Memorry is JUST an attribute of consciousness...

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It's the memory, and the kind of possible experiences, but ALSO the ability NOT to be conscious, that gives consciousness its COLOUR.
EVERY experience is unique, even if it is at an infinitesimal level. There is only one consciousness, and ALL its experiences are different from each other: it is called EXPERIMENTING DUALITY.
Our reality is now mature enough to experience a field of creation. That's it, the austerity of ideas, the standardization of contents and containers, AND ALSO...
It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
OR YOU AGREE TO DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF. OR NOTHING MOVES.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Memory is just an attribute? Eric Kandel's work with Aplysia showed how the physical substrate of memory works, and won the Nobel prize for it. I believe that memory is the raw material of consciousness. The process of consciousness involves comparing current environmental stimuli with remembered environmental stimuli. It is an empirical comparison, involving the set of cortical neurons stimulated by the environment in both the remembered environment and the current environment.

Do you believe that the brain makes consciousness, or that it just tunes into consciousness like a radio receiver?

Sorry to be blunt, but I do not believe that consciousness is a process. But if it's a process, it does not follow a clear past-to-future route.

I don't know how/what to say exactly. Do you believe that animals are conscious? Because I do, even spiders ands insects are conscious IMO.

Science is not a declarative force where everyone is expected to follow its declarations. Simple example: either the Earth is round, or it's flat. If Earth is a pizza (for example), then it's both. The problem I see wrt science is that they are trying to use mathematical transcendentalism, but without subjecting themselves to the intellectual rigueur needed to do pure mathematics (applied mathematics are not really mats imho).

I do not believe that the brain makes consciousness. And as for the brain being a radio receiver (it could be both, a receiver AND a transmitter), I need to reflect more about that.

I don't know what to say.

I heard somewhere that Henri Burgson was attributed with bringing the brain-as-receiver model of consciousness to popularity in the west. It could be a bit clumsy and oversimplified, a bit like saying 'the brain is a computer', any of these models can't be 100% right because very few if any of them really handle all edge-cases.

My own riff on what Max is saying - calorically speaking nature tends not to support something that's not being used, it gets dismantled by entropy and/or used somewhere else, and I think the better way of saying it isn't that memory is core to consciousness but rather that having greater memory (and perhaps higher intelligence) is justification for more consciousness. Similarly if you're in a state of absolute boredom, or if you were inside of something where very little was going on, consciousness wouldn't find that interesting and maybe the more physicalist-friendly way of saying this is that spinning your wheels doesn't sit well with the energetic restrictions we have in this universe.

I tend to think of consciousness as the place where the math breaks down, ie. it's where what we're familiar with starts getting divided by zero. In a way it's almost like a process that's perpendicular to physical processes as we're used to thinking of them. At the same time, particularly with self-organizing systems, I can't think of a good reason for the universe not to be swimming in it in at least many more localized examples than we're used to thinking of. One of the challenges we have is that we know that it combines, otherwise there would be no reason for a massive colony of cells to be conscious no matter how many cells there are, and yet if we were open systems where it could come and go we don't know how to track that - or at least i'd say very few people (at least in most public debate on the issue) have had any personally verifiable flights out past their own bodies and it's still hotly debated whether such things are even possible largely because of that, and that's also part of the intuition that makes reductive materialism seem as reflexively obvious to most people as it does.

You seem to be advocating for a theory called panpsychism, where consciousness is seen as elemental, like space or time. I have discounted that theory because it doesn't handle the hard question of how the universal consciousness interfaces with the subjective island of consciousness that exists in everyone's head. In a word, saying that consciousness "just IS" doen't leave me feeling satisfied. And if you accept it as true, how do you run with it? What deductions can you make, based on your belief that contagiousness is universal and elemental.



I believe that consciousness happens as a result of analogies drawn between current life experience and remembered life experiences. I believe that the greater the amount of experience that you have, the greater your consciousness of those experiences will be. You see, if consciousness is relating what's happening now to what has happened at previous times in our lives, then the greater the store of memories to relate current events to, and the greater your experience or consciousness of it. So an infant is not as conscious as an adult, and a spider is not as consciousness as an infant. I believe that the process extends on down into the physical realm, even to things like a thermostat, which is conscious enough of the temperature in the room, that it can turn the furnace off and on.



I do not believe that a brain is required for consciousness. A single celled bacterium is consciousness enough to approach a food source or to avoid toxicity. But I do believe that consciousness is a biological process which supports memory and analogy making based on similarities and differences in experiences.

You see a difference. To me, it looks like we are saying the same thing.
Greater memory = Greater pool of experience to relate current environmental event to = Greater consciousness = Greater understanding of what you are experiencing. Understanding = relating current environment to all previously experienced similar environmental experiences.



I feel this way too. And the reason that I feel this way is the iterative nature of consciousness.

1. experience
2. relate to memory in order to understand experience
3. react
4. go to 1.

If you analogize the consciousness process to the chaos in the action of a double pendulum, you can begin to see how each perturbation (life experience) of the swinging pendulum changes the future course of it's trajectory. So you are right, traditional maths can do little to explain it. I am hopeful that the new analog math of chaotic systems will prove to be a valuable tool for researching consciousness. Each event in the life of a double pendulum swing affects all future interactions, and that is analogical to human life experiences.

I believe that the mystery here, in why traditional maths don't work for consciousness, is that change is continuous, while math is always discrete. That's where you end up with infinities, which can not be understood or worked with. There are an infinite number of fractions between any two numbers. Consciousness is taking discrete snapshots of something that never stops changing. What's more, it's an iterative process where any rounding error will be amplified in future iterations. I believe that the analog math of deterministic chaos holds the answer as to how we can determine the analog of the exact fraction which would preclude the iterative system from growing the error which occurs when snapshot measurements are made of a continuous system. State diagrams of iterative systems become fractal. Fractals are fractional dimensions; read 2.5 dimensions vs 3. The fractal nature of iterative systems somehow solves the problem if experiencing the contiguous as discrete snapshots.




The infant universe was a lot of very little pieces; subatomic particles. These coalesced into atoms and molecules and eventually into galaxies and planets. And single celled creatures coalesced into multi cellular. And those multi cellular human creatures became families and cities and countries. We work together closely in teams and confer with each other courtesy of the worldwide net. And so the world has become more interdependent. Can a man live without others? Certainly the quality of life is diminished in solitude. So what does evolution hold for such an interdependent species? Will 6 billion humans become analogous to the trillions of cells within the human body? Will humanity become so interdependent that it will become one physical being?

I'd actually say I disagree with this. If what you were saying were correct intelligence and memory would be a symmetric match and it isn't. Richness of consciousness isn't just about raw horse power or storage, in so many ways it seems like the people who seem to have the most horsepower are usually the people right around the center of the bellcurve while many of the true towering intellects are frail if not in body then in other ways whether high-low intelligence (ie. wide spans across areas), neurological disorders, etc..



What you may be overlooking here, or at least need to put more weight on I think in your analysis, is the point at which something makes the lights go on, that light becomes aware of itself, and it begins to form motivated reasoning. We're not even sure how to get to square one - ie. the lights going on.

This is where I'm actually open to radical sources of hypothesis and especially if we're talking about sourcing hypotheses rather than making theories I don't have hangups over where the hypotheses come from or what the cultural flavor is. This brings to mind one of Gordon White's interviews on Rune Soup with Kenric McDowell whose a Silicon Valley employee and programmer and, believe it or not, yes there are programmers who are chaos magicians, Hermetics, pagans, etc.. Kenric is chewing over AI and Personhood with Gordon and then he mentions actually bringing the issue up to the spirits he contacts and they were super-dismissive of AI having meaningful self-awareness. I think he needs to see if any of them are up for more detail on that or whether perhaps they're just as lost on how they're conscious as we are:







I think the best 'what it does' model for consciousness, and maybe I've told you this before (I feel like I wheel it out a lot these days), is that it's an optioning service that's holding a big ring of keys, those keys are both desires/obligations as well as threats, and it's looking to match those keys to external environment and formulate strategies to stay alive or, more optimally, prosper under what internal and external conditions it has to deal with. Where I think this overlaps somewhat with the way you like to analyze a lot of this - those keys are mostly stored in memory in the usual sense of the term and others, albeit fuzzier and more instinctual, is in epigenetic and possibly genetic memory although we're not 100% sure that the last part is there.


It is continuous, also it seems to rely on immense folding of the sort that you have with with the really crazy stuff like mathematical monsters and the Julia sets.



Sounds like you'd enjoy checking into various integration theorists, I posted an interview in the politics video thread with Rebel Wisdom interviewing Ken Wilber, personally I found their interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger more interesting (he's a futurist albeit nothing like the Ray Kurzweil sort - much more pragmatic) but a lot of people are wondering what kind of frame we're going to shake out into. Some people are suggesting that we're going to beome something of a loosely knit single organism, like a colony of ants with a mass mind of sorts. Not sure if that's the case, it would be interesting and maybe that's how 7 billion + people stop trying to kill each other, ie. they lose their autonomy, but its really tough to call what's coming down the road at us. It could be that, it could be extinction, it could be drastic reduction of numbers, or it could be a very slow and underwelming decline if we find ourselves at the end of progress at some point with no story left to tell.

That is a very good point. I would have to agree with you when you say that intelligence isn't defined by the amount of experience that you have. But I think that the disconnect is also caused by the imprecise nature of the word 'intelligence'. But please note that I did not say that a greater store of memories led to greater intelligence. I said that it leads to greater consciousness (the more associations you can make between 'current' and 'remembered' experience, the greater your experience or consciousness of the current environmental activity. Maybe the disconnect can be solved by looking at what we mean by nebulous term "intelligence".

In 1983 an American developmental psychologist Howard Gardener described 9 types of intelligence:

Naturalist (nature smart)
Musical (sound smart)
Logical-mathematical (number/reasoning smart)
Existential (life smart)
Interpersonal (people smart)
Bodily-kinesthetic (body smart)
Linguistic (word smart)
Intra-personal (self smart)
Spatial (picture smart)

I would think that one's experience hones any latent brilliance one might have. And experience works through Hebbian Plasticity, in which the connections among neurons are strengthened weakened built and pruned. So I think that a big experience store is necessary but not sufficient for a person to have some type of intelligence.

Intelligence is also determined by connectivity, and connectivity is intimately connected with experience via the Hebbs Process. There are also genetic factors that influence brain connectivity. In this regard, some research has indicated that autism might be caused by hyper local connectivity within brain nucleii and weak connectivity in long distance connectivity between brain nucleii.

And then, there's research showing that working memory can only process 4 or so chunks of memory at a time. A chunk is a collection of interrelated information. It would seem as though as your memory grew, so would the amount of information in each chunk.

And memory is accessed unconsciously, to build conscious thought. This is because we understand every new thing experienced, in terms of all the old stuff that we remember. The relationships (to the past) realized deepen our experience of the present. Relationships are realized between groups of relationships and between groups of groups of relationships. This whole hierarchical stack of analogies embedded within analogies happens below the threshold of consciousness, but it provides understanding via sussing out relationships between "now" and "the past".




I think that relationships make the light go on. Relationships are the stuff of integration. Integration is combining two or more things or ideas to produce synergy; think 1+1= 3. Relations are mental constructs. There is no bigger taller smaller, unless you are talking about the relationships between two things or ideas.
So, if my retina sends my brain a bunch of electrical pulses representing the light reflected off of objects in the current environment, my brain would compare this pattern of pulses, with pulse patterns generated by memories. It would find relationships. And relationships, being mental not physical entities, make the lights go on.

Guilio Tonini says that consciousness happens when integrated information (relationships) reaches a certain level. But I think that it arises much earlier and grows throughout life. I believe that an adult is more conscious than a child, simply because the adult has a much greater store of experience. Doesn't necessarily mean the adult is more intelligent; just that he is more conscious.



I understand what you are saying. You are speaking at a very high level compared to me. The drive for self preservation is almost certainly genetic, as are the drives for sex and to seek out certain types of food; fats sugars etc. But when you get down to which people or cars or entertainment that you prefer, I believe that these are learned behaviors. I would bow to the inexact science of psychology here, and say that preferences are learned through experience via a natural sort of classical conditioning. "I tried this last time and I enjoyed it that way, so I'll endeavor to make it happen again."