Re: The Hard Problem for Behaviorists

From: Glen M. Sizemore (gmsizemore2_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/20/04 

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 12:46:15 -0400

Hi Curt,

You might want to consider the notion that what we introspect is our own
behavior, not the physiology that mediates behavioral function. This is not
the same as saying "We are conscious of our neurons firing."

Cordially,

G.

"Curt Welch" <curt@kcwc.com> wrote in message
news:20041020123028.635$10@newsreader.com...
> daryl@atc-nycorp.com (Daryl McCullough) wrote:
> > Curt Welch says...
> >
> > >Where I see that line being draw is that our conscious awareness allows
> > >us to sense when neurons fire, but what we can't sense, or know, is why
> > >they fire.
> >
> > I did not think that we were always consciously aware of when neurons
> > fire. Are you sure about that?
>
> No, I'm not sure at all. It's just a new idea I've recently had. It's
> bound to be either wrong, of have limitations. But I think the idea is
> closer to the truth than the previous why I thought about it which was
that
> we were not aware of most the neurons which fired.
>
> Basicaly, my old way of thinking about the brain as a machine left me
> thinking it was like any electronic device where we as external observers
> were not aware of what the electrons were doing. For my computer, I'm
only
> aware of what it shows me on the screen, or the blinking lights, or the
> sounds comming from the disk drives. All the internal computation
> happening was hidden from me simply because we can't directly sense
> electrical activity in a wire.
>
> So, realy without thinking about it, I took that same model and applied it
> to the brain. I assumed that what we were aware of in our own brain was
> limited to only the inputs and outputs and all the processing going on in
> the middle was hidden to us just like the processing going on in a
computer
> is hidden to us.
>
> But in the case of our own brains, we are the machine, so we have an
inside
> perspective on what is happening. We have sensors that tell us when
> neurons are firing, just like we have sensors that tell us when light is
> coming into our eyes.
>
> Now, when you get down to a single neuron firing, the "awarness" effect
> might be so small that we don't notice it. At the level of a single
neuron
> firing once, that probably falls below the noise level of our awareness.
> But if a single neuron causes a field of neurons to active, then it may
pop
> above our the noise floor enough for us to be easily "aware" of the event.
>
> But what this has caused me to think about differently is that there
> probably isn't a lot of active neural procssing going on below our level
of
> conscious awareness. What we sense happening in our head is all the
signal
> processing going on to drive our behavior.
>
> This view doesn't tell us that much about why the signals exist like they
> do, but it tells us that there's no other processing circuits needed to
> explain our complex behavior. We sense things, and we react to them. And
> that's all the signal processing going on in there.
>
> --
> Curt Welch
http://CurtWelch.Com/
> curt@kcwc.com
http://NewsReader.Com/

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