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morrowasted
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Re: RGV's Consciousness 101 Basics [Re: cubedryeguy]
#28375256 - 06/26/23 01:02 PM (6 months, 30 days ago) |
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LOL when was it? I'm busy so I can't click the link but it must have been a while ago. Chalmers is still out in front it seems. Poor Dennett can't seem to keep up anymore. I never cared much for his approach anyway. What remains unclear is whether or not what Dennett can't keep up with is sophistry or something real.
Edited by morrowasted (06/26/23 03:05 PM)
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redgreenvines
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Re: RGV's Consciousness 101 Basics [Re: cubedryeguy]
#28375268 - 06/26/23 01:11 PM (6 months, 30 days ago) |
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Quote:
cubedryeguy said: I just came across this article about a bet made between neuroscientist Christoph Koch and philosopher David Chalmers that we’d know the mechanism by which the brains neurons produce consciousness by now.
Thought it was fitting to then come across this thread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8
funny!!!
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cubedryeguy
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Re: RGV's Consciousness 101 Basics [Re: morrowasted] 1
#28375348 - 06/26/23 02:01 PM (6 months, 30 days ago) |
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25 years ago. Koch admitted defeat but says he’s willing to double down on his bet to 25 years from now. Given his age it’s a fair bet…
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redgreenvines
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Re: RGV's Consciousness 101 Basics [Re: cubedryeguy] 1
#28375361 - 06/26/23 02:19 PM (6 months, 30 days ago) |
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Tell him about my thread, hahaha!
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cubedryeguy
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Quote:
redgreenvines said: Tell him about my thread, hahaha!
I got you my man
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: redgreenvines]
#28375912 - 06/26/23 09:59 PM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
redgreenvines said:
Quote:
morrowasted said: I'm just here to say thank you. I don't know how you figured all of this out but it is true.
you are welcome, 50 years of investigation and pondering about pondering, accelerated by salvia divinorum over the last 18 years.
I tend to think that the Salvia trip is almost the worst outcome possible..
But it opens your mind to eccentric possibilities.
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morrowasted
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: BrendanFlock]
#28375936 - 06/26/23 10:27 PM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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Think left & think right and think low & think high: the thinks you can think up if only you only try.
S0phishtree
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morrowasted
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: morrowasted]
#28376049 - 06/27/23 02:28 AM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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I'm not trying to derail your thread back into making you reduce consciousness again but this video from Max tegmark encapsulates why I would not have used the word consciousness in creating this thread or diagram. Very simply put, perception, sensation, suppression , and expression constitute mental contents BUT the medium on which those events occur is what philosophers coin consciousness. Or if you want to dispense with the notion of needing a medium you can just define it as "what it's like to be something." I very much enjoyed your thread, followed your ideas, and reconnected some dots more accurately. You've done a very good job of explaining what it's like to be a human and the wires and bits that piece it together. but the question of why it's 'like anything to be anything at all' remains given the seeming plausibility of a world where everything is happening but nothing is experienced and therefore consciousness is an irrelevant concept.
Max Tegmark on 'Consciousness'
https://bigthink.com/the-well/consciousness/#Echobox=1687843597
Edited by morrowasted (06/27/23 03:52 AM)
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sudly
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: morrowasted]
#28376067 - 06/27/23 03:17 AM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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Not that this necessarily adds anything, but as a generalised foundation I think it's okay.
Quote:
Consciousness, as described by Anil Seth, is a dynamic and complex phenomenon that arises from the interactions between the brain, body, and environment. It involves active and distributed processing, where the brain continuously generates expectations and updates them based on incoming sensory information. This ongoing predictive processing allows the brain to construct our conscious experiences, which are shaped by both internal and external contexts.
The contributions highlight that consciousness is not a passive reflection of reality, but an active interpretation of our surroundings. It is a multifaceted process that goes beyond perceiving external stimuli and involves the brain's capacity to generate expectations and make sense of the world. This view rejects the notion of a static and unchanging self, emphasizing the ever-evolving nature of consciousness and its dependence on the dynamic interplay between the brain, body, and environment.
By embracing this perspective, we gain a deeper understanding of consciousness as a continuously evolving phenomenon, where the brain actively engages with sensory information and constructs our conscious experiences in real-time. This dynamic nature of consciousness transcends traditional ideas of a fixed self and highlights the interactive and adaptive nature of our conscious awareness.
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morrowasted
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: sudly]
#28376074 - 06/27/23 03:44 AM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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See I can't put my finger on it but every explanation I read fails to explain the mechanism.
I get that brains are not like other organs and they're changing all the time even- well, especially- within the individual organism.
I'm not going to bog This thread down with philosophy of Mind any further though
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sudly
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: redgreenvines] 2
#28376089 - 06/27/23 04:20 AM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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To me it sounds like you're trying to describe cortico-thalamic back propagation as a mechanism to underlie predictive processing by facilitating the iterative process of prediction and error adjustment.
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redgreenvines
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: sudly] 3
#28376118 - 06/27/23 05:43 AM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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In my opinion, the philosophy of mind (which I had no idea existed pre 2010 as I was looking for some specific evidence related to memory formation and perception) is an historical record of thought, which had inherited some flat earth like concepts including
- subconscious mind
- will & decision making & free will
- soul
- Hierarchical brain states
- brain states that are unique for each content rather than emotional/resonant brain states.
- ego
In many circles of thought the issue of prediction is stressed as a concomitant feature of consciousness, as well as logic, and I see these things as mental habits that are fundamentally associative perception at play. No Logic processing and no predictive processing except for a natural ability to remember trajectories and compare them and feel them - as in hunting animals jumping and swerving their attacks while prey also jumps and swerves to avoid, in which case both animals are following internally felt trajectories that use cerebellar timing circuits and temporal and parietal spatial awareness etc. Not actual prediction, but something like the feeling of musical scales which make sense over time.
As for how does it feel to be something like a bat, or like a human, I think that an aspect of this does anneal a few erroneous concepts in the following way: The frontal and prefrontal cortices receive gestalt or overall mental contents indirectly via pyramidal feeds, some of which are full action potential shunts, and most of which is micro-branches. In this way FC and PFC are like sense specific cortices for the mix or totality of how it feels to be human, and while not hierarchical, these associations add to the totality of how it feels to be human, and this set of neurons (FC & PFC) are uniquely wired into the amygdala and hippocampus where resonant brain states (emotion etc.) turn feeling into something that includes pleasure or fear.
That said, several times per day, I run into instances in which mental events happen for which I have no explanation such as yesterday when out the blue, while making breakfast I felt compelled to say: "Binaki Museum" (which is a museum in Athens) that is also related to some project in Kardamili. My wife was at that same moment looking at a real estate listing around the corner from the "Binaki Museum", and she asked me why I was saying those words. I really do not know. I certainly did not hear her mumble and my hearing is very poor anyway, I use expensive hearing aids if I have to discuss things with people, but do not wear them before breakfast.
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redgreenvines
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: sudly]
#28376119 - 06/27/23 05:44 AM (6 months, 29 days ago) |
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Quote:
sudly said: To me it sounds like you're trying to describe cortico-thalamic back propagation as a mechanism to underlie predictive processing by facilitating the iterative process of prediction and error adjustment.
This is very succinctly put.
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morrowasted
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: redgreenvines] 2
#28378156 - 06/28/23 07:28 PM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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You just may be right that I'm trapped inside of a kind of semantic mind prison that conjures up questions that are unanswerable. I did get a degree in philosophy the first time I went to college and of course took philosophy of mind but at the same time I was also working as a research assistant in a cognitive Neuroscience lab that investigated various things related to neural correlates of monolingualism versus multilingualism. I worked there because I'm fluent in Spanish mostly and I made a 100 in my neurobiology class so my professor just kind of suggested I do it and it appealed to my pride. In the sense of being very fluently bilingual I feel like I MUST be a little bit less trapped inside of a specific semantics than the average person. If my second language or something very different like Mandarin, even more so. Could be totally wrong
Quote:
That said, several times per day, I run into instances in which mental events happen for which I have no explanation
as do i. Which is much of the reason that I ask a lot of questions. Because as I mentioned before sometimes it sometimes seems to me as though there is something like a field of consciousness and that brains merely act analogously to radio receivers or TV sets that pick up on this field combine it with perceptual information to produce the overall experience.
Little tidbits here and there such as quantum entanglement, which you already mentioned is not of much interest to you especially at the level of what's happening in brains, keep me from feeling like the question is anywhere close to settled, no matter how well I may feel like understand the mechanisms involved in the perceptual portion of this process, which I do believe you have elucidated in great detail and accuracy
Edited by morrowasted (06/28/23 09:14 PM)
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cubedryeguy
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: morrowasted] 1
#28378217 - 06/28/23 08:30 PM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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One of the greatest teachings I became aware of on psychedelics is that the mystery is never ending. But we’ll keep trying to brush the dirt off of it and see what we find or what finds us.
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morrowasted
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: cubedryeguy] 1
#28378402 - 06/28/23 10:48 PM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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Reading an article in the New scientist and this quote feels relevant

Similarly, we can do so many things to reengineer what we call consciousness but we cannot really say what it is as far as I can understand
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cubedryeguy
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: morrowasted]
#28378518 - 06/29/23 02:06 AM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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Quote:
morrowasted said: Reading an article in the New scientist and this quote feels relevant

Similarly, we can do so many things to reengineer what we call consciousness but we cannot really say what it is as far as I can understand
Interesting quote and quite similar to a book I read recently. It also referenced a tribe of people that don’t use numbers or any abstract ideas in their language.
It seems the word consciousness often gets interchanged with sentience and awareness.
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sudly
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: cubedryeguy] 3
#28378521 - 06/29/23 02:28 AM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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Quote:
cubedryeguy said: One of the greatest teachings I became aware of on psychedelics is that the mystery is never ending. But we’ll keep trying to brush the dirt off of it and see what we find or what finds us. 
As we explain the properties of consciousness in terms of brain and body mechanisms, the mystery of what consciousness is will gradually fade away.
I understand the notion that discovery may seem to take away the mystery of things, but I don't think it's a matter of elimination, but instead a transformation of the mystery. Each new discovery opens a door to deeper understandings that can reveal the intricacies and mechanisms behind what was one mysterious. I don't think that discovery erases wonder and awe of the unkown but instead uncovers new layers of intricacy and reveals the remarkable complexity that exists within our world.
The more we explore and discover, the more we realise how vast and enigmatic the universe truly is.
Instead of diminishing the mystery, I think discovery becomes the catalyst for a profound appreciation of the intricate beauty that surrounds us. I think it's through the interplay between discovery and mystery that our curiosity is continuously ignited and propelling us on our journey of exploration and a deepening appreciation for the wonders of the natural world.
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cubedryeguy
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: sudly] 1
#28378527 - 06/29/23 02:50 AM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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I whole heartedly agree and the mystery I was suggesting was more in the totality of everything. I agree that for many, if not most people, once something is explained or labeled the ‘magic’ is lost so to speak. I enjoy the explanations and insights that we discover but I also enjoy quieting my thoughts to a whisper and feeling as though I’m viewing everything from a fresh and unlabeled perspective. I think many here have experienced that on psychedelic’s.
I’ll leave the explanations into how the brain and body produce or interface with consciousness to the experts.
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morrowasted
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Re: a demonstration in Javascript of the ideas in the original post [Re: cubedryeguy]
#28378917 - 06/29/23 11:52 AM (6 months, 27 days ago) |
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Quote:
I worked there because I'm fluent in Spanish mostly and I made a 100 in my neurobiology class so my professor just kind of suggested I do it and it appealed to my pride. In the sense of being very fluently bilingual I feel like I MUST be a little bit less trapped inside of a specific semantics than the average person. If my second language or something very different like Mandarin, even more so. Could be totally wrong
to make the most obvious example of this, if you wanted to try to translate the word consciousness from English into Spanish, you pretty much be stuck with the word consciencia.
But that word does not really denote or connote the same thing. It comes from the Latin con, which means "with" or "what(ever) accompanies" and the latin-then-greek scientia, which was their word for "what is known" (as opposed to what is believed or speculated). The most literal- and all of the oldest- translation(s) of consciencia possible is/were conscience, but that, to me, clearly denotes something different than consciousness.
Obviously the Greek scientia is the root for our word science which is what we say to mean our method of knowing things.
But even more fundamentally the Latin/greek word ciencia/scientia, although they are abstractly defined as knowing-Way, both come from the root sens-*, which is also the root for words like sense, sensation, sensibility etc.
What's interesting is that the Greeks were firmly against the concept of anything like a void. This shows up in the way that they focus their entire mathematical efforts on geometry. They could not conceptualize of an empty set because there's no such thing as a zero angle that's useful and there's certainly no such thing as a negative angle that's useful. Until.......
It doesn't appear to be until around 700 AD in India that for some reason a guy decided this circular placeholder symbol that had existed for centuries, from the West, could actually become very useful by representing the void concept, in combination with the Arabic numeral system, also from the West*. In fact the use of this numeral was actually banned in Rome initially because it was impossible to unambiguously denote in Roman numerals, and the government felt that it's use was an open invitation for bankers to commit fraud by confusing borrowers. Perhaps they were right.
The modern numerals already existed and the Arabian peninsula and the circle symbol already existed in many places as a placeholder symbol to allow people to tell the difference between, for example "1 12" and "1O12" without having to rely on the ambiguity of how much space there is between the two ones.
All this Indian guy did was realized that you could put that circle at the end and increase the value of the number by an order of 10 (10120= 1012^10). By appending the void concepts to a series of non-void concepts, an entire world of possibilities opened up in the form of algebra and then calculus. From there forward it was understood that in order to understand geometry in motion, one must invoke this void concept, awkward as it may feel it first, particularly when you try to divide by it.
So to me it seems that perhaps the original Greeks and Roman were the ones more trapped inside of a kind of semantics that led to the kind of neo-Aristotelian/Catholic philosophy that, ironically at times, seems to underpin historical and modern incarnations of pure materialism, which in essence amounts to the denial that whatever concept is denoted by the void symbol has a 'real/ontological existence.'
Thus in my mind the word consciousness cannot denote or connote the same thing as the Latin consciencia because that word originated in the context of a culture where nobody even had the concept of a void. Even in the philosophy of Plato if you tried to map his Forms onto numeracy, he would have said that one is the originator of all other numerals. You see this fully embodied in the neoplatonism of gospel era Christianity.
What we're stuck with is essentially using something that is fundamentally unknowable as the Crux of being able to know anything at all.
*Which even more interestingly, along with ser 'to be (intransiently)", which in turn comes from old Galician se, which seems to have connoted the concepts 'to sit' and 'to sum', according to context..... Almost as if there is a fundamental connection between meditating and increasing levels of abstraction and representation, and this translates into something realizable, whether the concept denoted something real to begin with
Nietzsche is virtually impossible to not misinterpret if you are a monolingual. I mean in some of his books he literally writes an entire chapter in Latin and says never translate this into anything else, goddamn it. But even beyond that his entire motivation for writing was essentially based on philology, and other people just kind of called it philosophy
*What I call the West here is what people here would call the Middle East/North Africa now
Edited by morrowasted (06/29/23 05:54 PM)
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