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Subjectivity seems different
something quite different
not of the physical world.
Private, experiential,
difficult to communicate
and then only by report
at the third person level.
Is the physical all that is
needed for consciousness
or is there something more
involved?
How is it that I have subjectivity
when, to all appearances,
to this subjectivity
I only have a physical system
with which to experience it?
We model the world in our minds,
we model our minds in the world
Engines of Analysis
Engines of Synthesis
What it is that is out there
is not what it is that is in
our Brains.
We transform and construct
to make the world continuous
and contiguous |
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The
Brain is the substrate for the Mind
an organised structure
describable by cognitive science
by neuro-biology.
It must be understood as a
dynamical system,
fluid, chaotic.
Our consciousness of the world
is dynamic,
in order to keep up with the
world,
and causal,
in order to get what we need
from the world.
Otherwise there is no point
in having it.
If there is no point in having
consciousness
then it most likely wouldn't
have evolved.
Evolution encourages
the development of processing
systems
for those features of difference
which provide information
to help the system maintain
its presence in the world
long enough to produce offspring.
Bifurcating pathways of the
neural processing system
forming a processing hierarchy,
with feedforward and feedback
pathways enabling feature extraction,
quality recognition,
object reconstruction,
recognition and naming,
cross referencing and global
binding |
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This is reverberant structure
output being routed back into
input layers
and cross-fed into other modality
pathways.
An extraordinarily complicated
but highly organised structure
for being dynamically active
in the world.
Establishment of NN connectionism
through self-trained
and culturally-trained
weighting of synapses
effects the discrimination
of features
which further enhance survivability.
The world is dynamic:
informational change, a form
of differencing,
The world is continual;
our place within that flux
is always changing
generating differences.
Likewise the informational
contents of
the neural system is always
changing,
and so the output transforms
presented to higher levels
will always be changing,
not in topography, but in surface
features.
These 'surface features' are,
so to speak,
'displays' of the dimensions
along which some
particular feature extraction
process occurs. |
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The contents of the brain may
well be
like the contents of a language,
codes for those things apprehended,
as words are codes,
signs standing in for the object.
There is only the complex of
processes
(the patterns of activation,
the addressing structures)
standing for the object in
the brain.
The known world is not congruent
with what is 'out there'
in that everything we know
of the world
is contained in the processing
system
which we call the brain.
What we know is not the world,
but our sensory processing
of its waves and disjunctions,
a virtual world.
The flow through this network
is as dynamic as I am,
as dynamic
as the world around me
and my body might be
from moment-to-moment. |
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This is an 'identist'
position
because I can see no other
possible way of viewing the
situation.
It is completely impossible
for me to divorce
my experience from my physical
system
because then I wouldn't be
able to
experience having a physical
system
which is perceiving and producing
those philosophers' illusions:
Qualia.
I would have thrown the baby
out with the 'liquidity'.
Why would (how could)
all this be going on
if it didn't have meaning
and wasn't experienced?
The dynamics of the system give
its difference
and learned experience gives
it meaning.
The whirlpool of feedback gives
it endurance
and (short-term) memory
at whatever scale one is working
at the time. |
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But one is in it,
inside it,
it is oneself undergoing all
this,
(there is no 'double aspect',
the information is embodied,
it can not be any other way).
Yes we know the states of our
system intrinsically,
because it is us,
our embodiement,
we are not a separate layer
observing this thing.
We are the first-person inside
it.
We are that process.
There is not some experiencer
applied to the task
there is simply the process,
the undergoing,
and I have to say,
the experience.
Subjectivity is essentially
the first person
experience of the brain's activity.
The experience of being inside
these processes:
physiological brain as described
within the language of phenomenlogy.
I (res cogitans - the thinking
thing)
am the process of my body/brain.
Experience is what it does.
Experience is what I do.
It is not as though I am a rider
on some wave of experience,
to whom its qualities are transmitted.
I am that wave,
Experiencing. |
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