Seeing red

[emjay]

Yeah. Basically getting caught up in the generality of that idea one thing I forgot is that ultimately neurons are only useful in as much as they can complete a circuit... they're like billions of little switches. So if you have say one input layer, two hidden layers, and an output layer then even if you have a very rich self-sustaining neural representation that makes it to say layer three, if it doesn't make it to the output layer... if nothing gets triggered there then I'd guess it doesn't contribute to the whole system? It's like a dead end? Or did you mean something else?

I'd say the more basic question is why are these output stages experienced as consciousness. I think it takes more than just neural nets to give rise to consciousness. Neural nets of a specific configuration, perhaps, but something more.

I have to go to bed now so I'll reply to this properly tomorrow. But before I forget I think one thing that is interesting is that if you get lost in thought you lose awareness of your senses. I think... it's very hard to actually catch yourself in the act of daydreaming, but I think you lose awareness of your senses whilst the mental imagery of imagination gets more vivid. Again, it's hard to catch yourself in the act but a small few times I've managed to be aware at the moment of exiting a daydream of vivid colours whereas usually imagination when superimposed over your 'viewscreen' is more like a vague sense than a vision. So that leads me to believe or at least strongly suspect that what is conscious at any given time is what is most strongly and richly activated in the network. But there's still the question of how any area of this network is accessed for this - how focus 'observes' it. But anyway I really really need to go to bed so I'll talk more tomorrow. Night night