Consciousness

Thomas Mann's character Professor Kuckuck talks about "the three fundamental and mysterious stages of creation":

The creation of the universe out of nothing, birth of life from inorganic, dead matter, and creation of consciousness out of organic matter.

Reading "The Quest for Consciousness - A Neurobiological Approach" by Christof Koch, based on joint research with Francis Crick

@BenjaminDYoung That was actually my own personal claim :-)

Understanding the mechanism underlying consciousness is of comparable importance to the discovery of DNA

Francis Crick, Nobel Prize for DNA discoveries, spent 25 years on the scientific study of human consciousness, with Koch. http://www.youtube.com/watch...

Interesting lecture by Christof Koch on "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach" http://www.youtube.com/watch...

Physiological studies show the cortex can be active without conscious experience

The brain stem-thalamocortical axis supports the state, but not the detailed contents of consciousness, which are produced by cortex ~ Baars

Super-interesting wikibook on the role of the thalamus and cortex in consciousness http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki...

Lesion studies show large amounts of cortex can be removed without removing consciousness

Lesions of the thalamus do indeed seem to abolish consciousness

Conscious experience consists of the output of the cortical modeling and perceptual processes. The cortex itself appears to be non-conscious

The diencephalon and the thalamus in particular can be shown to be excellent candidates for a possible location of phenomenal experience

RT @physorg_com: Scientists capture the first image of memories being made http://www.physorg.com/news164...

quantum-interference experiment with electrons that pass through a double slit in time, not space http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki... http://faculty.physics.tamu.edu/ggp...

"I cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Gödelian strange loops or level-crossing feedback loops."

The more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise.

whereupon the vortex "I" becomes a real, causal entity. Whenever such a loop arises, a unique new "I" is brought into being.

An "I" comes about via a vortex whereby patterns in the brain mirror the brain's mirroring of the world, and eventually mirror themselves,

Hofstadter draws an analogy to brains and selves, suggesting that the twisted loop of selfhood inside a brain also has causal power.

"Something strange emerges from the Gödelian loop: the revelation of the causal power of meaning in a rule-bound but meaning-free universe."

Reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

Wolfgang Pauli speculated that quantum theory could unify the psychological/scientific & philosophical/mystical approaches to consciousness

Neils Bohr sympathized with the idea that an extension of quantum theory might help in understanding consciousness http://www.physorg.com/news163...

The only remaining explanation is that qualia emerged automatically as a side product, like from sufficiently complex information processing

but qualia do not cause physical changes, the qualia would not benefit evolution. Why, then, would Mother Nature develop qualia?