Guest Post by David Stephen who looks at Neurobiology and what it’s implications could be.
There is a new book, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, discussing the origins of consciousness. It explores extents, stating that, “We tend to think of sensations as experiences that are impressed on us from the outside. But suppose our sensations actually originate as an active bodily response to the stimulus, like the signals sent to the speaker, and that we only become aware of this when we monitor our own response by a kind of listening in? Could this—and the feedback loops that would easily follow—be what gives sensations the thick, expressive quality that we find so wonderful? This idea would later take root in a theory of qualia. But that was still to come.”
Neurobiology: The Brain and the Mind are Neighbours, But Different
Asking if sensations are internal, in response to stimuli, implies that there could be an external situation, but it is what is determined internally that defines, interprets or places the experience of that situation.
Simply, words that should hurt may or may not always hurt, low temperature may or may not always result in the experience of cold, loud sounds may or may not be irritating and so forth. The situation is one thing, what is given internally, as an experience is another, which may or may not match.
The key question then is, where do experiences come from? No one experiences the amygdala, neurotransmitters or the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Whatever is recalled is not the hippocampus. Cold is not felt as the adjustment of the hypothalamus.
This clearly rules out the brain, as the experience, or its direct source. Whatever is experienced is known. Knowing accompanies every experience, and helps to decide extent. Pain in a part of the body, sound from a direction, itch somewhere, strain of some muscle, a dislocation of some joint, fast heart rate and breathing in exercise and so forth. These, as experiences, involving different parts of the brain, are centralized by knowing. Knowing defines how severe it is. Some are more known than others, in a moment, taking priority, but all experiences are towed by knowing. There are processes or experiences below awareness, they are still known internally, just that its rating in the mind to be known, by the individual, is minute.
Any form of knowing is memory. This exceeds assuming memory solely for cognition. All memory is the mind, not the brain. Signals from the body to the brain are operated by the mind, where their properties are.
The same mechanism the mind uses to know a vehicle is the same it uses to know muscular dystrophy. There is no separate knowing or memory mechanism for supination and a different one for gustation, within the mind.
Thoughts, feelings, emotions and reactions are all elements of the mind. All sensory inputs end up, as something else in the mind, where they are interpreted. It is the mind that determines or interprets whatever an external situation is, at any time.
The Mind is NOT the Brain
The focus of neurobiology and related fields is the brain, not the mind, with several overlapping tasks and descriptions. There are centers in the brain and locations in the mind with synchronous functions, but their contrasts are numerous. In respective experiences like sleep, mood, lethargy, regulation and so forth, there are different brain centers involved. To the mind, they represent degrees, for those centers, from mild to moderate to severe.
The labels of the brain across psychology, cognitive science, psychiatry, neuroscience and so forth, are external to the components and functions of the mind. For example, short-term memory, as information held in mind in a moment, OK. But when this happens, how do the components of the mind bring it to bear? And what are the similarities between how the mind functions in general, to what happens when it seems like short-term memory?
Also, for predictive coding, processing and prediction error, ...
