or a process, or anything for that matter
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Breakthrough: How the brain keeps track of time
September 4, 2018 - 06:25
Norwegian scientists Edvard and May-Britt Moser were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their studies on sense of direction. Now they have found the brain cells that place our memories in the right order.
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In the part of the brain called the lateral entorhinal cortex, they have found nerve cells that give each moment its distinctive signature.
“We believe this code keeps track of the order of events that happen. The code gives us a sense of time in relation to events," says Edvard Moser from the Kavli Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Norway.
He calls this coding, episodic time, and we are not talking about clock time.
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GrahamH wrote:SOS, have you read Graziano (Consciousness and the social brain, "attention schema theory") ? I've been meaning to start a thread on that because it seems spot on to me.
GrahamH wrote:
I thought you would have it on your bookshelf. How do you see it as answer to the non-thingness of consciousness?
In that respect it contrasts with IIT and other 'process' theories.
bayesian brain
THE GREATEST THEORY OF ALL TIME?
The more I learn about the Bayesian brain, the more it seems to me that the theory of predictive processing is about as important for neuroscience as the theory of evolution is for biology, and that Bayes’ law is about as important for cognitive science as the Schrödinger equation is for physics.
That is quite an ambitious statement: if our brains really are Bayesian, which is to say that predictive processing is the fundamental principle of cognition, it would mean that all our sensing, feeling, thinking, and doing is a matter of making predictions.
SpeedOfSound wrote:GrahamH wrote:
I thought you would have it on your bookshelf. How do you see it as answer to the non-thingness of consciousness?
In that respect it contrasts with IIT and other 'process' theories.
If memory serves me he has one good piece. But just another piece of the whole. A fine theory about one part of what our cognition is on whole. I have always been a theory-slut and I am beginning to understand why. Many theories are good and probably have some or a lot of truth to them. But there is no single thing that consumes all of so-called conscious content unless you want to say the entire brain and environment IS consciousness.
I am suggesting that we consider pushing back on the use of the word consciousness and break it into some finer parts. I think we actually want to talk about attention and awareness.
Macdoc wrote:
our brains constantly compare current inputs with previous understanding ..that's how we learn and consciousness is part of a spectrum that includes subconcious processes ....consciousness is an aspect of our neural network....which is indeed a thing.....a very complex thing.
SpeedOfSound wrote:So first, what is the thing to which we want to point and ask of science that it explain for us?
Animavore wrote:someone cracks neurology with a succinct and parsimonious explanation
Neurological studies have stunned the doctors. Tatiana can see out of both of Krista’s eyes, while Krista can only see out of one of Tatiana’s. They also share the senses of touch and taste and the connection even extends to motor control. Tatiana controls 3 arms and a leg, while Krista controls 3 legs and an arm.
Amazingly, the girls say they also know one another’s thoughts without needing to speak. “We talk in our heads” is how they describe it.
SpeedOfSound wrote:A quote attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Lord Rutherford's is “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” . I like it in reference to anecdotal evidence we get from thinking about our own mind. This is the stamp collecting part. All of us have plenty to say about our supposed inner worlds and I do think it legitimate to collect these stamps.
Unfortunately we have a lot of amateurs doing the collecting, like really really lots of amateurs and all of them are absolutely convinced that they are the epitome of professionalism when it comes to their own inner view. Philosophy is riddled with this disease of first person access and most famously this starts with that clueless hack René Descartes.
Undeniably we have something to study here. We all have some stamps. We all have shit happening inside of our heads and we all have an opinion about how this is proof of god or the supernatural or some other crazy notion like 'science can't x'. We have a thing for which we would like some explanations.
If we have a bottle of table salt in front of us we have a thing that we think we can explain. We look into sodium and chlorine and ionic species and then crystal formation and many other aspects in the realm of physics. Surprisingly no one says "science knows nothing about table salt".
How do we get to the same place with this first person mind thing? We point at the salt, how do we point at the mind?
One silly approach is to become overly attached to the spook we call 'consciousness'. We all know what a conscious mammal looks like and what an unconscious mammal looks like. Somehow many of us have come to believe that we can attach a -ness to that idea and have a thing worthy of pointing out. A candidate stamp.
I believe that the C with the -ness is just a spook that amounts to no more than an 'undigested bit of beef'. It is not a useful stamp. We have other words like attention, thought, and aware that are sufficient to describe our inner stamps.
So first, what is the thing to which we want to point and ask of science that it explain for us?
BWE wrote: Things are products of mind. Naming is a way to begin to make models.
Take your own advice and drop the "One God" reification.jamest wrote:Why is it important that consciousness be a thing? I mean, the thing is this, things aren't important to metaphysics.
Stop playing with your thing and get a clue.
jamest wrote:Why is it important that consciousness be a thing? I mean, the thing is this, things aren't important to metaphysics.
Stop playing with your thing and get a clue.
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