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How does action potential translate to conscious experience?
    #12083739 -

Action potentials carry information throughout the nervous system. The funny thing is that action potentials are never significantly different from each other. So, a single nerve impulse carrying information about sound is no different from one carrying information about sight, even though the energies that trigger these impulses in the appropriate receptor cells are in different forms. The differention emerges in the brain, where different types of information are processed in specialized regions. What is fascinating is that these simple positively charged, undifferentiated pulses are there somehow turned into the broad spectrum of human experience. But how? How does electricity=>conscious experience?

More importantly, if action potentials can turn into conscious experience, then why do so many assume consciousness exists only in the human mind? What's so special about the action potential produced by a human nerve cell?

Here's what I think. The structure of the brain allows it to be self-reflexive, to organize information, to remember things, to form an identity, and to communicate experience to other similarly structured brains(humans). But at no point is there a fundamental physical reaction in the brain that could not occur outside the brain. That being said, maybe consciousness is not confined to the human brain, maybe human consciousness is simply a sub-set of the total consciousness of the universe. It may be rare in that it's organized to such a high degree that it is self-reflexive, but self-reflexion is not same as consciousness, nor is self-awareness same as awareness. The brain is not the generator of consciousness, it is the organizer thereof.

What does this mean in practise? Nothing much. I just think it's an anthropocentric idea to attribute consciousness generation to the human brain. The human brain has given rise to rapid cultural and technological evolution as well as a growing sense of self-awareness and conceptual understanding, and in that sense it is special, but consciousness in itself is not a recent innovation.

Maybe that didn't make any sense at all. Nevermind, I'm ready for a beating :jointsmile:

Btw, I use consciousness and awareness interchangeably. It's the existence of phenomena as an immediate felt reality rather than an observed separate reality. It's sufficient on its own.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Tony]
    #12083754 -

The non-materialistically jaded answer is obvious: the action potential and conscious experience are one and the same thing.


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My solitude...
My shield...
My armour...

TESTED
WITH
FULL
FORCE

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: circastes]
    #12083848 -

Action potentials aren't all that happens. Often an action potential will spur a chain reaction of chemicals. Like opening a sodium ion channel. Or releasing neurotransmitters which send a specific signal on to another part of the brain. The location the information comes from makes all the difference in the world... literally.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Tony]
    #12083860 -

Great post.  I think everything is information like you point out; it's just the structure of information that determines the experience.  Also I like the functionalist approach to the mind/body problem; any information exchange has to be correlated with experience (but obviously certain information exchanges are more complex than others).


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: deCypher]
    #12083872 -

any information exchange has to be correlated with experience (but obviously certain information exchanges are more complex than others).


Word. Plus we don't even know where some of the information exchange comes from. Such as the placebo effect in Parkinson's Disease.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Kickle]
    #12083886 -

Elaborate; I haven't heard of any connection between the placebo effect and Parkinson's Disease.


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: deCypher]
    #12083901 -

I've posted it a few times here, and in more detail than I will this time.

Listos:
Fake neuro-surgery (just drilling holes in the skull) produced the exact same effects as a real neuro-surgery (implanting filial cells in the relevant parts of the brain). In both cases, the physical symptoms were reduced, but only in one is a physical explanation currently available. The filial cells restart dopamine production, causing motor symptoms to decline.

No one has a clue what is going on with placebo.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Kickle]
    #12083914 -

Oh, the power of Belief.  (but what about the power of Skepticism?)


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Tony]
    #12083919 -

I just think it's an anthropocentric idea to attribute consciousness generation to the human brain.


Why? Not just the human brain but the brain of other living things. The distinct possibility that it's an emergent quality or by product of the evolution of a brain is a likely possibility considering all the other evidence we don't have.


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"Don't believe everything you think". -Anom.

" All that lives was born to die"-Anom.

With much wisdom comes much sorrow,
The more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: deCypher]
    #12083944 -

I can only provide indirect evidence for that. Many medications are having a harder and harder time passing double blind tests because of placebo effects. It seems that as society believes more and more that medication will work, the more placebo we see. The speculation would then be that believing something won't work, prevents you from experiencing the placebo effect, but not from the physical effects.

But maybe no one is skeptical of what their physical body tells them, so we're not really seeing skepticism of the mechanism.


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Why shouldn't the truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Kickle]
    #12083959 -

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
--AC


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: deCypher]
    #12084185 -

deCypher said:
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
--AC


nice, who is AC?

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Freedom]
    #12084232 -

Aleister Crowley


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Tony]
    #12084285 -

Tony said:
Action potentials carry information throughout the nervous system. The funny thing is that action potentials are never significantly different from each other. So, a single nerve impulse carrying information about sound is no different from one carrying information about sight, even though the energies that trigger these impulses in the appropriate receptor cells are in different forms.



Actually there is quite a lot of variation in the properties of action potentials. Their shape varies quite a lot from neuron to neuron. Also the dynamic properties vary quite a lot as well, for example if you stimulate a train of action potentials in some neurons, the response will diminish over time, but in others the response will stay constant.

These different properties of action potentials are caused by different types of ion channels, and the orginization of those ion channels. An ion channel will cause a different response if it is in the post synaptic region, a dendritic spine, a dendritic shaft, the cell body or the axon hillock. There are over 100 different ion channels that can shape this, so it is quite complex and fascinating if you get into it.

What gets really interesting is there lots of EPSPs (excititory post synaptic potentials) and IPSPs (inhibitory post synaptic potentials). These potentials are bellow the threshold needed to fire an action potential, and it is the properties of these and their interaction which determines whether the neuron fires or not.

The different properties of the ion channels determine the shape of the EPSPs and IPSPs, the shapes and frequencies and timing of these potentials are the input and a computation that determines if the neuron will fire.

In this way each neuron is doing a tiny little computation from the information it receives. For example a type of ganglion cell in the retina is always looking for the exact combination of excititory and inhibitory inputs that occur when there is a line at a certain angle in a certain part of your visual field. When it gets this info it fires an action potential.

/nerd

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: deCypher]
    #12084356 -

deCypher said:
Aleister Crowley



Damn to bad I'm too busy* to read him





*busy is a great replacement for lazy :smile:

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: deCypher]
    #12084848 -

This is why a human mind will not recognize a non human mind. When we do recognize one, how will we understand it? How will it understand us? :tarzan:


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The Great Mycelium (TGMM) is more than you and me, we are all part of One.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: explosiveoxygen]
    #12084890 -

assimilation


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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: Tony]
    #12085680 -

Tony said:
Action potentials carry information throughout the nervous system...


wrong

the signals are not information.
that is a common information age cultural meme struggling with something so simple that it seems to be a paradox.

consciousness is not information.

even memory is not information unless it gets used that way.

the sensory signals always go to the same spot in the cortex from the same piece of sensory tissue. from there the energy spreads radially across the cortex and makes interference patterns with other currently activated cortical loci.

these interference patterns cause multi-axon cells to form an ENGRAM with all currently active cortical neurons, which is the smallest piece of memory.

this engram is throughout the cortex but specific just to those cells that were active together in that moment. When enough of a similar pattern is stimulated in the future by a similar occurrence, the whole of pattern can come back to action as a memory. & the more frequently it recurs the stronger the memory.

the memory is in the same place as the original sensation event in the cortex which is how it preserves it's character.

this works the same for animals most of which just have less cortex and less overall complexity.

much of the rest of the comment needs no consideration if you can grasp this.


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:brainfart: _ :finger:

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: redgreenvines]
    #12086672 -

redgreenvines said:
the signals are not information.


Everything is information.  How is a signal not information of some sort?


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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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Re: How does action potential translate to conscious experience? [Re: explosiveoxygen]
    #12086805 -

explosiveoxygen said:
This is why a human mind will not recognize a non human mind. When we do recognize one, how will we understand it? How will it understand us? :tarzan:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_translation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_interpretation

Davidson's argument is that we can always understand an alien's language without understanding the meaning behind their words.  It's *always* possible to understand an alien language given enough context.  If, after going through our radical translation process, we still can't understand what the alien is saying, it's not clear that the alien is actually speaking a language (he might be just spewing random gibberish).

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