Clues about consciousness

[Clive]

Originally Posted by rocketdodger

Where do these false memories come from? At some point in the chain there *are* senses involved.

What "senses" underlie the subjective experience of your consciously chiming grandfather clock?

[Dancing David]

Originally Posted by rocketdodger

Where do these false memories come from? At some point in the chain there *are* senses involved.

I think that has more to do with a series of processes, first confabulation which has a number of traits, first people with head trauma often have false memories of what happened prior to the event and then there is perceptual confabulation, like the material in the blind spot and most of the colors you see.

Perceptual confabulation may be a trivial process of blending existing perceptions from sensations into the visual field, but it does happen. (Close one eye and look, do you see the blind spot? While one eye is closed how much color do you see, the fovea is about the size of two degrees of the visual field (two dimes at arms length).)

Now memory is a very odd duck and still being theorized and formulated about and the beginning of investigation, the main issue is I remember the recent research is that memory is not stored as data like on a hard drive. It is more a loosely distributed set of separate fuzzy data points over a wide dispersed network and then recreated. Some sort of consensus arrives between the different data points of association. So it is likely that some memories are created with associations from similar events or spurious events.

So re-creation is a better term than retrieval. And given the nature of pattern recognition in the brain and pattern creation it is easy to see how false memories arise. There is no redundant storage and error checking.

[rocketdodger]

Originally Posted by Mijin

Random data. We keep scrambling the hypothetical brain's memory until we have a functioning consciousness.

Actually, that would work. Awesome response.

[rocketdodger]

Originally Posted by Dancing David

I think that has more to do with a series of processes, first confabulation which has a number of traits, first people with head trauma often have false memories of what happened prior to the event and then there is perceptual confabulation, like the material in the blind spot and most of the colors you see.

Perceptual confabulation may be a trivial process of blending existing perceptions from sensations into the visual field, but it does happen. (Close one eye and look, do you see the blind spot? While one eye is closed how much color do you see, the fovea is about the size of two degrees of the visual field (two dimes at arms length).)

Now memory is a very odd duck and still being theorized and formulated about and the beginning of investigation, the main issue is I remember the recent research is that memory is not stored as data like on a hard drive. It is more a loosely distributed set of separate fuzzy data points over a wide dispersed network and then recreated. Some sort of consensus arrives between the different data points of association. So it is likely that some memories are created with associations from similar events or spurious events.

So re-creation is a better term than retrieval. And given the nature of pattern recognition in the brain and pattern creation it is easy to see how false memories arise. There is no redundant storage and error checking.

I know pretty much exactly how memory works, there has been tremendous headway on that topic in the last decade. The neocortex, including the visual cortex, is a hierarchical pattern recognition system. A "memory" is a series of recognized patterns in that hierarchy, nothing more. When novel patterns are encountered ( that don't match any existing hierarchy ) the hippocampus temporarily records the pattern of pattern recognition and repeatedly plays it back to the neocortex until the patterns are memorized.

You are spot on that it is re-creation, not retrieval.

My point is that you can't take a brain that has learned nothing and claim it somehow experiences human-like consciousness. That is just an absurd proposition.

[Shadow the Poodle]

This might be the best thread to put this in,whilst out for a walk this morning I was struck by the thought ( for no apparent reason) that I had not seen any road kill, within a second I was treated to the smell of a dead fox and shortly its corpse. I assumed that I had smelt the fox below my perception threshold ( if that is the right way to describe it ) that then triggered the road kill thought and then voila dead fox.
Am I on the right track with how I became conscious of the road kill? Our is it more likely due to a delay in processing the smell allowing the thought to slip in first.
Funny things brains.

[Soapy Sam]

Could be simple chance, but I tend to agree you smelled it and your subconscious was flagging it a bit before you got the message. I suspect a lot of "psychic" experiences are due to this sort of thing.

[Dancing David]

Originally Posted by rocketdodger

I know pretty much exactly how memory works, there has been tremendous headway on that topic in the last decade. The neocortex, including the visual cortex, is a hierarchical pattern recognition system. A "memory" is a series of recognized patterns in that hierarchy, nothing more. When novel patterns are encountered ( that don't match any existing hierarchy ) the hippocampus temporarily records the pattern of pattern recognition and repeatedly plays it back to the neocortex until the patterns are memorized.

You are spot on that it is re-creation, not retrieval.

My point is that you can't take a brain that has learned nothing and claim it somehow experiences human-like consciousness. That is just an absurd proposition.

Agreed, development requires exposure.

[quarky]

Huh?

That is the conscious imperative.

or, perhaps

"D'oh"!

"Huh" is the negative value of "D'oh".

(Hopefully, this is pretty clear by now.)