Re: The Hard Problem for Behaviorists

From: AlphaOmega2004 (OmegaZero2003_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 10/20/04 

Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:44:26 -0700

A good reference on this subject is a recent Journal of Conscious Studies
volume entltled: Trusting the Self.

"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:20041020124616.174$nd@news.newsreader.com...
> 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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