it has been a little bit more than three years since i first started writing on https://t.co/o9UU8aBsq2. i would like to pause blogging for now! here is a retrospective to cap things off: https://t.co/AYXwxY0wqJ
the way i thought about the brain changed quite significantly when i first encountered a diagram similar to this one (in a John C. Lilly book).
in mammals earlier than humans you (very very broadly speaking) had the back half of the brain devoted to sensory cortices and the front half the brain to motor output. input = green areas, output = purple areas.
as things got more complicated evolution tacked on more and more associative cortices adjacent to the sensorimotor ones
i imagine the sensorimotor cortices to be dealing with low-level shapes which are structurally isomorphic to the incoming information, and the associative cortices to be dealing with more and more abstruse recombinant correlation-based representations as they get further away from the sensory cortices
so, if you follow the cortical gradient/predictive processing gradient, i expect you also see a gradient from more shape-based sensory representations to more abstract/symbolic representations
this is relevant if you are still thinking about the abstraction fallacy paper
susan pockett suggested it was only the sensory cortices which would be conscious (in the holistic field behaviour sense), as they deal with more redundant, higher correlated information (i.e., bigger, more correlated LFPs), whereas the associative cortices further up the predictive processing stack would be less "conscious" given those neurons deal with sparser, higher dimensional, more tightly compressed representations which would be indistinguishable from white noise (https://t.co/wnVcedVkGZ)
now, perhaps this is implausible simply for the reason that the sensory cortices are far apart! how do you get a unified world simulation from those? those sensory cortices all have thalamocortical projections down to their corresponding thalamic nuclei, which basically are all in the same place, so perhaps it's the thalamus where the nice shapely world simulation lives
thinking about this a second time – if @corsaren's piece was hypothetically rewritten in a way which leant upon relational rather than intrinsic qualia (as you have explored), i believe it would still wind up drawing the same conclusions about consciousness in digital minds. if not, then i don't understand your position, i would like to hear the explanation
@jessi_cata@de_lagunez@corsaren like i mostly just feel like "herp a derp it's all fake qualia don't exist" is the wrong interpretation of this position, and is entirely dependent upon the language used
@jessi_cata@foomagemindset insofar as qualia might not have intrinsic nature independent of physics, this would just mean that qualia and physics are two sides of the same coin.
@kyleostboe part of Ward's argument is that generally speaking cortical damage causes all kinds of remarkable degradations of experience but if the thalamus gets damaged it's lights out
@kyleostboe oh that's very interesting. yeah it's really hard to probe the thalamus.
i do like this paper (Ward & Guevara 2022) https://t.co/zrpJeFt3oe as well as its predecessor, (Ward 2011) https://t.co/Az40ONjwpw
@SpiritDirtbag this is of course a massive massive massive generalisation, if you go look at rat brain anatomy you might find the amount of real estate devoted to whiskers and smell striking
the way i thought about the brain changed quite significantly when i first encountered a diagram similar to this one (in a John C. Lilly book).
in mammals earlier than humans you (very very broadly speaking) had the back half of the brain devoted to sensory cortices and the front half the brain to motor output. input = green areas, output = purple areas.
as things got more complicated evolution tacked on more and more associative cortices adjacent to the sensorimotor ones
i imagine the sensorimotor cortices to be dealing with low-level shapes which are structurally isomorphic to the incoming information, and the associative cortices to be dealing with more and more abstruse recombinant correlation-based representations as they get further away from the sensory cortices
so, if you follow the cortical gradient/predictive processing gradient, i expect you also see a gradient from more shape-based sensory representations to more abstract/symbolic representations
i should expand on how i think about this model a bit, like the gist of it is that the field serves as a holistic guiding force for large scale synchronisation of neural oscillations
but broadcasting LFPs is expensive, ideally the neurons should learn how the global field behaves and mostly oscillate in sync with that. minimal friction flow state, minimal "consciousness" perhaps
if a prediction error comes in, that should create a sizeable disturbance in the force, neurons will notice, neurons will need to update their models somehow. more intense "consciousness"
(susan pockett also noticed that feed-back activity produces relatively large LFPs, whereas feed-forward activity does not)
i would also expect holistic field effects to dominate in younger organisms before their neurons have figured out how to predict an extremely wide amount of sensory input. drugs also mess with this, pushing dynamics out of homeostasis and causing field effects to dominate
@deepfates@1a3orn the idea that a embodiment/sense organs are a requirement for consciousness is approximately as insane to me as the idea that complexity is required for consciousness. i should really write a takedown of this