It's funny, I've been reading Kastrup's Rationalist Spirituality and just reached the chapter on 'A Universal Memory of Qualia' this afternoon. It talks about the same idea. The brain's neural network is processing the universe and spitting out insights into the Universal Consciousness, where the memories aren't stored so much as live on in perpetuity to be experienced again at any time.
Given that computer scientists can't even interpret how artificial neural networks have learned to perform certain machine learning tasks (that is you can't look at the code after it has learned a task and make sense of how it has learned to identify a picture), I think it's safe to say we're a long way from understanding how any type of information is encoded in the brain. It certainly happens, but the brain seems to be a pattern recognizer and learner. If we want to find the information it has pieced together, we'd have to look elsewhere.
Perhaps an easier search would be finding where consciousness interacts with the brain. We decide (through free will?) to perform an action and our brain directs our body to perform that action. Where/when does that impulse jump from consciousness to a physically neural path that ends in a muscle stimulation? I've heard some theories on a quantum mechanical mechanism within a neuron.
Perhaps there's another thread I can search to explore this idea.
Keep thinking everybody!
Butterfly Memory Defies Materialism
Re: Butterfly Memory Defies Materialism
We have to remember that BK is writing from the perspective of objective idealism, i.e. transpersonal conscious activity (CA) is fundamental and there is only CA. Therefore, the 'brain' and all its neural pathways must be limited representations of potentially unlimited CA. We can speculate on what aspects of CA the 'neural pathways' and 'muscle stimulations' may represent, but there are not two fundamentally different substances or processes (CA and material stuff) interacting with each other.Laufmann wrote: ↑Sat Feb 06, 2021 11:21 pm It's funny, I've been reading Kastrup's Rationalist Spirituality and just reached the chapter on 'A Universal Memory of Qualia' this afternoon. It talks about the same idea. The brain's neural network is processing the universe and spitting out insights into the Universal Consciousness, where the memories aren't stored so much as live on in perpetuity to be experienced again at any time.
Given that computer scientists can't even interpret how artificial neural networks have learned to perform certain machine learning tasks (that is you can't look at the code after it has learned a task and make sense of how it has learned to identify a picture), I think it's safe to say we're a long way from understanding how any type of information is encoded in the brain. It certainly happens, but the brain seems to be a pattern recognizer and learner. If we want to find the information it has pieced together, we'd have to look elsewhere.
Perhaps an easier search would be finding where consciousness interacts with the brain. We decide (through free will?) to perform an action and our brain directs our body to perform that action. Where/when does that impulse jump from consciousness to a physically neural path that ends in a muscle stimulation? I've heard some theories on a quantum mechanical mechanism within a neuron.
Perhaps there's another thread I can search to explore this idea.
Keep thinking everybody!
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Re: Butterfly Memory Defies Materialism
Right, but there are fundamentally two different perspectives. 1. A first person perspective of consciousness, of having an idea that you put into action. and 2. a second person perspective of seeing that idea play out in the field of perception -- in say, seeing your arm move.We can speculate on what aspects of CA the 'neural pathways' and 'muscle stimulations' may represent, but there are not two fundamentally different substances or processes (CA and material stuff) interacting with each other.
We can experience our own consciousness in the first person as we make a decision to act and perform that action, but a second person observer will only begin to see this process at a certain point. Where/when is that point? What is the first observable evidence (second person) we can see of this process taking place? The only evidence I've read about is the lighting up of neurons in fMRI studies. And then there are theories of quantum structures within neurons possibly being responsible for their initial flicker.
Again, all this might be what mind-at-large looks like from the outside looking in, but I'd be curious if we can map existing ideas from a materialist model into ways of exploring consciousness from a second person perspective. We can map mechanical hands to neurons so that consciousness can manipulate non-biological material almost as if it were part of the body. Could we build a radio that tunes in to conscious thought further up the chain? Is our thought incoherent without tracing its pattern through neural pathways or is it a fully encoded thought inside the impulse itself? My guess would be the former.
I really wish neuroscience were further along. it's interesting stuff.