[FRIAM] Eternal questions

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Great contribution, Roger! The article targets composition that's severely lacking in our discussions each time they pop up. Here are the bullets I pull from it, caveat confirmation bias:

• clustering induction (model-free) as agnostic concept registration

• "The amygdala, on the other hand, is involved with processing and responding to threats — an ancient, subconscious behavioral and physiological mechanism. 'The evidence shows that it’s not always fear that causes the behavior,' LeDoux said."

• "where the physical processing of the sensory stimulus and the conscious experience of it are often bundled together. In both cases, LeDoux believes 'these need to be pulled apart.'"

• composition of "approach" and "avoid" into complexes of "decision-making" and "attention"
  · reuse of primitives for different higher order constructs (polyphenism), e.g. primitives for memory repurposed for blood sugar regulation (or vice versa)


All 4 seem to argue that "the hard problem" is coherent. If conscious experience is an interpretation of more primitive firing patterns, and each of our physiological networks (not merely the brain) *learns*, induces, derives, that interpretation and and and there's evidence of polyphenism all the way up the ladder, then inter-subjective experience should be relatively rare. E.g. when Bob wakes up startled, he interprets the situation into "fear". But when Sally wakes up startled, she interprets the situation into "excitement" or some other /a priori/, socially limiting, filter category.



On 8/25/21 5:48 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/ <https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/>
> 
> A quanta article titled The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does
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>     Joseph LeDoux <https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/joseph-e-ledoux.html> is a neuroscientist at NYU known for his pioneering work on the amygdala, which is often referred to as the fear center of the brain. But that framing, he says, is very wrong — and very harmful. “I kept being introduced over the years as someone who discovered how feelings of fear come out of the amygdala,” he said. “But I would always kind of flinch when I would be introduced this way. Finally, I had enough.”
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>     LeDoux has spent the past decade emphasizing that the amygdala isn’t involved in generating fear at all. Fear, he points out, is a cognitive interpretation of a situation, a subjective experience tied up in memory and other processes. The psychological phenomena that some people experience as fear may be experienced as something very different by others. Research shows that the feeling of fear arises in the prefrontal cortex and related brain areas.
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>     The amygdala, on the other hand, is involved with processing and responding to threats — an ancient, subconscious behavioral and physiological mechanism. “The evidence shows that it’s not always fear that causes the behavior,” LeDoux said.
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>     Calling the amygdala the fear center might seem innocuous, he continued, but “then the amygdala inherits all the semantic baggage of fear.” That mistake can distort attempts to develop medications, including those aiming to reduce anxiety. When potential treatments are tested in animals under stress, if the animals behave less timidly or show less physiological arousal, it’s usually interpreted as a reduction in anxiety or fear levels. But a medication can change someone’s behavioral or physiological responses — those outputs of the amygdala — without curing feelings of anxiety, LeDoux said.
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>     “The whole field is suffering because of this confusion,” he said.
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>     Similar problems occur in other areas, he added, such as studies of perception, where the physical processing of the sensory stimulus and the conscious experience of it are often bundled together. In both cases, LeDoux believes “these need to be pulled apart.”


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