Susan Blackmore on Consciousness


At 2 minutes 20 seconds she talks about the difficulties of looking for neural correlates of consciousness in brains. I wouldn't expect to be able to locate consciousness in a brain either, but it doesn't seem too weird, to me, to look for some set of physical measurements which could accurately predict that a subject is in fact conscious at some time. I would expect them to be measurements of the brain as well as the enteric and autonomic nervous systems, and probably also a significant part of the skin and the contents of the bowels. I don't claim this is a scientific hypothesis though, it is just a "gut feeling" based on personal experience. See On Psychobotanics and Neurology and Nancy Trivellato on Disembodied Consciousness. See also the way Annaka Harris describes a spectrum of consciousness in Annaka Harris on Consciousness.


Something gives me the idea now that Hillary Nicholson has been watching YouTube videos, ... Hey, Hillary, have you got a copy of that weird essay about lambda calculus that I sent to you fifteen or so years ago? That might be a good way of explaining why we shouldn't expect to find universal neural correlates of any specific experience. That's just because it's all joined-up, and we are all each-other's context for interpreting descriptions. Ask Hillary what she is conscious of when she listens to this track. So, if you could contact my daughter, Hillary, she might have a copy of an essay I sent her about what a law of physics really is, ... and then you could maybe make sense of my rambling about abstract language being "everything".

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stefan Molyneux on Resource Based Economy

Image
This is an interesting discussion. What most people don't realise is that capitalism as we practice it now wastes 99.9% of the human and material resources we currently use. Once you realise that, the problems raised by the idea of gift or resource-based economies become much more tractable. At  10 minutes 30 seconds  the discussion turns to the way we treat our family and friends differently. We don't charge our nearest and dearest. At this point Molyneux brings in Neo-Darwinian evolution to explain why there is this difference between the way we treat our kith and kin to the way we treat everybody else. I guess he will go on to argue that this is because we evolved to be like this, otherwise we would not have survived. He will presumably say that this is human nature and because it is genetically determined, nothing we can do short of a programme of eugenics and euthenasia will change that. Well, ... you know what my answer to that will be, ... something along the lines:
Read more

Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math

Image
Sabine's book,  Lost in Math published in 2018. See  Rebecca Smethurst on the Crisis in Cosmology . Here's an interview on the subject of the book: At 16 minutes 27 seconds on aesthetics in a theory. I think you should worry first and foremost about whether or not it works, otherwise you are not doing empirical science. At 19 minutes 19 seconds on whether there would be better ways to advance physics other than by building the next generation of super high-energy particle collider. This is similar to military spending and it's really just an artefact of Keynesian monetary theory: that you can create 'wealth' by employing men to dig holes in the road and fill them up again. Of course you are not creating real wealth, you are destroying it and creating fake money. The upshot is that the better ways of spending much, much less money on encouraging sound scientific teaching and research are not of any interest, because they don't employ nearly so ma
Read more

Nikola Tesla and the End of The World

Image
At  1 minute 21 seconds  the building in the background, in Trafalgar Square , as she says "There is a story in our family that my great grandfather worked with Nikola Tesla, ..." is ... ... what? Hint: it is near to a statue of George Washington, a replica donated by the  Commonwealth of Virginia in 1921 .  See  War Crimes . Watch all four episodes of  Nikola Tesla and the End of The World  and then watch this: And on the meaning of the word sovereignty see: On the Mason-Dixon Line, the "boundary of slavery" in the American colonies, it might be insightful to compare the  Britannica  and  Wikipedia  entries and see where they differ. Then, especially if you're my daughter, see  On Feminist Genealogy . Then see this documentary about Mark Knopfler and what motivates his music. There's a nice bit at  17 minutes  about where songs come from, and what happens to their origin, and the role of Town Planners like my father, in this process, part
Read more