousness" stops and "another" starts.
(So, ok, guess who's a Distributed AI major.)  The really interesting
cases are the MORE THAN ONE cases, with many different time-scales for
feedback loops, crossing many more levels.

: These are merged via an integral transform (involving weightings defined
: on neural cell assemblies) to produce a distributed output signal. 

   Why not MANY signals/states on many separate parallel fronts? Some
electrical, some magnetic, some chemical, some genetic...

This
: can take two forms:chaos expressing novelty or distributed coherence
: (synchronization) signaling the existence of a known pattern. Detection of
: chaos can trigger an orienting reflex. The synchronized signal can either
: be processed simply as a signal that something known is being detected, or
: the associated sensory data can be processed further by downstream
: elements in a way similar to the processing of novel data. The gain of the
: system can be varied for optimum sensitivity. High gain tends to see
: artifacts as well as real patterns; low gain is insensitive. 

: Hence, objects of interest to the organism are dual to these (continuously
: varying) patterns of more-or-less coherent dynamics in the brain--the
: mind.

  Also objects of potential interest -- ie, a radiologist examining an 
X-ray looking for signs of some particular thing.

  Note that these patterns are fundamentally semantic, although
: syntactic processing can be performed by the mind. Attention is the
: process by which these patterns emerge (are generated). The self is the
: internal pattern dual to the physically experienced body. 

  If that last sentence has content, it eludes me.  How would you 
distinguish whatever it is you are affirming from some alternative?
If I'm physically experiencing someone else's body as well, am I them?
Are you saying that there is a mathematical transform between a 
body and ... a pattern, as real as, say, fourier tranform dual
representations? If so, you're saying the body can be represented
multiple ways, and you're calling one of those "the self" and the
other one "the body", even though they are simply different mathematical
representations of the same physical entity?  Or what?

  Loss of
: consciousness is literally the loss of these patterns--loss of mind. 

: This suggests that if we develop a capability of monitoring these 
: coherent dynamics, we will have a way of objectifying the mind.

: --
: Harry Erwin
: Internet: herwin@gmu.edu 
: Just a dumb graduate student working on Katchalsky network models....
: (And if you believe that, I have a ranch in California to sell you.)

   Overall, I agree that the nature of coherence is a critical concept,
as is ther question of how to deal with multiple interacting feedback
loops at multiple time scales and physical scales, even without including
other people in the picture.

   My tack is different, in terms of looking at this coherence as some
measure of the holy grail of "health",  with is increasingly showing 
up in situations where the behavior of the social context of "a person"
is as good, or a better predictor of "health outcomes" for "a person" than
any "internal" measures. 
   
   In terms of levels, however, as Marsden Bloise (?) pointed out
in J. of medicine and philosopy, circa 1982, the really interesting
medical problems involve situations where there is substantial vertical
interaction between the levels of this "curiously laminated" structure.
One can trace an economic downturn to a plant layoff to a family
disintegration to massive alcohol consumption to acid/base imbalance
problems.  Where do you "draw the line"?  What do you "fix" so it
will stay fixed?

  Why is it that a social support group has a noticeable effect on
immunosuppression and the outcome of chemotherapy?  Why should we
NOT be surprised by this?
  
  The problem seems to be more than just one (looking ahead to messages
up to this one) of getting from quantum mechanics to classical physics,
it's as if the levels, like network levels in the ISO network model, 
have completely different vocabularies and primitives and are almost
unreachable and incommensurate from each other.  

  IMHO, Turing's hypothesis is essentially false, for all practical
purposes, and, no, you CANNOT get from a sequential processor up to
any arbitrary level or model any arbitrary process, at least not in
the physical world we all live in.  I'm arguing a very strong
opposite, namely, that NO amount of processing, given unlimited 
computational power and an infinite time, in this physical universe
we live in, would get you from the atomic level to making a good
prediction of the existence of Haiti, Ronald Reagan, Roxanne, and
the oil depletion allowance. 

  To some extent, each level of the hierarchy builds on lower levels,
but, to some extent, each level is an independent agent with a life
of it's own that is invisible, incommensurate, and unknowable to 
lower levels, and maybe higher ones as well.    They affect each other,
sometimes, but do not, cannot, could not CONTROL each other, or
determine each other, except in cases where they all die.  There are
not only levels, there are, quite as importantly, GAPS between levels.

   No analysis at the pixel level alone would ever determine that your
"image" is one of Teddy Roosevelt, regardless how long you analyze
grey scales.  Teddy Roosevelt objects do not exist at the pixel level.

   I say this not to complicate the picture, but to think about what
it means.  To describe the brain/mind/body as having multiple interacting
levels and scales, physical and temporal, and then try to reduce it all
back to voltage levels seems, to me, to miss the point, namely, we
need a whole new vocabulary of primitives at each level of the system,
and a whole new formal calculus of how levels interact, what it means
to have simultaneous nested contexts, and how to even THINK about
systems with that type of qualitative complexity and structure, starting
with what's an "input" and what's an "output" of a system that feeds
various copies of its output back into its input stream, or are we
applying non-feedback concepts to heavy-feedback systems?

  For that matter, have we even gotten right whether the entity in
question is INSIDE the box, or OUTSIDE the box?    Where in the notes
is the true "fugue" located?  Where in the pixels is the power of a
great photograph located?  Maybe the only sense in which "you" have
a "self" is the sense in which I perceive you to have one.  What on
earth does it mean to "not be yourself today" then?


   Wade
  

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R. Wade Schuette                        Internet: schuette@eecs.umich.edu
Ann Arbor, MI 48105 USA                 voice:  313.996.7479 (work)
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