Zelebg wrote: ↑Mon Nov 11, 2019 12:13 pm
Dimebag wrote: ↑Mon Nov 11, 2019 11:28 am
Let me ask you, when you put your hand over a flame, what is your initial reaction? It is to withdraw from the flame. You do this because you feel pain. Now, the body actually has a “silent” signal of pain below the level of awareness which acts much quicker than the consciously felt pain, it sends a signal to the hand to withdraw, almost before you are aware of it. But, what is important is, if you don’t consciously perceive that pain, you won’t learn not to do that for next time. Imagine if you are a little kid. You touch the flame and your hand has the sudden withdrawal action away from it. You then feel the pain a few hundredths of a second later, quite traumatically, and your brain associates the source of the pain, the flame, with a fear response, so that the next time you see the flame, the fear response will be elicited by merely seeing the flame. This is enough to ensure you don’t touch the flame again. But you must be aware of the flame for this fear response to occur. Fear is also felt consciously. It is motivational, which means it creates motion. There are people who don’t have a pain response. They tend to hurt themselves a lot, which is bad. Pain must be felt to be effective.
Yes. But all that is just computation, does not require subjective experienc. This qualia might not be necessary after all, but then it would seem to burn unnecessary calories and that shouldn't be happening in evolution.
The brain fundamentally operates via the same signalling system, neurons, action potentials, and neurochemistry.
Imagine the signals are like 1’s or 0’s (just for simplicities sake, it’s more complex than that). Now, that binary code is just the medium via which the actual signal is encoded, just like your computer. The operating system in your computer translates this basic binary into a new layer of abstraction, a different language that software can interface with.
Well imagine your different senses and motor cortex are like the software, they all speak different languages, some care about edges, colours, shapes, depth, location, others care about tone, pitch, volume, others care about smells. They all have different interests, and so have their own language they speak. When they need to work together to accomplish a task, there needs to be a universal translator between all the different senses, cognitive areas, motor areas. This is conscious experience. All the senses learn this universal language and so can talk to any other part of the brain, and know what it’s talking about.
When you learn to drive for the first time, and the instructor says, okay, push in the clutch and change to first gear. You do this easy enough, (actually, your ears hear the verbal command translated into language, which the motor cortex understands and so it pushes your left foot down on the clutch). Then the instructor says, okay, slowly release the clutch and add some accelerator. You do so, but the car stalls. You panic, because you know it shouldn’t do that. The instructor gives you more specific information, “slowly release the clutch until you feel the car start to shudder a little”. You do that, and feel a shudder encoded from your somatosensory cortex. The instructor tells you, “that’s the friction point, now slowly add some power and Then slowly release the clutch”. You now have a reference point to look for when you are releasing the clutch, you feel the shudder and this acts as a trigger to start adding power, and as you add power this is the next trigger to release the clutch. You could not do this previously, but gradually, and consciously, you start to build up a specific sequence of movements, combining sensory information from multiple different senses which each have their own language, and feeding these into motor commands, which is then observed for correct execution, as well as monitoring the car for sounds of potential stalling, or somatosensory feelings of vibration. None of these brain systems could talk to each other in this specific way previously. However, thanks to the patient instructor, they guided you through all the movements and required sensory information and feedback to achieve the task, helping you wire together those systems as you continue to repeat the learning process, to the point where they wire together permanently, and conscious attention and awareness is no longer necessary. Only once these disparate brain networks are connected permanently can awareness focus elsewhere.
This is the great power of consciousness and awareness working in unison to learn. This enables cultures to grow, technology to be produced and passed down, methods of survival, of sustenance, amazingly powerful survival methods, only possible through consciousness.
Just because a task can be carried out without direct awareness, doesn’t mean it always could. A complex behaviour pattern must be learned to be adaptive when the arms race of nature is at play. Pre-programmed responses can be beaten by simply observing them, and predicting them.
