Dear Johnathan,
I find this idea to be very appealing! It seesm to imply that
"consciousness" per say has more to do with the attractor in state space
that any particular tableaux of neutron firings.
This, of course, would not fit well with the material eliminativists to
be forced to extend the same ontological status that we extend to flesh and
blood and hardware and electromagnetic fields to such entities as "strange
attractors" ! ;-)
http://www.newdualism.org/papers/M.Robertson/churchl.pdf
Kindest regards,
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Johnathan Corgan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <everything-list@eskimo.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 10:48 PM
Subject: Re: where do copies come from?
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
It is likely that multiple error correction and negative feedback systems
are in place to ensure that small changes are not chaotically amplified
to cause gross mental changes after a few seconds,
On the other hand, the above may be precisely how consciousness operates!
Picture a system that traverses through many different states as "chaotic
attractor" cycles, and outside stimuli act to nudge the system between
grossly different chaotic attractors. You have a system that needs to be
exquisitely tuned to subtle input changes, yet also robust in the face of
other types of changes (damage, etc.)
In the brain, these "state trajectories" would be neuronal firing patterns
and synaptic chemical gradients. Determining the chaotic attractors
themselves would be neuronal morphology and ion channel types and
locations.
The "short-term" information about a brain might not need to be stored in
order to reconstruct a brain. That is, individual neuron on-off states
and synaptic chemical gradients may be "how you feel and what you are
thinking this moment"--but discarding (or not measuring) this info might
only mean the reconstructed brain would start from some "blank" state.
Chaotic attractor dynamics would "pull" the system into one of the
aforementioned chaotic cycles and the system as a whole would eventually
recreate the short-term firing patterns and chemical gradients needed for
normal functioning.
(The above might be wrong in particulars, but I strongly suspect the
concept of small changes perturbing a chaotic system to shift between
chaotic attractors will play a role in the ultimate explanation of how
neuronal processes give rise to conscious experience.)
-Johnathan
