Re: Which part of the brain is conscious?

[Steve Johnson <***>]

Judith Rosen:

We have discovered that if we remove some essential
organ or subsystem from the human body, but put in
place some compensatory artificial equivalent, we can
sometimes preserve life. But there are "side effects".
Why? *** Perhaps because that missing subsystem's
usual interactions no longer exist and some of those
interactions were necessary to other interactions we
didn't know about. In other words, "parts of the
organization" are missing ***.

Steve Johnson:

The last sentence reminds of a George Kampis' article
I read that described how computer simulated evolution
always follows the same pattern. At first it creates a
varied ecosystem of some small and fast and some
bigger and more flexible "creatures". Eventually
though every simulation always settles into a
degenerate equilibrium of only trivial creatures. The
point of the article was that lack of causal
interactions causes degeneracy even if natural
selection is operating in a Darwinian sense. This is
also hypothesized in Varela's "Embodied Mind".



--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> Steve,
> 
> I think you don't give yourself enough credit for
> deep thoughts...
> 
> You know, the realization you posted is one that an
> awful lot of 
> "esteemed" scientists haven't been able to "get". It
> comes back to the 
> question "Is the mind immanent or transcendent?" I
> suppose the answer 
> has to do more with our definitions of those two
> terms than anything 
> else, but the way I define them, the mind is both.
> As you have seen, 
> the mind is not reducible to the structure of the
> brain anymore than 
> life could be reducible to bodily structure.
> 
> The way the structural parts relate to one another
> via the 
> organization creates interactions that act as "more
> parts". And that's 
> not all that's interacting: There are internal
> models, internal 
> contexts, external contexts... of which "time" is a
> constant 
> ingredient in its myriad guises (change, rate,
> sequence, anticipation, 
> etc.) and all of these interactions act as if they
> were the equivalent 
> of 'More parts". In other words, there is a causal
> effect from the 
> interactions that is not specified by the structural
> parts alone.
> 
> The case of metabolism, for example, is a whole set
> of interactions 
> interacting with each other, creating causal
> effects. Living systems 
> have an organization where the
> "interactions-as-parts" also interact 
> with one another. This creates causal chains that
> are entirely without 
> structural parts we could point to and say, with any
> logic "This is 
> the part that causes that effect." To complicate
> matters even further, 
> any physical part in a living organism serves as
> more than one part, 
> in more than one subsystem.... simultaneously and/or
> at different 
> times. So, the part of the brain that is most
> primitive, regulating 
> breathing and heartbeat, etc.... is essential to the
> conscious mind 
> even though we can say technically "we don't think
> with that part of 
> the brain"... The heart and lungs are essential to
> the mind 
> because.... Metabolism is essential to the mind
> because... But those 
> subsystems are not what "cause" the mind. Not
> directly and not even 
> indirectly. It's the interactions of the
> interactions of the 
> interactions...... as specified (constrained) and
> made possible by the 
> organization.
> 
> I think my father's point is that the mind is
> immanent in a certain 
> type of complex organization, of which the human
> organism is one 
> embodiment or example.
> 
> We have discovered that if we remove some essential
> organ or subsystem 
> from the human body, but put in place some
> compensatory artificial 
> equivalent, we can sometimes preserve life. But
> there are "side 
> effects". Why? Perhaps because that missing
> subsystem's usual 
> interactions no longer exist and some of those
> interactions were 
> necessary to other interactions we didn't know
> about. In other words, 
> "parts of the organization" are missing.
> 
> Judith
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Steve Johnson
>   To: ***
>   Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 12:32 AM
>   Subject: [ROSEN] Which part of the brain is
> conscious?
> 
> 
>   This is not exactly a deep thought for people on
> this list but I 
> just realized that my reading of the various Rosen
> writings and 
> related materials helped clear up a confusion I had
> a for a while.
> 
>   The collapse of the quantum wave function and the
> role of the 
> conscious observer in it have always prompted me to
> wonder which part 
> of the brain is actually concious. Clearly if we
> replace a blind 
> person's eyes with video cameras feeding into the
> optic nerve he would 
> still count as a conscious observer. You can
> continue this thought 
> experiment ad infinitum replacing various parts and
> at each step the 
> "observer" still seems conscious.
> 
>   This always seemed like a legitimate paradox to
> me, whereas now it 
> seems pretty obvious that the concious mind is not
> "contained" in any 
> part of the brain no matter which part you replace.
> As you continue 
> replacing you will at some point destroy the
> emergent organization and 
> "lose" the mind much like Rosen always argues that a
> dead organism is 
> a poor surragate for a living one even though it
> seems to have the 
> same parts.
> 
> 
> 
>
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