meekerdb wrote:
On 3/28/2015 12:33 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
Another possibility is that all those neurons that /*didn't*/ fire in
the calculation were just as necessary to the experience as the one's
that did. That seems quite plausible to me.
I find the notion quite bizarre. It is the actual sequence of actual
brain states that is important. If some neuron didn't fire, then they
did not contribute to /that/ conscious moment, no matter that they
might be crucial to other, /different/, moments of consciousness.
That seems bizarre to me. Are you saying that when I look at a black
and white picture only the photoreceptors that fire contribute to my
experience and the ones that didn't fire are irrelevant? Only the "1"s
matter and not the "0"s? The state of the brain (assuming thought is
neural action) depends on all the neurons; not just the ones firing at a
given time.
I see your point, but don't think it really makes a difference.
Certainly, the pattern of the brain state, which includes neurons that
didn't fire, is part of the description of the state. But if I replace
the neurons that didn't fire with a label saying 'there once was a
neuron here!', the pattern is the same, and you could argue that the
film re-animating the sequence of brain states would reproduce the
conscious state quite adequately even without those neurons being alive,
as long as the place is kept.
But I was actually think more widely of the fact that many brain
functions are largely localized. When I move my leg, the motor cortex
lights up, but if I am in the dark, or if I am blind, the visual cortex
is not generally involved. Consciousness is not lost if a few random
neurons die off, or are lost to injury and/or illness. People can lose
very large parts of their brains and still remain conscious, and for
quite a number of smaller brain injuries, the subjects do not
necessarily lose much functionality. So it is not the case that the
whole brain is involved in producing consciousness and this observation
seems to me to somewhat blunt the MGA.
Bruce
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