Mind Over Matter?

[JuliaL]

I see consciousness as being a highly conserved property of complex life probably
present in forms as diverse as cuttlefish, cats, parrots and humans.

It's common because it's useful.
Self preservation becomes much easier if self is recognized to be preserved.
Self awareness is a complex pattern in the brain used for self preservation, no
more surprising a construction of functional molecules than a leg
is when used for locomotion.
Your disbelief in the capacity of a neural network to sustain consciousness is
suspect given the brain's evident ability to do so.  

For a plausible meso-scale theory of how the brain creates consciousness I recommend Antonio Damasio:
The Feeling of What Happens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damasio%27...sciousness
In it, human minds are constructed of:

1. Protoself: Where a representation of somatic internal status is maintained and continuously updated.
   
2. Core Consciousness: A second system which monitors this internal movie.  This system provides moment by moment awareness of self.
   
3. Extended Consciousness: A third system, involving long term storage, maintains continuity of self perception over time resulting in a personal history.
   

Even the least complex of these processes is significantly abstracted from the level of synaptic membrane permeability.  We'll have to trust to Moore's law a while before detailed connections between the lower and higher functions can be determined.  The BRAIN initiative is wildly ambitious like Bush's Mars program or the Human Genome Project.  We'll see if it is useless like the one or useful like the other.


This study is hampered by the extreme complexity of the systems and ethical concerns over experimentation on individuals with minds sophisticated enough to be interesting.  Damasios work is based on case studies of brain pathology and disciplines of neurophysiology, anatomy and histology.  Not so much on neural networks as studied by computer scientists.