[FRIAM] Oliver Sacks on Consciousness

[Frank Wimberly]

"Since the last third of the twentieth century, the whole tenor of
neurology and Neuroscience has been moving towards such a dynamic and
constructional view of the brain, a sense that even at the most Elementary
levels--as, for example, in the "filling in" of a blind spot or a scotoma
or the seeing of a visual illusion, as both Richard Gregory and V. S.
Ramachandran have demonstrated--the brain constructs a plausible hypothesis
or pattern or scene. In his theory of neuronal group selection, Gerald
Edelman--drawing on the data of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, of
embryology and evolutionary biology, of clinical and experimental work, and
of synthetic neural modeling--proposes a detailed neurobiological model of
the mind in which the brain's Central role is precisely that of
constructing categories--first perceptual then conceptual--and VB of an
ascending process of "bootstrapping" where through repeating
recategorization at higher and higher levels, consciousness is finally
achieved. This, for Edelman, every perception is a creation and every
memory a re-creation or recategorization.

Such categories, he feels, depend on the "values" of the organism, those
biases and dispositions [partly innate, partly learned] which, for Freud,
were characterized as "drives", "instincts" and "affects." The attunement
here between Freud's view and Edelman's is striking; here, at least, one
has the sense that psychoanalysis and neurobiology can be fully at home
with one another, congruent and mutually supportive.  And it may be that in
this equation of Nachtra:glichkeit  with "recategorization" we see a hint
of how the two seemingly disparate universes--the universes of human
meaning and of natural science--may come together."

-----------------------------------
Frank Wimberly

My memoir:
https://www.amazon.com/author/frankwimberly

My scientific publications:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Frank_Wimberly2

Phone (505) 670-9918
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