[FRIAM] Self-Consciousness, experience and metaphysics

[Prof David West]

responding to two of glen's comments:

First the two anecdotes about dropping/catching things. My experience as I read them, there are two different conscious entities here, glen and glen's body.  [Hidden premise in the movie, Jennifer's Body?] made me think, another experience, of the metaphor "monkey brain riding a dogs brain riding a lizards brain," and made me wonder, another experience, if all three have quasi-independent consciousnesses.

Second, the fusion anecdotes. I experienced a "yes!" moment regarding a continuum of consciousness: "mom's ICU partial fusion, mom's "fully home" fusion, and Huxley's Doors of Perception fusion, escaping the filters imposed by the 'focused-on-survival-brain' and achieving a (more) complete fusion.

davew


On Thu, Jul 25, 2024, at 8:29 AM, glen wrote:
> I disagree the theme is "pausing between two possibilities". I view the 
> theme as a *fusion* of sensory input. Sometimes, the sensory fusion 
> appears to be intentionally stanced as a choice/decision. But that's 
> not the case in the itch transfer, hat-catching, or satiety examples. 
> Those are clearly examples of the fusion of high dimensional 
> environmental data.
>
> Consciousness is that *fusion*. Another example is when someone wakes 
> up from anesthesia, when you "see" that "someone is home". They've 
> become conscious. They're now taking in a bunch of data from the 
> environment and fusing it, making sense of it. I have a story akin to 
> that, too. Before my mom got her pacemaker put in, she'd been in the 
> ICU for a few days and had ICU delirium. She played cards with illusory 
> people, kept telling me there was a man behind me, asking me what the 
> man was doing there, etc. This is a kind of consciousness, but an 
> incomplete kind. When she would "wake up" from that delirium, you could 
> see that she was now fully "home", conscious, competently fusing the 
> incoming data.
>
>
> On 7/24/24 18:46, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>> a  theme that seems  to run through these examples is that the animal pauses between two possibilities.  we are tempted to understand these behaviors in terms of  the consideration of alternatives,  ...[snip]... just as you cat instead of doing either of the two things you might expect,  hovers between the  two, making what the ethologists would call "intention movements" in either direction as the pressure leaks out.
>> 
>> But what calls for an explanation in both cases is the violation of the observer's expectations.
>
>
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