--- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "BruceD" <blroadies@...> wrote:

> --- In Wittrs@yahoogroups.com, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
>
> "Should Dehaene and company shut down because you cannot abide the
> notion that brains produce consciousness while you yet have nothing
> better to offer?"
>
> Let's take it a piece at a time. I find Dehaene's work fantastic and
> worthy of full support. But I'm not convinced that he means "brains
> produce consciousness" in the sense that bones produce blood.
>

Well of course he doesn't. And neither do I. Blood is a physical substance and consciousness is a set of operations performed by physical processes on the view I am espousing and ascribing to Dehaene. Just because "produce" is used doesn't mean the same type of production or the same type of result is obtained.

Perhaps this onoging dispute is just about words? Are you in agreement that brains produce consciousness in the way I have described only you don't want to call it "produce" or "cause" or "engender" and just want to say consciousness "emeerges"? Well, okay to that, from my perspective as long as we mean the same thing by the locutions each of us settles on.

In that case what is there left to argue about? If you agree that Dehaene's research is sound and that the idea that brains make consciousness in the way described but you would rather say consciousness emerges from brains in this way, go for it.

> Excerpt of review
>
> "The main thing Stanislas and his team noticed is that when neural
> activity in the brain exceeds a particular communications threshold
> across multiple brain areas, the brain enters a large-scale synchronous
> state and consciousness appears. The researchers have also devised an
> empirical test for the presence of consciousness and tested it on human
> patients in coma, vegitative state, and locked-in syndrome. So far,
> their test seems to reliably detect which patients have residual
> consciousness."
> *********************************************************************
>
> To say: "Consciousness appears", when the brain enters a
> Synchronous-State, is inconsistent with saying that the S-State causes
> consciousness because the S-State is simultaneous with consciousness.

No, IT IS NOT. The reference is to information picked up that Dehaene says can be used as evidence of the presence of consciousness. But in his own talk, not the "review", he proceeds to explain the theory that he believes his identification of synchronous activity in the brain AS A MARKER FOR CONSCIOUSNESS implies. And that is that consciousness just is this syncrhonous activity when it reaches a certain level (involving a certain set of brain funtionalities in the brain's various parts).

> It
> is consistent with saying "with my brain I regain
> consciousness, comparable to with my hands I play the piano.
>

Yes, it is consistent with a dualist presumption (that consciousness and brain activity just happen to occur simultaneously) but that is NOT what Dehaene concludes from it. Read his talk!

> On doing better.
>
> Global Neuronal Workspace
>
> Just like my desk top. Completely described on the physical level? Yes,
> if you mean how these letters appear when I strike the keys. But No, if
> you mean why this sequence of letters. To answer the latter question,
> one must ask my intention.
>

His notion of a "global neuronal workspace" involves the supposition of an area of activity in the same way we can speak of computational workspaces. The physical activity underlies it but it is on the level of the activities themselves that the workspace is defined. The turning wheel has a space within which the turning occurs but the space is not the wheel anymore than the turning is. It's the locus of the turning. And yet it's all physical from the wheel to the turning to the space within which everything occurs.

> D starts with my intention. The GNW is a tool, like my desk top. His
> research makes more sense if thought of in terms of the instruments I
> use to complete tasks.
>
> bruce
>

So you still cannot shake the picture of you using your brain to be conscious? But what would it be like if YOU didn't, if you used something else? Is that conceivable? Does it make any sense?

Since you're the one who once made the claim that it is "unintelligible" to speak of brains as causing consciousness (even in the sense of "cause" that I have invoked), you cannot disregard the intelligibility question here. So is it intelligible to speak of a conscious being using his, her or its brain to be conscious?

How could such a being use something else? Can we just slip our consciousness from our brain to our pinkie toe at will? Or to any other kind of entity? Is consciousness to be conceived as a separate entity that can pass from platform to platform? (Note that I am not referring to where we focus our attention, what we are most aware of, etc. I am speaking here, of course, about whether minds can move from one physical medium to another which is reasonably inferred from any claim that 'I USE my brain to be conscious'.)

There is an interesting sci-fi concept in which a person replicates his body via cloning and then uploads himself into the new clone's brain with all his memories, etc., intact. An interesting concept to be sure but isn't this more like a recording than the passing of a soul from one body to another? Is there any way in which it could make sense to say the consciousness has moved, absent the notion that the consciousness is, itself, a separate and distinct entity?

But if it is that, then we are back to dualism which, if true, requires a lot more evidence than we currently have. Absent that evidence, by insisting on a dualist picture, we are speculating in a way that violates the Occam's Razor standard.

Now that standard is no guarantee that we must always adhere to the simplest, least complex explanation, to discover the truth, but there is plenty of good experiential history in the record of the progress of science (knowledge of the world) to support adherence to this standard.

Is it your wish, then, that we ignore all of that now and choose dualism, in the absence of any good reason to do so, merely because we happen to like that picture better (since it makes humans special in the universe, entities not governed by the physical laws that seem to govern everything else)?

Anyway, I suspect there is more here between us than just a disagreement over words. But at least some of our problem involves word usage which, if we could get clear on this aspect, we might at least finally be able to focus on the core problem between us which, I suspect, is the difference in how willing each of us is to entertain the idea that consciousness can be understood as fully explicable in terms of the physical universe.

And that is to say that our difference here boils down to differences in our respective allegiances to competing ideas (just as Sean suggested earlier on).

SWM

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