You mean this: “We’re not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; we’re talking about a process.”
You mean there’s some key difference in meaning between your original formulation and my reformulation? Care to elaborate and formulate some specific prediction?
As an example, I once gave a try at interpreting data from olfactory system for a friend who were wondering if we could find sign of an chaotic attractor. If you ever toy with Lorenz model, one key feature is: you either see the attractor by plotting x vs vs z, or you can see it by plotting one of these variable only vs itself at t+delta vs itself at t+2*delta (for many deltas). In other words, that gives a precise feature you can look for (I didn’t find any, and nowadays it seems accepted that odors are location specific, like every other sense). Do you have a better idea or it’s more or less what you’d have tried?
I’ve lost the thread entirely. Where have I ever said or implied that odors are not location specific or that anything else is not location specific. And how specific are you about location? Are we talking about centimeters (or more), millimeters, individual cortical columns?
What’s so obscure about the idea that consciousness is a process that can take place pretty much anywhere, though maybe its confined to interaction within the cortex and between subcortical areas, I’ve not given that one much thought. BTW, I take my conception of consciousness from William Powers, who didn’t speculation about its location in the brain.
Nothing at all. I’m big fan of these kind of ideas and I’d love to present yours to some friends, but I’m afraid they’ll get dismissive if I can’t translate your thoughts into their usual frame of reference. But I get you didn’t work this aspect specifically, there’s many fields in cognitive sciences.
About how much specificity, it’s up to interpretation. A (1k by 1k by frame by cell type by density) tensor representing the cortical columns within the granular cortices is indeed a promising interpretation, although it’d probably be short of an extrapyramidal tensor (and maybe an agranular one).
Well, when Walter Freeman was working on the olfactory cortex of rodents he was using a surface mounted 8x8 matrix of electrodes. I assume that measured in millimeters. In his 1999 paper Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality (paragraphs 36 − 43) a hemisphere-wide global operator (42):
I propose that the globally coherent activity, which is an order parameter, may be an objective correlate of awareness through preafference, comprising expectation and attention, which are based in prior proprioceptive and exteroceptive feedback of the sensory consequences of previous actions, after they have undergone limbic integration to form Gestalts, and in the goals that are emergent in the limbic system. In this view, awareness is basically akin to the intervening state variable in a homeostatic mechanism, which is both a physical quantity, a dynamic operator, and the carrier of influence from the past into the future that supports the relation between a desired set point and an existing state.
Later (43):
What is most remarkable about this operator is that it appears to be antithetical to initiating action. It provides a pervasive neuronal bias that does not induce phase transitions, but defers them by quenching local fluctuations (Prigogine, 1980). It alters the attractor landscapes of the lower order interactive masses of neurons that it enslaves. In the dynamicist view, intervention by states of awareness in the process of consciousness organizes the attractor landscape of the motor systems, prior to the instant of its next phase transition, the moment of choosing in the limbo of indecision, when the global dynamic brain activity pattern is increasing its complexity and fine-tuning the guidance of overt action. This state of uncertainty and unreadiness to act may last a fraction of a second, a minute, a week, or a lifetime. Then when a contemplated act occurs, awareness follows the onset of the act and does not precede it.
He goes on from there. I’m not sure whether he came back to that idea before he died in 2016. I haven’t found it, didn’t do an exhaustive search, but I did look.
“You said: what matters is temporal dynamics”
You mean this: “We’re not talking about some specific location or space in the brain; we’re talking about a process.”
If so, all I meant was a process that can take place pretty much anywhere. Consciousness can pretty much ‘float’ to wherever its needed.
Since you asked for more, why not this: Direct Brain-to-Brain Thought Transfer: A High Tech Fantasy that Won’t Work.
You mean there’s some key difference in meaning between your original formulation and my reformulation? Care to elaborate and formulate some specific prediction?
As an example, I once gave a try at interpreting data from olfactory system for a friend who were wondering if we could find sign of an chaotic attractor. If you ever toy with Lorenz model, one key feature is: you either see the attractor by plotting x vs vs z, or you can see it by plotting one of these variable only vs itself at t+delta vs itself at t+2*delta (for many deltas). In other words, that gives a precise feature you can look for (I didn’t find any, and nowadays it seems accepted that odors are location specific, like every other sense). Do you have a better idea or it’s more or less what you’d have tried?
I’ve lost the thread entirely. Where have I ever said or implied that odors are not location specific or that anything else is not location specific. And how specific are you about location? Are we talking about centimeters (or more), millimeters, individual cortical columns?
What’s so obscure about the idea that consciousness is a process that can take place pretty much anywhere, though maybe its confined to interaction within the cortex and between subcortical areas, I’ve not given that one much thought. BTW, I take my conception of consciousness from William Powers, who didn’t speculation about its location in the brain.
Nothing at all. I’m big fan of these kind of ideas and I’d love to present yours to some friends, but I’m afraid they’ll get dismissive if I can’t translate your thoughts into their usual frame of reference. But I get you didn’t work this aspect specifically, there’s many fields in cognitive sciences.
About how much specificity, it’s up to interpretation. A (1k by 1k by frame by cell type by density) tensor representing the cortical columns within the granular cortices is indeed a promising interpretation, although it’d probably be short of an extrapyramidal tensor (and maybe an agranular one).
Well, when Walter Freeman was working on the olfactory cortex of rodents he was using a surface mounted 8x8 matrix of electrodes. I assume that measured in millimeters. In his 1999 paper Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality (paragraphs 36 − 43) a hemisphere-wide global operator (42):
Later (43):
He goes on from there. I’m not sure whether he came back to that idea before he died in 2016. I haven’t found it, didn’t do an exhaustive search, but I did look.