Cognition

Pain is a neurological reaction to a stimulus. The experience of feeling physical pain is only pain if our brain perceives the experience as pain. Of course, the feeling of pain is normally a subconscious reaction. It’s a trait that has been developed and passed down in evolution to help keep species alive.

Yes, pain is in the head, and without the brain, there would be no sensation of pain. But what do you mean that pain is normally a subconscious reaction? pain is in its core conscious, so there can never be pain that is not conscious. You have to call it differently, perhaps some kind of reflex?

Experiencing pain is nothing more than a chemically induced feeling.

That is not entirely correct: the experience of pain is something very different than "just" something chemical. It starts out as a chemical process, transmitting signals to the brain and there somehow (something still completely unknown) the sensation of pain is formed.

So by assuming we do not feel pain' date=' people only experience pain and neurons do not? Cuz I think each neuron experiences pain and then work together as a system, people should check out the info in the website below.

 

http://www.stevenharris.com/theory/[/quote']

 

Why should a neuron experience pain? What arguments do you have for such a ridiculous idea?

in reply to the original question' date='

 

I personally feel that like the computers process things in binary, our brain also has a "system" or "language" of processing information. Maybe I'm not able to express my thoughts clearly, but doesn't the base system depend on how many types of impulses are present?[/quote']

 

I am glad we are coming back to the original topic again, although pain is interesting, but there is so little one can say with certainty about pain...

Ofcourse it is a psychological state, but what does that mean? Does it mean that you have to understand pain before it is there? No, ofcourse not. Pain is a basic Quale, and therefore not well understood yet, and we can make a difference between (what we can call) physical pain, and emotional pain. Both are feelings, but there are differences. I would rather say that emotional pain is a psychological state and physical pain is not.

 

What you are saying about thinking is correct. There is a system or "language". And probably the main building blocks of our thought are cell-assemblies. We know that concepts are the fundament of thinking and concepts are represented by cell-assemblies in the brain. The flow of activation between cell-assemblies is what is considered in common sense languge as thinking and although there is no consensus about the details of all this, there are no reason to think about some mysterious aspect like "muscles" to explain how we control our thoughts: lots of activation is happening at one moment in the brain and our thoughts are guided by that and that alone....you may experience a train of thought and then suddenly be distracted by something significant in your surroundings, which may cause you to shift your thinking to that.....

That is a good description

All these answers are very interesting, but none seem to answer the basic question.

The basic question is not answered?? What kind of answer do you expect? It is our brain that determines what we think about and although human beings think they have free will, it has been shown a long time ago that free will is an illusion: the brain processes of a conscious thought are beginning a few hundred milliseconds before the conscious thought about it. The reason we think it is all voluntary is probably the gigantic difference between the objective processes and the subjective consciousness. But there is no definite answer to "WHY" we think we have free will as far as I know.

One of the structural flaws with psycho-theory is connected to the lack of concensus understanding of what consciousness is. This should be the foundation of the mind since it is what interfaces the personality to the brain and to the biochemistry of the brain. Without such basic understanding one can not begin any theory at step one. This might explain why most consciousness theory is empirical instead of rational. In all due respect, empirical is useful because it lets the dice fall where they may without requiring concensus understanding of consciousness.

I read all this and it sounds nice, although to freudian flavoured. But there are a few things I do not understand. We already have an understanding of the link between personality and brain, so when you talk about "the interface" it seems that you are saying our personality is one entity apart from the brain entity. That sounds dualistic.

Furthermore, I think that scientific psychology is empirical, because it seems so very hard to say what Consciousness IS, and the only way to explore the brain is the empirical way. Are you saying that a rational analysis of consciousness would give us greater understanding as to what it "IS" (ontologically?)

.....I would like to attempt to deduce the nature of consciousness from my own studies and observations.....

I read your text and I am not 1 nanometer closer to understanding what consciousness is......

The ego or conscious mind, can willfully move around the brain and cause certain regions of the brain to show higher neural activity.

I hope you are not saying that consciousness is different from brain function, and that this "thing" is causal.

I don't think they do, because I use ZoneAlarm on my laptops with AVG and Avast. And I never had any problems there, but this is the second time I had this problem on the HP desktop (Norton came with the computer and it is very hard to remove it completely from the system)

Hi,

I have Norton running on my (old) HP desktop and since a few days, I was unable to go online. Now I turned off the firewall from Norton and it works fine. But also I have some kind of user-problem. I am unable to start programs by double-clicking on the short-cuts: I can start the program by right-clicking on the short-cut and start it from there, but it is more tedious.

Also some of my option (e.g. software) in the control panel are just not working anymore. I remember having this problem before (a long time ago). My virus-scanner doesn't show any problems. What is wrong and what can I do about it??

Yes consciousness can think causually and can manipulate genetics in the process. For example, if one was to think about a tasty food in the imagination, one could potentially begin to feel hungry. The hunger instinct has been shown to be due to a series of chemicals which begin in the hypothalamus region of the brain and flow to other regions of the body. Since this imagination process can occur out of sych with natural hunger/DNA frequency (between meals), it implies that the imagination has caused the the DNA within the hypothalmus cells to unpack and/or increase the transcription rate to make more proteins, which will initiate the needed chemical train; consciousness manipulating the DNA at will.

It would be more helpfull to explain all this as a way of conditioning. Consciousness has no causal powers, but the brain does. At the same time it is one thought activating another, so it is the "thought" process in the brain that has the causal powers, but your terminology is very confusing.

It seems as if you wanna attribute some causal "thinking" powers to consciousness, or am I reading it incorrectly?

There is something else I do not understand about the supposed toxicity of the seeds of (e.g.) apricots. If it is true that the hunzakuts are consuming large quantities of these seeds, I expect that they would have dropped dead by the thousands. But this presumably didn't happen. Why?

Theoretically' date=' women taking B17 = miscarriage[/b']

 

Studies found several cases of miscarriage in pregnant women who were taking laetrile for cancer ….. for centuries Polynesian girls have eaten a papaya seeds to avoid pregnancy …….

 

India….. Of these, the methods in most widespread popular use are raw papaya……

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/Organizations/healthnet/SAsia/suchana/0510/herhealingheritage2.html

 

pregnant women should avoid papaya as it may cause a miscarriage…..

http://www.bawarchi.com/health/papaya.html

 

... Due to the risk of miscarriage, pregnant women should not take passion flower ..Apricot. ...

http://www.drugdigest.org/DD/DVH/HerbsTake/0,3927,4101%7CApricot+Vine,00.html

 

K.. not the best examples but you get the idea.

I read some research from ages ago pointing out that in the fetus cells also divide very rapidly, just like in cancer. Is that the reason why eating b17 leads to miscarriages??

I have been reading for two years now about b17 (leatrile) and its supposed effects on cancer. Online you can find lots of sites dedicated to it. The first one to state this effect was Dr. Krebs. But what has really bugged me always was the fact that I can also write some shit on my website. For a real good discussion about the subject here, we should provide solid articles about the subject that everyone agrees on they are telling the truth. Do any of you have extremely reliable papers in which some real research about B17 is undertaken??

I wouldn't mind defining a human brain and human cognition as nothing more than just a whole lot of interconnected neurons and that's it....

If we would be an alien species that was extremely intelligent but didn't know anything about consciousness, would we discover it while exploring the human brain? I am not sure about it, since we have not discovered anything at all that seems to point to consciousness (at least the hard problem of consciousness which also seems to be the subjective most salient aspect of it). So, I agree with francis Crick that we are nothing more than neurons, but we still need to discover what causes consciousness. Some people maintain that we should not concern ourselves with it, since it is nothing more than an emergent property of the brain. Perhaps that is right, but if that is so, we still have this explanation-gap that is not present with other emergent properties. We can understand an emergent property like "driving" of a car that is caused by all the individual components of the car working together. But that kind of understanding is not (yet) available for the brain-components causing consciousness

I have read some of Dennett's material on the subject' date=' most recently 'consciousness explained' - and I've found that regardless of whether you agree with him or not his points are incredibly hard to argue against. The man himself would probably object his views truncated in the manner they are on here; but nonetheless it seems to boil down to a few points;

 

Phenomenology - i.e. a subject's experience. Cannot be taken as what is really happening. [/quote']

 

Yes, I agree. And, in fact, I agree with 99.9% of what Dennett says. But I do not agree with his view on Qualia. Qualia, subjective expereinces, are not the right subject for science, but we all know we are conscious and that qualia are the main "ingredient" of consciousness, and the way Dennett is trying to explain them "away" by saying that they are illusions is just to easy. That doesn't do justice to what we all feel and think we know so well. If you say things like that, you have to explain exactly why we are "thinking" we are conscious (even an illusion is a Quale), but I don't see anything like that in "Consciousness explained".

The basic constituents of thought are supposed to be concepts. We all have conceptual knowledge, and the big question still is how the brain stores and handles all this knowledge. We are quite sure that one "simple" natural concept, like "dog", or "bird" is not represented by the activation of 1 neuron. There are several arguments for this: one neuron is not able to activate one other neuron. Also, we lose lots of neurons everyday, and we don't suddenly lose the ability to think of common everyday concepts.

The hypothesis that concepts are represented by cell-assemblies is much more tenable: cell-assemblies are probably clusters of neurons or several clusters of neurons working together throughout the brain. Together with an control-mechanism (in the frontal cortex) the complex interaction of clusters or neurons is the way humans are supposed to think.

And the fact that he related anything to sex, was because at that time (Victorian), everything associated with sex was very repressed...

Ofcourse not. Then you would also expect that people with damage to their hippocampus would eventually recover by itself, and that doesn't happen. The damage is permanent

Muscles don't play a function in thinking, unless you have muscle-pain, and that (electrical) signal is transmitted to the brain and you start thinking about the pain. Thinking is done by the brain because neurons (brain-cells) are connected to each other and they communicate by electrical pulses. That complex interaction between thousands of neurons is what we call "thinking"...

I agree with you that when in a clinical setting the correlates of consciousness can give a workable construct, then you should use it. Conscioussness is part of cognition and since I am a cognitive scientist, I have always been interested in consciousness, but I never did any real research in that field. I am reading a lot about in and I know the work of Dennett, Eccles, Penfield, McGinn, and ofcourse Searle. When Searle speaks about Intentionality, I can not get away from the strong intuition that he is speaking about consciousness, and we see that in these last years consciousness is more in his attentional spotlight

Creativity is only judged by a human, there is no mathematic calculating method involved. Who is to say that if a machine developed a theory based on credible evidence that it isn't creative?

There is a very good book about creativity by Margaret Boden, an English AI specialist and Philosopher. It is a great book, and it shows that creative behavior is not mystical as most people would like to believe. I think computers can be Creative and computers can be Artificial Intelligent. I know for a fact that I have created Artificial Intelligence and it is really not that hard. But ofcourse it is simple AI, a mechanism that learns to generalize from examples and when it is presented with something "new" it is able to categorize that almost perfectly. That is a definite form of intelligence and since it is not done by the human brain, it is AI.

But I do not think that computers based on the Von Neumann structure will be able to be as intelligent as human beings, even when they are programmed with all the knowledge the world or even with immense processing power. I have another idea also. In the beginning of this thread it was argued that there will never be Machines more intelligent then us, because everything will be based on our brains....That is just the way to make a machine more intelligent then we are: we know that humans have a limited short time memory and thinking (creatively) is usually making associations and seeing similarities between two things. If we would understand what it is that makes our short term memory so limited, and we understand much more of the processes of reasoning, analogy and thinking, then we will definitely be able to create extremely artificial intelligence.

Concepts and categories are mainly learned from experience. There are some good models about this, but there is in fact very little work relating concepts and categories to the brain.

What we know from concepts and categories can be summarized in 2 current theories about it: one is that we learn from experience a prototype (i am sure you choose your name for that reason, right?), and this prototype is used also when we categorize new exemplars. The other theory says that we don't necessarily form a prototype from experience, but we store every exemplar of a category and then we use that information to categorize new exemplars of a category. There is quite a lot we understand about learning and categorizing, but also still a lot we don't know. People sometimes seem to use an "implicit model" when they are making categorizations and it is still not known how humans do that.

Property dualism... didn't know that' date=' but I found something on Wikipedia: "It asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e., organized in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge."

 

There's also a short definition at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/propertydualism.html.

 

Do I understand it correctly that it means that matter has or can have different properties, like on different levels? Like some atom having physical properties, but also having mental properties on a different level at the same time?[/quote']

 

What it means is that the brain has physical properties and conscious has not, it is subjective and has different properties (qualia). Somehow the brain will probably cause these qualia, but we still have absolutely no clue how that is done. So when you are a property dualist (which I didn't invent, I just read about it), then you can simply say there are different properties: this does not deny the subjective experiences, it does not lead to substance dualism and you leave open the possibility that science will explain the causation someday.

Except that there are degrees and levels of consciousness.

No, there are no levels of consciousness. Give me one good link where levels of consciousness are proven. Then I believe you. As I said: I experience no levels, so there are no levels. I am not saying this to be arrogant, but it shows the trouble with what is said. I think Consciousness is only Qualia and that is why we can never say that there are levels. C is subjective and therefore the only definition can be a subjective one. If I feel there are no levels, then there are no levels

That's because, as I said, there are problems with most definitions of consciousness. The main problem is its subjectivity which means that definitions often contain descriptions of correlates, such as responsivity or EEG activity.

No, there is an inconsequence in your reasoning. If part of consciousness (or a lower level) is responsivity, or if that is how C. is defined, then we can easily see why that must be wrong: a thermostat is responsive and no sane human being would say it is Conscious, or intentional, as we think we are (well, I think Dennett would, but there is his only mistake: in trying to be a physicalist so hard, he thinks he must take this "stance".... )

True, but nonetheless, for many reasons we need a working definition. The best we can do is work with the least flawed, or at least, the most reliable one we can generate.

Yes, and that is what I am trying to argue. We can Qualia as a fundamental given (like gravity in physics), and work on cognition as we do already, trying to find out the way the brain thinks, memorizes, categorizes, etc. Then we can use this "stance" to give most of what is thought to be (part of) consciousness a good scientific explanation and admit that qualia have subjective properties which can not be explained physicalistically (yet). And then (almost) everyone will have a reasonable answer to everything: the best we can give with our current knowledge.

You sleep, don't you? You cease to be consciously aware of your surroundings, yet your mind still works, albeit on a different level of consciousness.

Yes, I sleep, but i don't feel as if my subjective experiences change. My body is going into sleep-mode, but during dreaming my experience of my dreams is no different then my experience of my thinking and my memories during waking hours...

Just as they cannot prove your consciousness. But that is what I said; consciousness is entirely subjective. We can know it in ourselves, but only infer it in others. Where this is necessary (e.g. in clinical situations), we do so by using observable corrolates, such as responsivity to stimuli, measures of awareness of the environment, measures of cognitive function etc.. These are not direct measures of consciousness, but as a rule, these functions don't occur without it.

Sure, I will admit that these functions are there most of the time when a human being is conscious, but what can they really tell about the difference in level of C.? I think nothing. I may be less responsive when I am asleep, but that is no reason to assume that my subjective experiences change also dramatically...

The Ego and the Id were introduced to Psychology by Freud and he tried to explain the "abnormal" Mind with it. Cognitive Psychology is not about the abnormal mind, but it is about the cognition and the cognitive system where you find processes such as memory, learning and thinking. That is why you will not find the ego and the Id within cognitive psychology, but in clinical psychology