Seeing red

[emjay]

So in other words, what would be a state at the particle level? Would concentrated ions count as a state for instance, where one concentration is a different state from another concentration? Or would a molecule count as a state in the sense of being a structural organisation of atoms etc? This is not the way I usually think about these things so I'm having trouble with it.

That's the thing.  Everything in the universe has some relationship to everything else, and these relationships are all dynamic on some level.  So it's ALL information in a sense.  So when we talk about mind, and brains, and neural nets, what is the distinguishing feature that separates any arbitrary collection of components as having "states" or carrying "information," and the rest just being a bunch of stuff floating in space?  I think you can guess that my position is that it is only by mind that these rather arbitrary divisions can be made, and so we're thrown back into our circle again.  Let's say I were to arrange a bunch of black and white stones into a digital pattern on a beach, representing a Beatles' song.  Is it a song, or isn't it?  To me, it is, to anybody who doesn't know my mind, it couldn't possibly be.  So perhaps something ONLY becomes information when a sentient mind aritrarily imbues it with meaning.  Back to the circle a third time.

My particular interest is in photon emission and reception, and for a particular reason.  From the "perspective" of a photon, no time has passed no matter how far it travels, which means (to me) that the point of arrival is predestined.  The photon, then, instead of being seen as a packet of energy traveling for millions of years, could be seen as serving a kind of distant electron function: it binds together two atoms at a point (due to the relativistic flattening of the universe at the speed of light).  What does this have to do with anything? -- It is an extension of information through time and space, much as DNA is an extension of state through time in the form of statistical effects of the environment on that DNA's formation, and much as the human memory serves to bring a remembered state into comparison with a new state.

I don't know what to say but WOW! I think you're going to spawn a whole new interest in me with all this. In that this is a brand new way of looking at the whole problem that deals with what you call the boundary problem. So instead of confining myself to the mind-imposed arbitrary limits of where a system starts and ends, look at in terms of states and relationships of matter in space and time, including your theory of photons which to me sounds like you're saying essentially that they can essentially 'teleport' to anywhere, and I suppose anywhen, in the universe and in so doing transfer information between any two atoms in 4 dimensional spacetime? Physics is not my strong suit so apologies if I've let my imagination run away with me a bit there and that's not what you mean.

Then there's another question that is worth thinking about, both from your position and mine. What about subconscious processes (or indeed non-conscious processes). From my original theory's perspective, there'd have to be a reason why certain neural circuits did not contribute to consciousness despite still being states and relationships. And the same question would apply to your theory... why would certain particles contribute and not others to consciousness, especially given the essentially uniform physical structure of neurons?

This is a problem, and is still so even in psychoneurology.  It turns out that most perceptions, and consciousness itself, is distributed across many brain parts, and not always the same subsystems of each part.  In other words, it seems to be the percepts themselves, rather than the mechanism processing them, which is responsible for the sensation of awareness.

In my theory I would have said that that would be to be expected in that perception was a function of the whole network rather than any particular part and thus could be thought of in a slightly different way such as to say if you were to hypothetically probe any area of the network and artificially turn off a neuron it would - or may... depending on its influence - cause the network to settle into a different state, which is therefore representing different values and relationships. So that's how I would have seen what appears to be perceptions spread across many different brain areas, and not necessarily the same ones... basically as the function of an every changing network that can settle into different states and where any single neuron anywhere in the whole network can have a massive influence on how the whole network will settle.

It's difficult for me now because you're right... the boundary problem is a very real concern, both in terms of what level to think at and in terms of where a system starts and ends, at least in the mind-body question. But there's no doubt about it that neural networks do all this stuff So leaving out mental phenomena the neural network is the right level to understand the system (for me anyway) and I still believe that perception is redundant and unnecessary, however it comes about, and therefore still that we may as well be philosophical zombies. But the question is, do you? Or would you, given that what you're proposing here is provisional on it being a materialistic universe? Do/would you believe that mind, as a property of matter could in any way influence matter, or would it only be a reflection/mirror of it? In other words for me it's a one-way street but is it a two-way street for you?

Selective brain damage is interesting, too.  In various cases, you can lost the ability to do a specific function: say, recognize a face.  That experience is no longer in your toolkit.  And yet, the basic "screen" of consciousness is still fine.  I wonder if when we are sleeping, there's a kind of idea-less "screen" or not, but I'm not sure how it would even be possible to determine.

Well I would say in that situation that you'd lost a 'channel'. Though that's my own word to represent perceptions that co-exist but don't overlap in consciousness. Some channels are obvious in consciousness - like vision, pain, sound etc - but others you might not realise you had until they were gone... like face recognition despite still being able to see faces in the sense of having them 'presented' on the 'screen'.

Quite recently there was an experiment where they found a neuron(s) that could turn off consciousness: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2...p-in-brain. The article says:

Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. “I would liken it to a car,” he says. “A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there’s only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key.”
...
Counter-intuitively, Koubeissi’s team found that the woman’s loss of consciousness was associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness. Although different areas of the brain are thought to synchronise activity to bind different aspects of an experience together, too much synchronisation seems to be bad. The brain can’t distinguish one aspect from another, stopping a cohesive experience emerging.

Just speculating here but synchronisation could be thought of as reducing the number of distinct states to be represented in my theory or yours (possibly) and thus the differentiation in the output (ie the vividness). The same thing could be said of meditation... which is about quietening the mind... and which can result in weird states of consciousness. And if the claustrum acts as an associative area connecting all these different brain areas like a switchboard then loss or reduction of connectivity there could either separate them essentially into individual networks - as per the same effect as as cutting the corpus callosum - or even if still connected could still influence their overall settled states in the sense that, as I said before, any change in the input of a neural network can cause it to settle into a different state and the difference will be more drastic depending on how influential the inhibited neurons are.

This seems to be the case: that sounds, sights, smells, etc. are coordinated on a kind of common medium.  But it doesn't seem to exist anywhere.  My guess is that it doesn't exist at all, and that wherever there is processing, there is percept-- but its just not "owned" by you, and so it's not part of your subjective experience.  Your neuron may be having a blast with its exciting processing of electrochemical cascades, oblivious to your existence.

By common medium do you mean the body map? As in how you can feel referred pain in all the wrong places etc? Or are you saying that this common medium exists (in whatever non-existing sense you define ) wherever there is matter and that essentially forms blocks bound together by relationships etc so that say the brain... or what is active in the brain could form one such block and the bigger it is, the richer and more subjective it is? Or something else entirely?