A recent paper takes on the extradimensional explanation for consciousness: From Black Holes Entropy to Consciousness: The Dimensions of the Brain Connectome. The author, Dr. Denis LE BIHAN, seems fairly legitimate with a number of papers and significant positions held over the years. The core idea of the paper is “consciousness can naturally emerge from this four-dimensional brain connectome when a fifth dimension is considered, in the same way that gravity emerges from a ‘flat’ four-dimensional quantum world, without gravitation, present at the boundaries of a five-dimensional spacetime”. Black holes and holograms enter the discussion as well the Kazua-Klein theory that ties electromagnetism to relativity through an extra dimension. The problem with approach, as I see it, is that it would seem for the theory to work as presented in the paper, we would need to see relativistic effects in a low mass and relatively slow brain. We don’t see that, so this seems improbable.
I still think there may be something to the hologram idea which goes back at least as far the as holonomic brain theory. I will write more about this in a future post.
Another new paper claims to have discovered that when cells in the visual cortex are activated a kind of negative of the firing pattern forms in the memory areas. This suggests that the conventional view that upper level cortical uses abstract neural code might be wrong and the mapping may be more geometric. It could suggest also that memory areas may contain a reasonably complete representation of information in the sense organs.
Speaking of memory, a study has found that ripples in the brain “facilitate neuronal coupling in a phase-dependent manner and can organize the firing in entire assemblies of neurons”. “Ripples are bursts of high-frequency oscillatory activity that have recently been shown to synchronize across the cortex and may play a role in coordinating neuronal firing”. The hippocampus figures prominently in the coupling.
These findings are consistent with cortical ripples contributing to memory consolidation and recall in humans. Specifically, ripple co-occurrence could facilitate the binding of different elements of memories that are represented in disparate cortical areas, the essence of hippocampus-dependent memory.
Ripples co-occur, and remarkably, phase-synchronize across all lobes and between both hemispheres, with little decrement, even at long distances
The hippocampus is an odd structure.It has primarily been associated with memory until recent discoveries have also suggested a role on mapping location in space through place cells.
Hippocampus is a complex brain structure embedded deep into temporal lobe. It has a major role in learning and memory. It is a plastic and vulnerable structure that gets damaged by a variety of stimuli. Studies have shown that it also gets affected in a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548359/
We have two of them, one on each side, that are located at ear level and near the middle from front to back of the brain. It is shaped oddly, sometimes described as looking like a seahorse. It may be incorrect, however, to think of the hippocampus alone. Simply because anatomists have identified an area doesn’t mean that the brain uses the area in isolation from nearby areas, so interpret what I saying from here on as applying to hippocampus and associated areas. The hippocampus with its low central location would be in prime location for communication with other functional areas of the brain. What’s more, its input paths are the same as its output paths which suggests two-way communication.
There is a lot of information at the Wikipedia on the theta wave and the hippocampus.The hippocampus generates some of the strongest EEG signals in the brain. That would indicate that during wakefulness it is an area of high activity and likely stronger EM fields. During wakefulness, it has a theta rhythm of 4-8 Hertz. It shows a different pattern during sleep with irregular patterns punctuated by periods of sharp spikes. Some believe the hippocampus is where short-term memory is stored and that at night during sleep the memory is moved to longer term storage elsewhere. The hippocampus is also maybe the only place in the brain where neurons can regenerate themselves. The hippocampus is directly connected to the olfactory system
The hippocampus is found in all vertebrates. Analogous structures, which are also connected to the olfactory system, also exist in arthropods and may be used for navigation by insects. It’s location in the brain and its wide appearance across the animal kingdom suggest an ancient origin. We could speculate its direct connection to the olfactory system could suggest that smell was the first sense.
Another fascinating paper that caught my attention: Consciousness as a Memory System. This paper is long but a relatively easy read. It is jammed with basic facts and observations about how the brain works. I would recommend it just for that. I am going to quote the entire abstract:
We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system.
If this theory is correct, the hippocampus and related areas could be directly at the center of where consciousness is taking place.It could be place where much of the binding happens and it may have reasonably accurate copies of consciousness from other parts of the brain that are communicated by ripples and traveling waves.
The hippocampus is usually the place to which various neurodegenerative disorders can be traced. These disorders include Alzheimer’s and dementia. The hippocampus in people with schizophrenia. have a smaller cell volume. A number of people, however, have had portions of their hippocampus and/or amygdala removed in an effort to abate epileptic seizures. Usually only selective portions are removed based upon determination of the origin of epilepsy. Some have reported visual defects as well as the expected memory problems. One of the more extensive removals was the case of Henry Molaison or H,M as he is sometimes referred in the literature. Although the removal is sometimes described as complete, it seems unclear exactly how much was removed. A study in 2014 found that up to half of the hippocampal tissue remained. H.M. showed a variety of impairments in spatial and visual processing, but most notably the loss of ability to form new memories. He could fill in crossword puzzles when the clue was based on knowledge prior to the procedure in 1953, but could recall nothing for what happened after the procedure. Clive Wearing is another patient who suffered severe damage to the hippocampal area due to encephalitis. His condition was even worse than H.M’s. He would fill his diary with repetitive statements with timestamps minutes noting nothing more than he is now totally awake. He couldn’t remember from minute to minute.In each of these cases, however, other parts of the brain remained and could compensate for the deficits from the hippocampus. That makes a good argument that the hippocampus is only part of a larger system that generates consciousness. The authors of the Consciousness as a Memory System write: “we believe that consciousness would not be normal in individuals with complete absence or complete dysfunction of the hippocampus and related structures since birth.”
It seems apparent that consciousness in humans is located in multiple brain areas since people can lose substantial portions of it and still behave as if conscious, albeit cognitively disabled. But was this always true? Where did consciousness reside in the first conscious organism on Earth?
Let’s imagine the prototypal conscious organism in a minimalist form. We’ll call it C-prime.
- It can move in the water by flippers.
- It has one sense – a sense of smell.
- It can detect potential food with its sense of smell.
- It can react to move towards the source of food with its flippers.
How would C-prime work?
To move successfully to the food source, C-prime might have evolved a primitive hippocampus-like structure connected to the olfactory organ that can map the environment on an internal grid. It has its representative self on the grid in relationship to the food source as revealed by the strength and direction of the scent. This serves to direct its movement in the water. It starts swimming towards the food source with the information in the grid controlling the flippers.
To fine tune the search, however, another thing could be added. As it moves towards the food, small currents buffet C-prime away from the original direction slightly to the right or left, up or down. The food source could also be moving. As this happens, the scent becomes stronger or weaker. The strength of the scent in the new direction would be new information that could be used to fine tune the movement, effectively triangulating the position. However, this requires one additional feature to the hippocampus-like structure. It has to keep a record of strengths over time so it can compare the current scent with the previous scent. In other words, it needs a memory. The odd fact that the hippocampus is involved with both spatial mapping and memory makes sense.
Is this the birth of consciousness?
Broad Speculations 
The hippocampus is a fascinating region. It works closely with the adjacent entorhinal cortex. My memory may be a bit rough, but from what I recall, the hippocampus handles spatial relations while the entorhinal handles temporal ones. Although it’s the relations between grid entities that are the real meat.
I don’t think of the hippocampus as storing short term memories (although that’s the way it’s commonly described), so much as preserving the sequence of recent firing patterns from connected brain regions. Under the right conditions, during sleep (and maybe other times) it retroactivates those firing patterns, “rehearsing” the event in those disparate regions, which strengthens the synapses associated with those patterns. Eventually the patterns in the hippocampus fade, but by then the connections in the other regions are strong enough to last.
(I do wonder how the hippocampus keeps the various memories straight, although given the vagaries of human memory, maybe I’m giving it too much credit.)
I think the right way to think of episodic memory is as the capability for time sequenced simulations. In that sense, it and imagination are basically the same thing. We simulate (imagine) past events and call it memory, and then simulate future ones and call it planning. As you noted, it’s why our memory stinks as any kind of recording system, but that’s not what it evolved for.
On the relation between this kind of processing and consciousness, it depends, of course, on how we define “consciousness”. But you might find this paper on the evolution of episodic memory interesting.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1301199110
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Thanks for the information.
I like this statement from Consciousness as a Memory System:
“If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system”
I read the abstract of your linked paper and it is much in line with my thoughts in this post and Consciousness as a Memory System. I think, however, something similar might exist in arthropods which is left off the diagram, although it might be it is convergent evolution that accounts for it. The mushroom bodies in insects function like the hippocampus and also are tightly tied to the olfactory system.
The term “episodic” maybe isn’t the best term when we look at its evolution over time. It has always sounds to me like “stories about myself.” So, it sounds like a pretty advanced capability. It likely began with something more rudimentary. Also, “short-term” memory can get confused with “working” memory. Probably the various sorts of memory we talk about don’t really match up with how memory actually works and don’t align neatly with functional areas. Through evolution, many memory related functions, which were located in hippocampal-like structures have migrated gradually to other areas. So now in humans, we see all of these different types of memory spread out across multiple structures in the brain. Originally the hippocampus may have mapped space and time and might have been the only memory to speak of in the organism.
The diagram suggests it originally it mapped space which is pretty much how I see it. My C-prime is one step above that and also maps when and what.
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It’s been a while since I read the paper, but that diagram is definitely vertebrate oriented. The mental capabilities of arthropods and other invertebrates remain controversial topics.
“Probably the various sorts of memory we talk about don’t really match up with how memory actually works and don’t align neatly with functional areas.”
I think this is an important insight. We shouldn’t expect a 1:1 mapping between psychological categories and physical processing. There will almost certainly have to be several layers of abstraction between them, a lot of which I suspect will seem utterly bizarre to us unless we can suss out their evolutionary history.
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This is a really great article in Quanta.
“They gathered a massive amount of behavioral data — obtained from experiments designed to test different aspects of cognitive control, including working memory, response inhibition and learning — and ran it through a machine learning classifier. The resulting classifications defied expectations, mixing up traditional categories of brain results and sorting them into new groups that seemed to “move together in terms of some much more generic constructs,” Poldrack said — constructs for which we don’t yet have labels, and which might not relate directly to our conscious experience”.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/
They also found that a lot of what we think we are measuring isn’t what we think it is. I think you have blogged about that before.
Still, if we look at from an evolutionary perspective, we can look at brains that are much simpler than the human brain. To me the limbic system (of triune brain fame) stands out as a relatively simple structure common across many species that I suspect might be the foundation of consciousness.
Essentially my C-prime is a primitive limbic system EXCEPT I left out a critical piece – something that provides “feeling” like the amygdala. Without “feeling” there is no motivation for learning. C-prime can’t learn about food sources if it cannot attach and persist in memory not only a smell but also a “feeling” about the food. (Or the smell might be the feeling.) It could be as simple as good or bad. This “feeling” in primitive organisms sits on the borderline between instinct, which would require no consciousness, and learned behavior which would require it once it goes beyond simple association.
Perhaps my next post after some research.
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That is an interesting article. Thanks! I remember Paul Cisek in particular. He’s the one who questions the very concept of “cognition”. But I definitely think a lot of our psychological categories won’t map well to the brain’s actual processing.
The points about attention remind me of William James’ views. We have to look at it in the context of the brain’s overall reason for existing, to produce adaptive movement. James, who got a lot right back in his time, equated attention to volition, the selection of perceptual information for action, or at least action planning. Seeing it separately from that is probably artificial, as is seeing memory as separate from dispositions toward actions.
The term “limbic system” has become pretty controversial in neuroscience. Most scientist now think the concept has misled more than helped. Of course, the structures exist, but whether they form any kind of coherent “system” is strongly challenged these days. And as the article noted, a lot of what used to be attributed to it is seen as happening in the cortex these days. Although as always, it depends on how we define things like “emotion”, “feeling”, etc.
I think of feelings as overridable instincts, or at least I think they evolved from instincts. Of course, they’ve been evolving in tandem with “cognitive” structures for a very long time, so it’s a lot messier today.
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I think Buzaki, who is quoted in the Quanta article, in one of his books talks about how our conceptions of the facilities of “mind” more or less align with the chapters in James’s psychology but the brain doesn’t line up everything in tidy categories.
Agreed about the limbic system. There seems to be some aspect of anatomical truth to it but the functions and their locations changed as the brain has gotten bigger. Everything gets spread out but also interrelated. Additionally, limbic-like structures have been found in less complex brains that lack the actual hippocampi and amygdalae.
Regarding feelings and instincts – I think of instincts more as a complex of automatic behaviors. I put “feeling” in quotes because what I am trying to get at is something different from how the term is usually used. More or this later, but we can look at simple associative learning, something that probably doesn’t require consciousness. Take the reflex of salivation on the sound of a bell in Pavlov’s classical conditioning. Salivation involves a neural pathway that signals receptors to release fluids from the cells. So, you have a pattern. Something stored is triggered to release. Neurons store ions which are triggered to release. This pattern of storage, release, and replenishment is the bioenergetic basis of life.
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On the hippocampus or any other apparent aspect of the brain, I think it’s always best to consider how they might function in relation to a full model. And given that I consider the presumed standard model to be false (which is to say that consciousness and non-consciousness function together in a seamless way as essentially one thing), this is why lots of descriptions seem ill fitting to me. My perspective has always been that the brain is an entirely non-conscious computer. It was only when I learned of brain produced EM fields that I found a practical medium by which the conscious form of computation might exist additionally.
So from this perspective if the hippocampus tends to fire neurons in synchrony to create strong theta waves, and also has been documented to be associated with episodic memory, then it could be that EM energy produced by it reflects neural firing associated with what’s retain from past experiences. And why might these energies need to be stronger than cerebral cortex energies? Maybe because its depth in the brain requires more energy to effectively get out to causally join the rest?
On the paper “Consciousness as a Memory System”, I’m sure James is right that it’s jam packed with good stuff. Something has put me off reading it however. It seems to me that episodic memory is quite usefully defined as “past consciousness that remains for present use”. From this perspective consciousness simply couldn’t have emerged from episodic memory, but rather this would exist as one aspect of consciousness. And of course these terms may be defined in different ways to still relate them properly. For now however there’s too much reason for me to move on.
On a minimally conscious organism C-prime, my suggestion would be to conceive of it almost entirely as a non-conscious biological robot. So whatever light, vibration, chemical, and so on detection that one of our robots might use for algorithmic processing, presume that C-prime has all this and probably more for relatively autonomous robotic function.
Then additionally let’s say that there’s a phenomenal “smell” element as well. This is to say that something here feels good when certain chemicals are detected and feels bad when other chemicals are detected. Observe that this experiencer needn’t be functional inherently. Here it could be punished and rewarded with no ability to affect organism function. But theoretically there were situations where evolution would incorporate the desires of such an experiencer for better outcomes than standard algorithmic function alone. Thus consciousness evolved.
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The hippocampus is primarily responsible for episodic memory but it has an important and likely related role in mapping the world in spacetime. This mapping might be considered consciousness itself or a key component of it. Once time gets involved, inevitably memory is involved because we would have no sense of present time without a memory of a prior time. Clive Wearing, the patient with severe damage to the hippocampus, seemingly had no sense of current time whatsoever and seemed to be in a state of perpetually waking up. He maintained some functionality because of memories from before his illness.
If EM field theory has any value, I would think one of the best places to modify consciousness experimentally to test the theory would be the hippocampus.
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One problem with hippocampus however is that this goes deep and thus EM field detectors and transmitters aren’t easily added. But then I suppose that’s just in reference to the two potential testing methods that I conceive — reported consciousness alteration given exogenous EM energies, as well as effective consciousness transcription by means of EMF detection. I’d love more if you can think of any James. The question is, how might an EM field itself be held responsible for consciousness while any other alterations are controlled for?
I like to refer to sentience itself as the essential component of consciousness rather than any functional ability, like mapping spacetime. Here existence can be good/bad. But given that neural firing tends to strengthen synaptic connections, it seems to me that there ought to be more proclivity for the firing of a certain past experience to at least fire partly again given incitement. Such memory should certainly be important for functional consciousness to exist. But just as our computers can access data and algorithms which are referred to as “memory”, our brains should do similar things which are entirely non-experienced. So we should be aware of that potential terminological discrepancy between conscious and non-conscious function.
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To me, primary to sentience is knowing where and when you are. That’s usually the first question asked of a waking person after they’ve been knocked unconscious.
There are certainly problems investigating consciousness in humans if the experiments involve invasive procedures. The presence of a hippocampal structure of some sort might be a useful indicator of consciousness. That opens the research to a wide range of species. If the firing of place neurons in the hippocampus of a mouse is a mapping of space(time), then modifications or direct EM field stimulation of the area should produce some kind of measurable effect either in behavior or scans. For example, the mouse could show systematic changes in its route through a maze it had learned well. I think you need to be looking more at animal or even insect research.
I wish McFadden and other EM field theorists would expand their theory.
How do the patterns of firings, which are producing consciousness, relate to the generated EM field and relate to the contents of consciousness? There should be a language of a sort where pattern A matches with a yellow ball flying in front of your eyes.
An evolutionary accounting would be helpful too. How did consciousness arise? Is a sufficiently strong or complex EM field required? How strong? How complex? When does consciousness arise in evolution and what advantage did it provide at that time? If consciousness is related to memory, I would also expect that the EM field would have some role in the molecular mechanism of memory formation.
https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-reveals-molecular-mechanisms-memory-formation-0208
Could the EM field cause a transformation in the Npas4 protein that encodes information, for example?
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Well you could say that primary sentience is knowing where and when you are, though I perceive people to generally mean something more broad for the term. Knowing where and when you are suggests something like being cognitively straight. If you’re taken away in a blindfold, drugged, or whatever else that might mess up your sense of where and when, you might still feel good/bad. If we don’t call that “sentience” then we’d need another term which encompasses that as well.
Through scientists are allowed to do horrible things to mice that they’re not allowed to do with humans, the thing about altering their brains to test EM field consciousness is that mice can’t explicitly tell us what they notice to phenomenally change if anything does. Conversely cognizant people could potentially tell us the sorts of things that exogenous EM brain energies might cause them to see, hear, feel, smell, and so on. Over enough studies and different subjects, if McFadden’s theory is true then scientists ought to be able to learn about the sorts of EM fields which exist as someone’s consciousness.
On the relation of firing to EM field, that should be basic physics. But which sort of EM field creates which sort of consciousness? I would expect a yellow ball flying in front of your eyes to have EM field characteristics in the form of “yellow”, “ball”, and so on, and also modulated over time for movement. McFadden likes to talk about “representational drift” regarding different neurons firing on different occasions for the same sort of consciousness effect. Apparently what doesn’t drift so much is the sort of EM field produced for a given sort of consciousness.
While McFadden may not talk about how consciousness might have evolved, I certainly do. My basic scenario is that past organisms which harbored epiphenomenal EM field experiencers were by chance given a shot at altering behavior, and some of them did so well enough to promote those genes and so tended to be given more resources from which to function consciously, and so on.
What exactly might this mode of function have been able to do better than standard algorithmic function? I think it ultimately boils down to purpose based function, which is to say goal directed achievement. We can’t give a robot a goal such as “keep the house clean” because it will have no desires at all. All we can do is write algorithms to that effect. So theoretically by tapping into something that is goal based (with the goal being personal happiness), evolution was able to harness another mode of function that could do things that standard algorithms could not. And though we may like to think of ourselves as free agents which rule our bodies, I also see us as slaves that evolution has punished and rewarded under the process of genetic selection. On this I’m quite agreed with David Pearce (and we continue talking). But the first choice that a primitive experiencer might have made for an organism? Hard to say. If in the form of smell, maybe “go/don’t go”.
I don’t know about EM field strength, except for the obvious that this permits causality over greater distances.
On complexity, I’d think that only seeing a plain color for example would required less EMF complexity than an involved scene with many colors and shapes to potentially figure out.
On memory, let’s say you’re trying to remember where you might have left your keys. So given this task an EM field episode might occur as a scenario about where you think you had them last, and in the form of an imagined but hollow image. This EM field thought might open up possibilities to you about places to actually go check. Or with insight from such memory based speculation things might roll over to another EM field scenario to think about. I’m quite sure that for muscle movement, decided EM field energy must force the right neurons to fire for those muscles to function (ephaptic coupling). But does this also occur every time one EM field memory morphs into another? Maybe. And does a field have specific neural chemical effects or rather just sometimes tip a neuron to firing? I can’t say.
One thing that I think current evidence does suggest however is that neuron firing frequency seems to matter. There are EM fields in the form of delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma (in order of slower to faster oscillations) that seem to be associated with different sorts alertness and tasks.
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Just to clarify – brain waves are like stadium waves. While some neurons are standing up and producing a local EM field, the others are sitting down and producing no EM field.
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Agreed. I vaguely recall when the stadium wave meme emerged. Wikipedia says it was invented by a guy known as Krazy George Henderson November 15, 1979 at an ice hockey game in Denver Colorado. People went nuts for them after an October 15, 1981 broadcast of an Oakland baseball game. This seems to involve a natural proclivity for people in a stadium to “AND”. The theme is, “If people around me stand, then I will too. If they sit, then I will too”. We see this in congressional speeches as well, though along with the “AND” relation of party members there is also a “NOT” component regarding oppositions. “Yes I like to stand and clap when my own people do, though I also don’t like to stand and clap when my oppositions do”. So if democrats and republicans were instead organized in checkerboard squares, we’d see altering displays of squares pop out from time to time.
Then regarding the “OR” situation, this might be displayed where there are all sorts of diverse political interests though each tend to stand and clap any time one of their interests does. This should generally tend to incite more firing since there’s a lower threshold to do so than the “AND” condition, and certainly the “NOT”. Actually given location based firing this all brings up the neural firing vortex displays that you’ve mentioned. Surely good reasons exist for them.
Anyway apparently neuron function occurs on the basis of synaptic connections with other neurons where the gating tends to have such Boolean characteristics. When a neuron gets concurrent conflicting signals, I presume that one of the two wins out given specific ion flows that either does or doesn’t incite a firing. And while the synaptic connections of neurons have strong effects, I get the sense that EM field effects can only tip a given neuron to firing when it’s already pretty close to doing so anyway.
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I think that the Boolean characteristics of neurons is misleading because we are not looking at the neuron over time. It is not that it fires but when it fires and how many times it fires that is critical to the information it is sending. When you take behavior over time slices, you have nuanced and analog information not the digital on/off.
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I don’t mean to over sell the digital nature of neuron function. Ultimately I consider all of reality to be analog. But as I understand it neurons relate to each other in AND, NOT, and OR ways, and from these logic based operations in general may be formed. So for example given that neurons regulate heart muscle function, I presume that information from the body is sent to the brain and that this information will be processed through the mentioned Boolean operations to adjust heart function appropriately given those provided conditions.
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” I understand it neurons relate to each other in AND, NOT, and OR ways”
If that’s the only way, then the brain is a digital computer. I think it is analog almost everywhere with exceptions like reflexes.
Look at the Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding
The proposed encoding schemes involve temporal/rated-based and spatial/population schemes.
Much of the brain operates with oscillations in time. The brain works asynchronously in time slices and with lag times. Firing 1,2,3… times per time period transmits a lot more information than yes/no.
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That’s an interesting argument James. Essentially the brain not only computes by means of digital Boolean operations, but also analog operations which can potentially provide far more information. I guess the theme is that if our machines are only digital then they’ll never create consciousness as our brains do, since analog machines are required. I’m certainly open to the idea that brains function in more than digital ways, though from my perspective that’s irrelevant to the creation of consciousness. As I see it brains can never “become conscious”, but rather can merely play a role in causally “creating consciousness”. Digital or not, their processed information should need to inform something causally appropriate that itself would exist as consciousness. It’s somewhat like processed computer information informing a computer screen to exists as those particular lit up pixels. Our consciousness should ultimately exist as the right sort of physics which a computing machine informs to the details of all elements of consciousness.
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