A lot of neurons in our brain are doing visual processing. How much of it is conscious?
Writing this comment, I have very little insight into how I am able to create this sentence and then read it. Makes me wonder what's the point of being conscious anyway.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/y19ck8/i_finally_r...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1fze6sx/blindsight...
Even more relevant now with LLMs (not that they're an "intelligent species." But a lot of people seem to think they are)
I think quantifying consciousness is a problem we are absurdly far from solving yet. Most we are able to do is philosophize about it.
Can you explain me how neuroscience proves the visual cortex can't be conscious? Why is it so wrong of me to ask that question?
If I walk into a city council meeting and start yelling "Why haven't you greened the fish sun???" all I'm doing is wasting everyone's time, and yet I can then say "Hey, I'm just asking questions! They won't answer my questions!" as though I'm some kind of victim and the city council is some kind of mysterious evil cabal.
Similarly, the phrase "Do your research" is designed to signal that I'm the smart one, the one in the know, the one who knows what's REALLY going on, even though I know nothing about x, y or z.
So far whenever I read summaries about it I can’t say EMT exactly “clicks” with me, though I would at least lean towards our consciousness necessarily involving/extending to people in our lives whom we are in contact with.
Btw, from the threads's article, the personality change over transplant it's literally an episode from The Simpsons, but you, know, creators are actually PhD people, as it shows off under Futurama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...
The author thinks that mentally poking the bodymap created by the brain can cause changes in the actual processing. I wouldn't believe this without proofs other than introspection(1). Technically, the vagus nerve can carry enough information to produce speech (the gut should be articulate, of course), but it certainly nowhere near the corpus callosum or the spinal cord. I doubt that it can allow to "coordinate the rest of our body".
(1) As far as know conscious manipulation of the heart rate is achieved by changing respiratory patterns, not thru direct control of the signals that the brain sends there.
That does not seem at all to be what citation 2 is saying.
> A report in the lay literature describes the case of Claire Sylvia who reported changes in her personality, preferences, and behaviors following a heart and lung transplant at Yale-New Haven hospital in 1988. Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets” (p. 184, [9]). Sylvia later discovered that at the time of her donor’s death in a motorcycle accident, a container of chicken nuggets was found under his jacket [9].
I haven't read the whole thing, maybe there's something more relevant as well. That report isn't really about accessing the previous persons "memories" but at least claims she adopted a part of their personality. I'd be skeptical about its accuracy without more such reports, however.
A more interesting question regarding the case above would be "what's in our hearth and lungs that affects our perception of capsaicin?".
You could ask all kinds of philosophical questions about this, but at the end of the day, there are parts that are easily replaceable and parts that are harder if you want to preserve the identity of a particular machine.
E.g. while RAM, CPU, GPU, power supply etc are all essential for running a PC, you can also swap them out without many problems. In contrast, the data on the hard drives or the TPM might be hard or impossible to restore.
In the same way, I'd still see the brain as the center of the self, because so much cognitive information is stored there.
There are so many SoC subsystems in a computer that the CPU only thinks it knows what's going on and can be catastrophically wrong about it in some cases. Brian Cantrill has a pretty good rant about it in one of the recent Oxide videos.
This ancestor gave rise to a branch called protosomes (worms, insects, mollusks) and another branch called deutorosomes (which includes humans and other vertebrates).
Worms and humans share: bilateral body organization, a digestive tract, basic nerve structures, many shared genes that control body development.
Also. We are very neuro-centric, but the system also had all type of hormones and other chemical messages affecting it.
______________
> In primates and mice, it’s a different story. Cells from the invading placenta digest their way through the endometrial surface, puncturing the mother’s arteries, swarming inside and remodelling them to suit the foetus. Outside of pregnancy, these arteries are tiny, twisty things spiralling through depths of the uterine wall. The invading placental cells paralyse the vessels so they cannot contract, then pump them full of growth hormones, widening them tenfold to capture more maternal blood.
> These foetal cells are so invasive that colonies of them often persist in the mother for the rest of her life, having migrated to her liver, brain and other organs. There’s something they rarely tell you about motherhood: it turns women into genetic chimeras.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-pregnancy-is-a-biological-war-bet...
Have fun controlling for confounders with this shit.
Aren't those the supposed locations of the "chakras"?
I took a Yoga class years ago (my tight wrists made it very unpleasant) and on the last day of class the instructor pulled out some obscure stuff and had us do some energy work, which I was sure was going to be complete bollocks. And about five minutes before the end of the class I experienced feelings that were identical to Flow state (that slightly buzzy feeling when you're in the grove and just crushing a task.) I recall thinking, "Oh this is potentially addictive. I'm glad this is the last class."
I'm betting that 10-20% of the mysticism stuff eventually turns out to be true and the rest is speculation built on top of correlation with those objectively true bits. Science eventually gets around to studying coincidences. Medicine tends to be more arrogant and dismissive of anything they can't measure, for far longer than is strictly healthy.
There's good reason for that. A huge part of such stuff eventually turns out to be dangerous horseshit.
The difference between god and a doctor is God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.
In the same town, another person died from a different type of dangerous horseshit - specifically the kambo ritual.
In terms of methods dangerous horseshit outnumbers actual medical practice 10:1 at least. How do you know which one works?
The latter at the very least is tested for safety and efficacy.
crown of head
center of forehead ("third eye)
throat
heart
solar plexus
belly
bottom of ass/below feet, depending on if your magical tradition prefers to work seated or standing
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365412617_Polyatomi...
The muscles and the nerves within your limbs adapt some - they respond to being used - but they don't have the representation capacity to store action patterns in them.
The spine itself is another matter - it's much more complex and adaptive, it has some capacity, it can learn things. It mostly carries a set of reflexes you get at birth, and some commonly used learned action patterns. Less "how to play the piano" and more "a set of finger motions useful for playing piano". The most studied thing is probably the spinal involvement in gait generation and stabilization of bipedal locomotion.
Now, things would be different if you were an octopus. But humans are pretty centralized, as far as nervous system goes.
That doesn’t ring true for me - I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.
Do you really feel that you are ‘often’ out of control or behaving unpredictably?
Good for you. I almost parted with a very good friend just because I had a very bad day and a big headache yesterday. Fortunately she is understanding enough. Due to lack of mental clarity I've said things that are simply untrue but I felt that the words I'm writing were correct at the time. I felt it was wrong reaction pretty soon after sending and rereading.
But I'm not "often" out of control. It just happens once or twice a year.
We build models of the world in order to predict it.
But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.
An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.
“Extra-cerebral” neurons are optimized for different functions than neurons proper in the brain.
It’s unlikely that the gut has thoughts and feelings, given neuronal tissue is distributed throughout viscera (versus concentrated in one spot like the brain). They are distributed so that smooth muscle tissue can contract appropriately and push food and wastes down the line.
The author compares the number of GI neurons to the number of neurons in a dog’s brain, but gleans over the number of neurons in a dog’s GI tract which is probably similar or proportionally less because the tract is physically smaller.
The neurons the author highlights in the heart are concentrated at the base, because the shape of the heart is optimized for coordinated contraction via electrical impulse propagation.
Anxiety triggers release of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which trigger a host of physical symptoms ranging from cold hands (reduced blood flow in extremities) to upset stomach, nausea, increased heart rate, etc.
Brain can anticipate these changes and associate anxiety with the effects of these hormones. There might be all sorts of interesting interactions, but saying that gut is responsible for processing of these feelings is definitely a stretch.
Another physical reaction which is associated with an emotion is blushing. But somehow nobody is talking about face skin taking control...