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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
March 18, 2018
Added a lengthy note, on 121208, in Prove It, about 'the self' and 'subjectivity.
the knower came in steps: the protoself and its primordial feelings; the action-driven core self; and finally the autobiographical self,
All of this summarizes the brain's ability to distinguish, through 'body maps' and proprioception, self from non-self.
I doubt that the neural basis for the conscious mind can be comprehensively elucidated without first accounting for the self-as-object—the material me—and for the self-as-knower.
given that the self is our only natural means to know the mind,
This can't be 'given' as it's the point of the book? Plus, since the mind hasn't been defined here, then to presume it's 'natural' is also unwarranted. Already we're at the mercy of the assumptions of terms.
Personally, I don't think it's arguable ...
In ref 14, Damasio asserts that the self is physical.
the neurobiology of conscious minds has been based on combining three perspectives: (1) the direct-witness perspective on the individual conscious mind, which is personal, private, and unique to each one of us; (2) the behavioral perspective, which allows us to observe the telltale actions of others whom we have reason to believe also have conscious minds; and (3) the brain perspective, which allows us to study certain aspects of brain function in individuals whose conscious mind states are presumed to be either present or absent.
When some other neural patterns generate a rich enough self process subject, the images can become known.
A nice enough 'statement' but begs for so much more explanation/detail.
To be sure, this is a conjectural, hypothetical view.
At least he gets this out early.
only after those brains developed a protagonist capable of bearing witness did consciousness begin,
Still .... begging for lots more detail.
Organisms make minds out of the activity of special cells known as neurons.
Not necessary, but it allows him to spend the, apparently, obligatory time going over basic neurophysiology ... sigh.
oh, well, that clears it all up! <drop>
primordial feelings,
Why introduce complex terms when the basics, the components of these terms, haven't yet been discussed? How would he define 'feelings' in the first place?
Conscious minds begin when self comes to mind,
the autobiographical self. This self is defined in terms of biographical knowledge pertaining to the past as well as the anticipated future.
This is the 'self' that I primarily focus upon, with the primordial and core selves playing roles as well.
For practical purposes, normal human consciousness corresponds to a mind process in which all of these self levels operate, offering to a limited number of mind contents a momentary link to a pulse of core self.
Personally, I think to most readers this comes across as confusing, at best.
The conductor is cobbled together by feelings and by a narrative brain device,
Here the 'conductor' is the 'self', but even so, using the wiggle-term 'narrative brain device', doesn't help.
The conductor undeniably exists in our minds, and nothing is gained by dismissing it as an illusion.
Is he confusing illusory with imaginary (i.e. non-existent vs 'not as it seems')?
Way too soft, way too soft ... Just how does this 'emerge' happen?
in the case of sociocultural homeostasis, to encompass the deliberate seeking of well-being.
or ... aka predicting the future
The time will come when the issue of human responsibility, in general moral terms as well as on matters of justice and its application, will take into account the evolving science of consciousness. Perhaps the time is now.
the decisive contributions of the conscious mind to evolution come at a much higher level; they have to do with deliberative, offline decision-making and with cultural creations.
our very human conscious desire to live, our will to prevail, began as an aggregate of the inchoate wills of all the cells in our body, a collective voice set free in a song of affirmation?
Tho a bit floral, Damasio does raise a fascinating topic. At what level (chemical, biochemical) does this regulation of 'good for me'/'bad for me' begin? A cell membrane creates the first step towards homeostasis. As the ability to imbibe selective nutrients (no small feat in itself) comes online, the organism then begins to make 'decisions', "shall I swim this way, or that way?" The first one to develop the ability to figure out which way to turn, had an extraordinary advantage.
No, not really, It's the arrangement of (millions/billions of) neurons into a network capable of modeling/forecasting.
Biological Value
Where is the engine for the value systems? What is the biological primitive of value? In other words, where is the impetus for this byzantine machinery? Why did it even begin? Why did it turn out to be this way?
Important questions that relate to 'decisions'.
human brain circuitry has been so extravagantly dedicated to the prediction and detection of gains and losses, not to mention the promotion of gains and the fear of losses.
The only contradiction to this I can see is the willingness of rats to pull a reward-lever to exhaustion, and possibly human obesity? Neither is toward a homeostatic state.
single cells also has to harbor a response policy, a set of extremely simple rules according to which it makes a “decision to move” when certain conditions are met.
Yes but these are *reactions* not adjustments to a changing environment.
Personally, I feel Damasio is doing a disservice by jumping from the molecular description of cellular organisms and the complex wordage ascribed to higher organisms such as 'goal' and 'incentive.'
Throughout this book, I use the terms image, map, and neural pattern almost interchangeably. On occasion I also blur the line between mind and brain, deliberately, to underscore the fact that the distinction, while valid, can block the view of what we are trying to explain.
And where does that value come from? It comes from the original set of dispositions that orients our life regulation, as well as from the valuations that all images we have gradually acquired in our experience have been accorded, based on the original set of value dispositions during our past history. In other words, minds are not just about images entering their procession naturally. They are about the cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted. The mind procession is not about first come, first served. It is about value-stamped selections inserted
...more
Jaak Panksepp. This idea, and that of early feelings arising in the brain stem, are of a piece.6 Two brain-stem nuclei, the nucleus tractus solitarius and the parabrachial nucleus, are involved in generating basic aspects of the mind, namely, the feelings generated by ongoing life events, which include those described as pain and pleasure.
CHILDREN DEPRIVED OF THE CEREBRAL CORTEX
They have minimal modeling/predictive capabilities (eg moving into a sun spot for warmth); perhaps similar to some animals.
normal infants lack a fully myelinated cerebral cortex, which still awaits development. They already have a functional brain stem but only a partially functional cerebral cortex.
The superior colliculi are part of the tectum, a region that is closely interrelated with the periaqueductal gray nuclei and, indirectly, with the nucleus tractus solitarius and parabrachial nucleus.
Of course everyone knows this.
; )
Could be a poster child for jargon-speak in the field.
There is no other place in the brain where information available from vision, hearing, and multiple aspects of body states is so literally superposed,
The superior colliculus produces electrical oscillations in the gamma range, a phenomenon that has been linked to synchronic activation of neurons and that has been proposed by the neurophysiologist Wolf Singer to be a correlate of coherent perception, possibly even of consciousness.
Ensembles of neurons that are working together to signify some combination of features must synchronize their firing rates. This was first demonstrated in the monkey by Wolf Singer and his colleagues (and also by R. Eckhorn), who found that separate regions of the visual cortex involved in processing the same object exhibited synchronized activity in the 40 Hz range.
assembly of the self
Is ref. #18 indicates 'correlations' of consciousness with neuronal synchronization.
In other words, besides building rich maps at a variety of separate locations, the brain must relate the maps to one another, in coherent ensembles.
Timing may well be the key to relating.
any theory of consciousness that does not incorporate these facts is doomed to fail.
'These facts' being the interconnectedness of the brain and body.
Brentano actually saw the intentional attitude as the hallmark of mental phenomena and believed that physical phenomena lacked intentional attitudes and aboutness. This does not seem to be the case.
I haven't checked yet, but does this precede Dennett's 'intentional stance?' (ah, the references here clarify: Dennett 1987, Brentano 1995)
single cells also appear to have intentions and
It's this 'appearance' that clouds objective analysis. Thus a focus on the brain as a predictive modeler removes this confusion. Predictive vs reactive.
As we shall see in the next section, something is added at that intermediate stage. This is quite important when it comes to the signals related to the body’s interior that come to constitute feelings.
Interesting if we can relate these intermediate stages with hidden layers?
simulate body states that have not yet occurred.
ding ding ding
Complementing the complex mapping of the interior sense described above, to which we refer as interoception, are the body-to-brain channels that map the state of skeletal muscles engaged in movement, which are a part of exteroception.
For example, when our eyes are about to move toward an object at the periphery of our vision, the visual region of the brain is forewarned of the impending movement and ready to smooth the transition to the new object without creating a blur. In other words, the visual region is allowed to anticipate the consequence of the movement.8 Simulating a body state without actually producing it would reduce processing time and save energy.
