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vincentML -> RE: Let's try leaving religion out of it.... (6/23/2016 11:46:52 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kirata
quote:
ORIGINAL: vincentML
~FR
A new model of consciousness proposed. I found this interesting and simply wished to share it without comment.
The driver ahead suddenly stops, and you find yourself stomping on your brakes before you even realize what is going on. We would call this a reflex, but the underlying reality is much more complex, forming a debate that goes back centuries: Is consciousness a constant, uninterrupted stream or a series of discrete bits -- like the 24 frames-per-second of a movie reel? Scientists from EPFL and the universities of Ulm and Zurich, now put forward a new model of how the brain processes unconscious information, suggesting that consciousness arises only in intervals up to 400 milliseconds, with no consciousness in between. The work is published in PLOS Biology.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160412160346.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_science+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+Science+News%29
Well, it's been known for years that there can be a delay of up to 500 milliseconds between when the brain registers a stimulus and when an attending subject reports awareness of it, for example by pushing a button. But the feed is continuous while we are attending, so processing delays do not seem to me to be evidence that consciousness is blinking on and off. It is, however, often attending to other things. We drive home from work absorbed in thinking about the argument we had with a co-worker or where we're going to go on vacation, and arrive at our driveway having devoted little if any conscious attention to how we got there. But that doesn't mean that our consciousness was turned off. It is simply the case that once we have learned something we can do it largely automatically while attending to other things.
K.
I think your critique is a valid one. I think these fellows have over-reached announcing a new model of consciousness. What they propose, imo, is best limited to a single stimulus-response process even if the response is just awareness of the perceived object or event. They present no new observations nor do they suggest predictions and experiments. Someone once claimed there are more neurons in a single brain than stars in the universe, or maybe it was galaxies in the universe. In any case, a hellova lot of neurons, and each neuron may be connected to thousands of other neurons forming elastic networks. So, I don't see where anyone can make a definitive statement about unconsciousness based on a simple stimulus-response model. I agree that we multitask without being fully aware of a task we are doing. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
This raises the whole issue of the quality of unconsciousness. We know, I think, that there are different levels of consciousness when we sleep and when we are anesthetized. I wonder if total, blank unconsciousness is not just a false concept that arose from seeing people "knocked out" and then come awake again. Even patients in a vegetative state and those only minimally conscious show activity on brain scans.
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