3 ms·

I'm not sure what you mean by 'atomic'. Do you mean very detailed? Have you read about the Fovea, and saccades and so on? You might be surprised to learn that

I'm not sure what you mean by 'atomic'. Do you mean very detailed? Have you read about the Fovea, and saccades and so on? You might be surprised to learn that the part of our retinas that can discern detail is very small - if you hold your thumb up at arms length the detailed part of your retina is about twice the width of your thumbnail. Everything else is lower resolution. And your eye jumps around in saccades - but you don't notice the constant movement. But it doesn't seem like that does it? Essentially what we have here is an abstraction that we are completely unaware of most of the time. So I put it to you that our consciousness does contain abstraction, but that abstraction is not obvious to us. Because what do we have to compare against? Of course it seems super detailed to us.

ffwd 10y ago
>> Do you mean very detailed? Not necessarily, although I could argue you need detailed sensory organs to have a complex mental model but that's beside the point. What I meant by atomic was approximately what I said above - that it feels like individual nerves are conscious, like a mental field, and then you can fill that field with any arbitrary activation patterns and it will register in conscious experience. A lot of it won't activate _other_ things like emotions, memories, words and associations, but those aren't necessary for it be in conscious experience still. I'm just struggling a bit with a 'computational' model of consciousness where there is this big abstraction process in the brain, while at the same time seeming so closely connected to the world and vast in possibilities. The way it seems to me is, the brain doesn't get sensory input of a chair, and then it has a preconceived notion of the chair in the brain, and then the brain projects the chair onto consciousness, but rather, the brain can see everything, and then with a more connected neural network, we can attach the 'chair stimuli' to other neural pathways, giving the chair a deeper meaning. I know that after we have learned the meaning of some object in the world, _then_ the brain can have an automatic response to it, and that would be an abstraction that works in the higher areas of the brain, but we could still see the thing consciously before we were scared of it. In that scenario consciousness comes first, and then meaning is built outward by connecting neural pathways together into networks of meaning, which is how I feel the world is anyway. In that scenario you'd need some kind of module that gives consciousness to all experience, and then abstraction is built in the neocortex or something after that. Also to address your question - you are right, we can't compare this to anything, so we are stuck in our own conceptions, so maybe this is all moot ;

ffwd 10y ago

>> Do you mean very detailed? Not necessarily, although I could argue you need detailed sensory organs to have a complex mental model but that's beside the point. What I meant by atomic was approximately what I said above - that it feels like individual nerves are conscious, like a mental field, and then you can fill that field with any arbitrary activation patterns and it will register in conscious experience. A lot of it won't activate _other_ things like emotions, memories, words and associations, but those aren't necessary for it be in conscious experience still. I'm just struggling a bit with a 'computational' model of consciousness where there is this big abstraction process in the brain, while at the same time seeming so closely connected to the world and vast in possibilities. The way it seems to me is, the brain doesn't get sensory input of a chair, and then it has a preconceived notion of the chair in the brain, and then the brain projects the chair onto consciousness, but rather, the brain can see everything, and then with a more connected neural network, we can attach the 'chair stimuli' to other neural pathways, giving the chair a deeper meaning. I know that after we have learned the meaning of some object in the world, _then_ the brain can have an automatic response to it, and that would be an abstraction that works in the higher areas of the brain, but we could still see the thing consciously before we were scared of it. In that scenario consciousness comes first, and then meaning is built outward by connecting neural pathways together into networks of meaning, which is how I feel the world is anyway. In that scenario you'd need some kind of module that gives consciousness to all experience, and then abstraction is built in the neocortex or something after that. Also to address your question - you are right, we can't compare this to anything, so we are stuck in our own conceptions, so maybe this is all moot ;