The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach

[saltydog]

A conscious moment

I've been reading John Searle's "Consciousness"

He proposes the "Unified Field Theory" suggesting that consciousness is spread across a portion of the brain called the thalamocortical system. Searle states, "we should look for consciousness as a feature of the brain emerging from the activities of large masses of neurons, and which cannot be explained by the activities of individual neurons".

In my humble opinion, that statement hints of "Emergence". Allow me to offer a slightly changed version of an analogy I stated earlier:

Imagine all the ways thousands of butterflies trapped in a 3-D matrix could flap their wings in synchronicity. Not just all at once but in a symphony of "flowing" patterns (a large 3-D matrix). Imagine in it's past, a breeze passed through the matrix. The pattern of beating wings shifted in response to the force of the breeze propagating through the matrix. Now the wings, in the absence of a breeze, shift back to that pattern as the matrix experiences a conscious moment.

 

[Mentat]

To elaborate on what salty said, imagine that we can reconstruct your own brain, neuron by neuron, to the point where the architecture and functionality of the second brain was exactly the same as yours. Would it not believe it was you? It would have your memories filed away and your behavioral tendencies programmed into it (including any tendency to love in a particular way). It would also hold all of the same beliefs that you do. Now imagine we did this same thing, but instead of using organic neurons, we used silicon chips that performed exactly the same computations and behaved exactly like human neurons. Wouldn't the outcome be the same? We'd have created a robot Mentat, complete with your past and your social constructs. (You'll have to put aside the practical impossibility of ever doing this, of course.)

Quite correct (and admirably succinct).