[Peter Cariani (960502)]
[From Rick Marken (960501.1340)]
Peter Cariani (960501):
>You assume consciousness, awareness, and perception
> without specifying what any of these things are.
But we do specify them, in terms of what they are
(perceptions = neural signals in afferent neurons)
and in terms of what they _do_ (consciousness
involves the detection of perceptual signals
[awareness] and the manipulation
of reference signals [volition] in the control hierarchy).
Oh, yes, this really pins it all down. (Let it be noted that
I have not accused anyone of the crime of "handwaving", but
those who make such criticisms should examine their own
explanations.)
>What exactly are these neural signals you are hypothesizing?
The rate of neural firing.
It's good that we have such a highly developed, specific account.
But, there are numerous examples where "firing rates" (itself
a very vague term without any mention of which neurons are involved
or what kinds of time windows are used for the "rate") do not (and
in some cases, cannot) explain the perceptual distinctions that
are made -- where other factors such as temporal discharge
patterns and spike latencies appear to constitute the "signal".
>Where is the "observer"?
"Outside" of the neural signals (perceptions) that are observed;
the observer_could_ be constructed of neurons, too,
but these neurons would have to be "outside" of the neurons
carrying the observed perceptual signals.
Yes, it's all become crystal clear to me now. Why, yes! They must be
<outside> the neurons carrying the signals (whichever those are).
Why didn't I think of that? This weekend I plan to build one
of these things with these construction plans. I see the light
and admit that I was being fuzzy-minded, and capitulate totally
to the logical force and rigor of your "hard-headed" approach.
>You aren't even trying to solve the same problem,
>so why compare the two explanations?
But we _are_ trying to solve the problem
(of consciousness) and our approach
to an explanation seems (to us) much better than yours
because it is, at least in principle, _testable_
(both Bill and I have suggested possble means of
testing our notion of consiousness).
I keep outlining how one can test for particular psycho-neural
correspondences. This is one of my central points, that there
<can> be empirical tests of these notions.
I'm as hard-core about wanting to empirically test these notions,
as anyone else on the planet, but the concepts have to be thought up,
articulated, debated, and developed before they can reach that stage.
As far as accounts of "awareness" go, <all> existing explanations
are in the most rudimentary and primitive of stages.
>It is possible to distinguish systems that are self-producing
>from those that are not
What is a "self-producing" system and how do you
distinguish it from one that is not self-producing?
As I said in yesterday's message, the big problems involve the
neural coding problem (precisely, what are the neural signals?,
what is their form?, how are they processed? -- and I'm sorry,
a general appeal to firing rates just doesn't cut the mustard
here) and then once one has some idea of what the signals actually
are there is the problem of getting access to enough of them so
that one can actually observe the functional organization of the
entire network in action.
Next to these problems, those of operationally-defining how to
recognize self-producing sets of signals from some set of
identified and observed signals is trivial. Consider a set
of chemical reactions between substrates A-Z, where some
combinations of substrates produce other substrates, e.g.
A + B -> C, and M + O + Z -> D + W + F.
One can make a directed graph of the reaction network
and using graph-theoretic (or logical entailment)
procedures find those sets of substrates that
form closed loops, i.e. the members of the
set through their interactions regenerate the members of the set.
This is an operational definition of "autopoiesis" and I believe
that it is the best operational definition for living
organization ("life", as we know it) that we have.
Neural signals can be considered in similar terms. Ok?
>We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Gutteral regards from Hollywood,
Grunt.
How about them optical interferometry telescopes that were in
yesterday's science section of the New York Times?
Really impressive.
Peter Cariani