This is the Blind Brain Theory (BBT). Very briefly, the theory rests on the observation that from the torrent of information processed by the brain, only a meagre trickle makes it through to consciousness; and crucially that includes information about the processing itself. We have virtually no idea of the massive and complex processes churning away in all the unconscious functions that really make things work and the result is that consciousness is not at all what it seems to be. In fact we must draw the interesting distinction between what consciousness is and what it seems to be...
But we also need to take account of the recursively self-referential nature of consciousness. Scott takes the view (others have taken a similar line), that consciousness is the product of a special kind of recursion which allows the brain to take into account its own operations and contents as well as the external world. Instead of simply providing an output action for a given stimulus, it can throw its own responses into the mix and generate output actions which are more complex, more detached, and in terms of survival, more effective. Ultimately only recursively integrated information reaches consciousness.
The limits to that information are expressed as information horizons or strangely invisible boundaries; like the edge of the visual field the contents of conscious awareness have asymptotic limits – borders with only one side. The information always appears to be complete even though it may be radically impoverished in fact. This has various consequences, one of which is that because we can’t see the gaps, the various sensory domains appear spuriously united.
My interest here is what this massive information asymmetry (38 trillion calculations per second versus consciousness straining to do simple multiplication of whole numbers), means for how we consider the unconscious. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It's something I've been kicking around for awhile. — Count Timothy von Icarus
lizard brain — Count Timothy von Icarus
unconscious — Count Timothy von Icarus
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/520927 (see "Bakker" link in the post)My educated guess – Like the eye that is necessarily absent from its own visual field, the brain, lacking internal sensory organs, is functionally brain-blind, and therefore cannot immediately perceive any source – mechanisms – of its own thoughts even as it is thinking so that the cognitive illusion of an "I-self" floating free and "essentially" disembodied persists and variations of a "soul"-of-the-gaps (or more sophisticated gap-of-the-gaps aka "nonduality") are psychologically (& culturally) confabulated to (transcendentally) tether down our "thoughts". — 180 Proof
psychological processes unavailable to explicit consciousness are nevertheless implied by and belong to it (and vice-versa), not in the sense of a content that arbitrarily contributes to awareness in the manner of interactions between independent regions, but as an integral bodily background — Joshs
The stuff you can't do without isn't sensory innervated.
A fair amount of the stuff that is sensory innervated can be lost without any significant change in consciousness. — frank
And underlying ‘sensory innervation’ is what sort of set of pre-suppositions? — Joshs
That the brain constructs representations out of raw sense data that come from an outside existing entirely independently of the subject, but can never be directly accessed as what it is in itself? — Joshs
It's not any sort of presupposition. It's anatomy. — frank
When you say "embodied" what part of the body are you talking about? — frank
Or to summarize, the unconscious is doing a lot more, at a much higher level then we often give it credit for and key aspects of our minds that we generally think of as conscious functions (i.e. most higher level thought) also appear to be able to run in the background, without making it to the recursive system. — Count Timothy von Icarus
What is the anatomy of a sensation, a perception, a memory, an affect? What are the anatomical
boundaries of the body? Does the body end with the skin, the hair? Or does it extend into the environment? Is the air part of the lungs? — Joshs
In short , we have a single brain-body-world system which functions as an integrated whole. Focusing on anatomy apart from function or isolating ‘sensation’ from perceptual interpretation is artificial and an attempt to separate what is inseparable. — Joshs
Just to pick this apart... there's an unfortunate common assumption that "the I" equates to "what I am aware of when I self reflect"; as if these are indivisible entities. But I've never quite understood how this is really supposed to work anyway... if I decide to move my hand now, how can that sensibly be the same as my awareness of my deciding to move my hand now? (I suppose the model is supposed to work like I first consciously deliberate, then I decide, then it happens; but that quite simply doesn't fit my experience of how most of the voluntary actions I perform feels like).For a spookier example, tests show that the sense of voluntary movement (i.e. I decide to move my hand now) actually comes after the movement has already started. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The things that are clearly innervated, like your mouth (there are three big fat nerves keeping watch there), don't appear to be necessary for consciousness. You don't need a mouth to enjoy Beethoven. You don't need your digestive track. We can put the right chemicals straight into your blood.
You don't need a heart or lungs. We can bypass those with machinery and you can remain wide awake. — frank
You may be missing the point. It’s not a question of what’s necessary for the very existence of consciousness, — Joshs
but of how feedback from nerves in the mouth or the other organs contribute to the particular way in which consciousness functions. — Joshs
I’m not arguing that the organism is an undifferentiated whole. Of course there are differentiated subsystems. The brain cannot pump the blood , the lungs cant think, the liver cannot hear. But alterations to any of these processes ( circulatory blockage, liver toxicity , renal failure, copd, Alzheimer’s) changes the functioning of all the other processes in some fashion, including consciousness. — Joshs
As far as the brain not being able to feel itself , the sensations from the receptors cannot be consciously felt no matter how healthy they are , because conscious feeling is not simply receptor stimulation but a complex
, differentiated process of perception, most of which takes place far away from the sensory source. This is also the reason for phantom limb syndrome , the real feeling of sensation arising from an amputated limb. The receptors are no longer three , but the brain processes of sensory perception are still active. — Joshs
In sum, we can’t tear organ systems and other as processes of the body as interchangeable , but neither can we understand what they are in themselves without understanding what they do, and we cannot understand what they do without knowing how they interact in reciprocal fashion with all other systems of the body for the sake of a total functionally unified system. And this total body system cannot be understood without knowing how it forms a body-environment process. You remove the environment and you fail to understand the body. — Joshs
you don't need most of your body to be conscious. Therefore, embodied consciousness has to do with content. That's an issue far downstream from a basic theory of consciousness. — frank
think this is the real import of the word ‘embodiment’ It doesn’t just refer to anatomical parts outside of the brain, but a way of understanding the organization of cognition and its relation to the organization of living systems in general. — Joshs
Think about geniuses' great moments of breakthrough. — Count Timothy von Icarus
this thing we call “the world” isn’t something wholly outside ourselves, something we experience in a detached and objective way. It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us—and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience.
That point is astonishingly easy to forget. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve watched distinguished scientists admit with one breath that the things we experience around us aren’t real—they’re just representations constructed by our sense organs and brains, reacting to an unimaginable reality of probability waves in four-dimensional space-time—and then go on with the very next breath to forget all that, and act as though matter, energy, space, time, and physical objects exactly as we perceive them are real in the most pigheadedly literal sort of objective sense, as though the human mind has nothing to do with any of them except as a detached observer. What’s more, many of those same scientists proceed to make sweeping claims about what human beings can and can’t know and do, in blithe disregard of the fact that these very claims depend on the same notion of the objective reality of the world of experience that they’ve just disproved. — John Michal Greer, The Clenched Fist of Reason
I don't get this impression we have of lizard brains being primitive. We are the lizards that survived the extinction level event 65 million years ago. — TheMadFool
the theory rests on the observation that from the torrent of information processed by the brain, only a meagre trickle makes it through to consciousness; and crucially that includes information about the processing itself.
He's an interesting writer. I bought Life's Solution in a rush of enthusiasm about 8 years ago, but it's a very technical biology text, requires a pretty high degree of bioscience to absorb. But, philosophically congenial to my way of thinking. — Wayfarer
The idea that my fingers begin moving and then I retroactively begin to experience the sensation of choosing seems backwards to me, and given the reaction to the paper, many other people as well. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I suppose it's not spooky if you don't go in assuming that you make a decision first, and then act. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Self awareness could be an accident of evolution, but my strong guess is that it serves a function for long term planning. Certainly it is hard to explain how humans make such long term and complex plans without self reflection and recursive feedback acting to steer things at some level. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The survivors of the Yucatan Impact are birds, not humans, We descend from mammals that lived at the same time as the dinosaurs and survived the catastrophe.
We do have a "reptile brain", so called because it is similar to the brain of reptiles. It's the cerebellum and brain stem. It's a vital control center of physical functions like breathing. It is in control of our innate and automatic self-preserving behavior patterns, which ensure our survival and that of our species.
You might like to know that your inner ear structures are an adaptation of the back part of the fish jaw that shrank in size and somehow (don't ask me) was used to fashion your inner ear as we developed into a different group within the larger phylum of vertebrates--chordata (animals with backbones). Chordata is divided into five common classes: fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds. To read more about this (and related matters) see YOUR INNER FISH by Neil Shubin. Fun read, I thought. — Bitter Crank
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