[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:101, topic:8988”]
Don’t you see, you’re viewing that situation totally from within the limitations of your own perspective and spacial experience, of course the brain doesn’t replicate that.
I am viewing this from a “natural selection” perspective. If an ability is necessary, natural selection would have already selected for it.
Think about what you are trying to tell me - the brain doesn’t have any sense of the internal geography of itself.
Do you have a sense of your brain’s internal geography? If it does it is at a subconscious level and that is what Seth is talking about.
In fact the new GPT3 computers have more awareness of their internal workings than humans do. You can ask them to do something and they can actually do a printout of the code it invented to produce the result.
Can you?
I’m incapable of buying that. I’ve long ago learned to respect my body’s inner understanding of itself and the way it speaks to attentive senses. My brain/body knows a whole bunch more than I do, I’m good with that.
Nobody disputes that the body is an extremely complex system. We are just not consciously aware if it. Do you have a conscious clue of the presence of your symbiotic bacterial friends that outnumber your human cells 10 to 1?
Where is your spleen? can you look at it and describe exactly its shape and size and between what organs it is located? Of course you cannot. You don’t need to know. It would make no difference if you did.
Homeostasis is a purely autonomous brain function at a different level than where consciousness resides.
Your body knows as much about what goes on inside your cells as a single-celled Paramecium. But you do not need a brain for that.
A Paramecium doesn’t have a brain or neurons, but it has homeostasis.
Because it has microtubules that process information.
Get what I mean, the body brain system has no need to understand coordinates the way you comprehend them - just because you can’t comprehend how the brains interior works, don’t mean the brain isn’t keenly aware of where all components in relation to other components of the body, in its own fashion.
Of course it doesn’t. The brain only knows anything from the incoming data it must process and identify before it can even make a “best guess” of what’s going on at all. It doesn’t need to. Bio-chemistry does not need consciousness to function.
Your brain doesn’t even know it is in a skull or a vat. It only knows what incoming information tells it and it is very selective in what it considers relevant. (Orchestrated reduction).
If you watched the video of Lambda AI, it told us that because it receives and must process all incoming data it gets overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of information it needs to sort.
It’s not limited to instinctual balance catching you when you suddenly slip. When you slip it is. That does not mean it is ONLY limited to that.
What you are saying is that there is no such thing as subconscious mind.
Have you ever been anesthetized and “ceased to exist” as a person and become in a “vegetative state”? I have and it did not affect my physical homeostatic maintenance in the least.
And why do you assume the brain needs no comprehension of the location of organs?
It doesn’t need to. All it needs is electro-chemical feedback of their status.
It has nothing to with a conspiracy to disagree with everyone - cause I don’t, I’m a great respecter of scientific findings.
It’s a lot of the interpretations I’ve learned to be wary of.
How do you know what the brain needs to know?
Unlike you I accept that what sounds like a reasonable scientic explanation to me.
I am absolutely convinced that natural selection does not select for unneeded abilities when they do not give a survival advantage.
Cave fish used to have eyes, now they are blind because in a dark cave eyes are useless. Natural selection ONLY selects for survival advantage
in a passive way. The organism that survives for whatever reason gets to seed the gene pool and gets passed on. Sometimes it is an evolutionary dead end , like the Silvery Salamander who only can reproduce female clones of itself because it does not accept male sperm and can only use its own chromosomes to make identical female copies of itself.
A few dozen survivors are only found in a few ponds and intensively protected from exterior pressures.
This underscores that although we accept the same science, we are on different planets when it comes to perspective and your oversimplifications never cease to amaze me and I don’t want to argue about it, our body is a product of 600 million years and more, with internal systems of homeostasis beyond your imagining, and still beyond complete scientific understanding.
And why is that if we were aware of all those trillions of electrochemical exchanges taking place. We don’t know anything at that level because our brain has limitations, our sensory organs have limitations, because we get by famously without needing to be consciously aware of any of that . It finctions at a cellular level and only those abilities that help us cope with the exterior environment is employed at a conscious level.
And how old are the parts of a thermometer? How old is iron that is formed in stars, how old is mercury, how old is the wood the thermometer is fastened on? Do the individual parts need to know how they are “interacting” with each other?
Mind that just like a thermometer, homeostasis has its “red lights” that tell the brain something is wrong, but they are activated only when something is wrong. Head ache, joint pain, nausea, dizziness, loss of hearing, loss of eyesight, blackout, confusion, are all warning signe from the homeostatic system that something is “out of balance” even if you cannot tell what is causing it. That is when we go to a doctor to get a diagnosis.
When you have a general feeling of well-being is the closest you get to sensing the state of our biome, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the location of your organs. No person is identical to another, but does anybody know how we differ internally? We only know our differences by our observable exterior appearances, including our own when we look in a mirror.
Come on, it’s self-evident the brain is in intimate communication with thousands subsystems throughout the body’s various cycling networks, working independently & in coordination, throughout the body all the time.
Of course it is! We just don’t know that unless something goes wrong.
But you want to impress me with comparing those systems to a thermostat.
And you consider me presumptuous.
C’mon CC, I wax philosophically about the incredible informational and control abilities that microtuble systems in our bodies provide in the cytoplasm and cytoskeleton and most importantly in our brain, and you accuse me of comparing homeostasis with “just” a thermometer?
Okay, here’s an article that introduces the situation better than I can, and it turns out my hero Mark Solms appears the source of much of it. You really ought to spend some time getting to know his work.
Carlos Montemayor Ph.D.
Posted May 11, 2021 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Theory of Consciousness
4¶: We will not discuss here the details about where exactly in the brain this basis for conscious emotion regulation occurs, but rather focus exclusively on the idea of homeostasis. Fear, for instance, is deeply related to the fight-or-flight response.
Stop right there.
a) We don’t know exactly where the basis for emotion regulation is located!
b) Fear is not caused by an internal event. It based on an observed external event, like rustling in the bushes.
Therefore it is not an internally caused control function.
One may even say that fear is the phenomenally integrated aspect of the response, engaging not just the physiological mechanisms that sustain life but also the cognitive resources of the entire organism, channeling all of these resources and attention towards arriving at the optimal response.
Well duhhh, Guess the role microtubules play in this scenario?
Thus, the phenomenal experience of fear is similar to homeostatic temperature regulation because it is flexible in responding to threats from the environment, yet stable enough to guarantee not only actual but also potential engagement through learning.
He just made a comparison with the body’s thermometer .
Intense fear stops when the system reaches the required equilibrium, like any other homeostatic system.
From this perspective, even the phenomenology of fear and other emotions supports a homeostatic account.
Well yes, all emotional responses ti all stimuli are inherently homeostatic
Don’t play the conspiracy game. It’s not like corporate greed and their self-serving donations and purchased influence haven’t impacted academia and how it deals with issues.
The history of climate science and the denial industry is a very illuminating example, that’s reflected in all sort of other arena’s too.
And Mark Solms is exempt from commercialism?
Oh and yes, various groups have been engaged in calculated “conspiracies” to stupefy the public, and it’s been way too successful.
No doubt, but that does not diminish the work of dedicated scientists.
Over simplifying is no virtue.
Over complication bordering on the spiritual isn’t either.
You are using Anil Seth’s 15 minute synopsys of a science he has devoted 20 years of his life on and judge his excellent lecture at Ted’s, where he received a standing ovation by intelligent people.
Perhaps you need to watch some of Seth’s more formal presentations.
I like Solms, but I can find weaknesses in his posits also.
The fact that we know very little about “consciousness” speaks volumes about our understanding of conscious and unconscious data processing. I try to go by “known” facts, not speculative flights of fancy.
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