Seeing red

[emjay]

Nand2tetris bro, it'll change your life.  Building computers used to be my whole life, now it's just my obsession, my hobby.  If you hope to understand mind by reference to ANNs, for example, you might find it illuminating to know the specifics of how the hardware is manufactured and why it works the way it does that those ANNs run on.  What is true of a single nand gate is not true of a computational system as a whole, even though -any- comp system can be made leveraging nothin but nand.  If you see nuerons as the components of a system in the way that gates are the components of a cpu, focusing on the components alone might not tell you what you want to know about the system in it's entirety.  

Personally, I think this is how I would answer to jorg.  What is experiencing?  The system is experiencing, not any specific part in isolation.  A description of the systems operation is a description of experience.  We certainly haven't found any "command center" of the brain that's pulling all the levers.  We wouldn't expect to, though, that's a feature of top down intentional architecture, and our brains are, as we understand them, no such thing.

Thanks for that... I'll look at that   I can build computers in the sense of hard drive, motherboard, graphics card etc but that's as far as it goes. I don't know much, if anything, about circuitboards. ANN... artificial neural network? I didn't think of them as requiring specific hardware... just software... like Emergent. You're talking about neural networks built of chips? Well I didn't see it as that until you just explained it   But yeah if there is a parallel between a CPU and a neural network then that's definitely something of interest. I'm not interested in neurons alone, just the neural network level... but I generalised it and concentrated more on the representations and less on ultimately where that data ends up. And it was you and Jorm's talk about system's in their entirely that reminded me about this circuit business. So yeah, that's the way I see it, but it's inspired by you and Jorm.

Yeah, I agree with that... the whole system is experiencing, not any specific part in isolation. I would've said before that it was the whole network, but 'system' takes it that step further as Jorm defined it so as to include the environment and the body. And no, I'm not looking for a command centre either

Anyway, really got to go to bed now, so night night again