[Michael Chui]

Originally Posted by Melchior

This is an analogy that I've rarely come across for the mind, and it's rather informative. I was going to ask what would constitute as the conductor of the orchestra, but then I read your next part. So then, would it be that the artifact of consciousness is like the players performing something of an impromptu?

I would say it's more like the sensory input--patterns of light splashing across the retina, vibrations in the colchea, nerve firings in the nose, tongue, and skin--is the sheet music being generated spontaneously. That is, it's not random: it's entirely informed by sensory information.

Originally Posted by Melchior

Although, I'm kinda confused as to why you've connected the orchestra only with the sensory regions, wouldn't it be more of both an input/output kind of thing, with the remixing happening to change how this association behaves? Or is there something else that would describe the motor regions you've noted? Maybe explain this part again?

I only touched on the sensory regions because consciousness is about sense. It's reception and processing what got received. I imagine introspection and reflection is something like parts of the brain dumping out remixes and other parts receiving and "sensing" it: that's the simplest and most plausible explanation I've heard.

Originally Posted by Melchior

I wonder how this connects to the behavior of strengthening the connection at a synapse as that connection is used more often, and how this playing of a pattern occurs in the absence of external stimuli. Because, if it's an internal thing, there's some sort of loopback involved too, as tricky as that would have to get for it to remain 'stable' if you would, to improve the sound engineers job, but perhaps that is fixed due to it being only certain chemical reactions in the brain rather than a region of neurons as well, not sure of this.

Yeah. I don't know whether or not research is being done on this topic (probably), but I'm not really aware of any of it.

Assuming it's correct, though, it provides an explanation for several things. Most trauma-based insanities, for instance, are a cancer-like echoing of past incidences. And a creator who locks himself up and doesn't allow external things to influence his originality tends to fail to create anything, arguably because the feedback loops don't have any novelty to work with and die out.

Originally Posted by Melchior

Well, if you reduce it to the harmony of associating input and output of a system, then the rock probably does, but the functions are also quite simple in comparison.

Or simply much slower. The difference between a rock and a computer is simply that a computer is made up of rocks that we've carefully designed to do precise actions really fast.

Oh, btw. The "rock as conscious thing" comes from Andromeda Strain, I think. There's a scene where one of the scientists puts down three objects, and one is a watch, and points out why each of them could be considered a lifeform.

Originally Posted by Melchior

I hope it doesn't actually take a century, I'd like to see a conscious computer before I die.

Oh, we already have conscious computers. What we don't have are self-conscious computers. I was saying it'd take at least a century to figure out how to do actual mind control. Or memory forensics.

Originally Posted by Melchior

Thanks for the link, I briefly glanced over his memory prediction framework and it seemed quite nice, at least making sense with the idea of finding and using patterns as well as the abstraction layers involved. Although, I did find the description "a learning hierarchy of feed forward stochastic state machines" much more helpful to me, but that's probably because I haven't read too much on him as of yet, looks like I'll have to check out his book.

The book is made for laymen, as my math professor complained when I showed him. You might be able to learn more if you poke around with Numenta products; I know my knowledge isn't up to snuff for understanding what they're doing. I barely understand neural networks.

For motivation, there is a section at the end where he talks about consciousness, qualia, and robots taking over the world. It's nice.

Originally Posted by Melchior

I'm hoping this topic doesn't die out as it did... You know, it's interesting that on a spirituality, consciousness, & awareness forum that such questions are simply ignored...

tbqh, challenging questions that can't be answered pithily tend to be too slow-moving to stick around the first page. I would know, having been in like... half of them. Which is fine, technically, since any worthwhile question is going to demand thoughtful reflection in between posts. But they tend to lose popularity contests; Christianity-bashing is much more fun and exciting.

Hrm. I can't remember the last time I saw a thoughtful thread on religion.