clair073

In an earlier post, “Where Neuroscience Stands in Understanding Consciousness,” I presented a summary of the progress occurring in neuroscientific understanding of consciousness ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-medic/201804/where-neuroscience-stands-in-understanding-consciousness ). Now a recent report in the May issue of Science adds to a growing understanding of how the brain generates conscious recognition. The study examined neural impulse discharge responses of monkey brain to visual stimuli. Electrodes were implanted in the four visual cortex areas that are sequentially activated by visual stimuli. The stimulus was a circular spot of varying contrast in the lower left area of the visual field. Monkeys were cued when a stimulus was delivered, though whether they saw it or not varied with the spot’s contrast against the visual background. Monkeys were trained to report when they knew they saw the spot by shifting   their gaze from a central fixation point to th...

The Joys of Consciousness You take time to be alone, valuing your personal time. You meditate. You feel light and buoyant. You feel spiritually uplifted. You find a solution to a problem. You have a fresh new idea. You notice something beautiful. You walk outside in nature and feel refreshed. You engage in physical activity that's invigorating. You are playful and take time to play. There is a moment of pure joy. You smile in appreciation. You respect someone else's boundaries without being asked. You lift someone else's spirits. You make another person laugh. You give someone a helping hand. You do something kind. You forgive a slight. You offer yourself in service to someone in need. You feel a close bond with another person. You cherish another person. ― from The Healing Self by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi        re-sequenced to show the joys of nurturing oneself and then nurturing others.

Many scientists, even physical scientists, assert that the Holy Grail of science is to understand human  consciousness. This human state is even hard to define, but is characterized by a state in which we know what we believe, know, and imagine, know what we decide and plan, and feel what we feel. That explains nothing. The problem in understanding is not only that the mechanisms must surely be complicated, but also that we don’t have good non-invasive experimental tools. There are only two useful tools, a metabolic proxy of neural electrical activity (functional fMRI) and scalp monitoring of electrical activity (the electroencephalogram {EEG), or its magnetic field counterpart. Among the problems with fMRI are that it is only an indirect measure of the actual signaling within the brain that generates thought and feeling and enables consciousness. Its time resolution is about one-second or more, whereas signaling in the brain occurs on a millisecond scale. Although the EEG monitors...

We have the feeling that we experience the world like a continuously sampled data stream. If we perceive multiple objects of events seemingly at the same time, we may actually be multiplexing the several data streams; that is, we take a sample from one data stream, switch to take a sample from the next stream and so on — all on a millisecond time scale. But another possibility is that we perceive objects and events like a movie frame, where the brain takes working-memory snapshots and plays them in succession. Like still frames in a movie, if played at a high-enough speed, the frames will blend in our mind to give the illusion of continuous monitoring. In either case, we have to account for working memory. That is, we can only hold a small amount of information in our working memory at any one instant, as in being able to dial a seven-digit phone number you just looked up. In the phone number case, does our brain accumulate and buffer the representation of each integer until reaching t...

Brains have owners. The question is, "Just who is this owner?" Can the brain be its own owner? Or is it more likely that the brain generates a process that acts like an owner? You might call that process you . The owner is your conscious mind. But how does conscious mind exist? What does the brain do to possess it? Everything the brain does, as far as we know, involves the deployment and distribution of nerve impulses in defined circuitry to control bodily functions, thought, and behavior. Thus the owner, that is your conscious you , could exist as a special collection of nerve impulses operating in a particular way. The conscious self is an explicit frame of reference by which the nerve impulse patterns of stimuli from all senses can be evaluated in the context of self-awareness. The smell of sizzling steak is only detected by my olfactory pathways, but it is perceived by my “I.” In both cases, this processing is mediated by nerve impulses.  Likewise, the sight of a beautifu...

Do you deserve credit for your honest achievements and blame for your failures? No, say an increasing number of philosophers and scientists. They say that everything you do is commanded from your unconscious mind, which you can't consciously control. The conscious "you" is just a superfluous observer. Free will is thus regarded as an illusion (Fig. 1). My new book, "Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will" (Academic Press), challenges the science used to justify these counter-intuitive ideas. Figure 1. Illustration of the concept that free will is an illusion. In this view, the actions that your brain commands come from the mechanical gears of an unconscious mind. Conscious mind is informed after the fact, creating the illusion that one's conscious mind commanded the act. How free will is defined affects the conclusion about whether humans have any free will. As defined here, free will exists when a person generates thinking and behaviors...

Scientific and philosophical fashion these days is to claim that humans have no free will. That is, we are basically biological robots, driven to our thoughts, beliefs, and actions by unconscious forces in our brain. Our genes and our experiential programming control everything we do. Free will is an illusion. So goes the assertions of a clutch of activist scientists, such as Richard, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Wegner, who have probably gotten rich off their best-seller books arguing the case against free will. Religion is also nailed to the cross, so to speak. Ideas of moral responsibility originate in views of right and wrong, and every religion expects that followers have the capacity to make the correct choices. Their free-will capacity makes them morally responsible. I think it is no accident that most of the illusory free-will activists I have read are also activists for atheism. Otherwise, their position would be cognitively dissonant. Legal issues arise, as stated by the l...