Quote (Titch @ May 10 2010 08:26pm)
i dont that.
+ deep philisophical argument brewing.
http://speculativeheresy.***/2008/11/26/the-semantic-apocalypse/
Quote
CONSCIOUSNESS AS COIN TRICK: THE BLIND BRAIN HYPOTHESIS
What if we’ve been duped, not simply here and there, but all the way down, when it comes to experience? What if consciousness were some bizarre kind of hoax?
The final secondary argument offered in the novel is based on something called the ‘Blind Brain Hypothesis.’ Consciousness is so strange, so little understood, that anything might result from the current research in neuroscience and cognitive science. We could literally discover that we are little more than epiphenomenal figments, dreams that our brains have cooked up in the absence of any viable alternatives. Science is ever the cruel stranger, the one who spares no feelings, concedes no conceits no matter how essential. In the near future world of Neuropath, this is precisely what has happened under the guise of the Blind Brain Hypothesis, the theoretical brainchild of the story’s hero, Thomas Bible.
Consider coin tricks. Why do coin tricks strike us as ‘magic’? When describing them, we say things like “poof, there it was.” The coin, we claim, “materialized from thin air” or “appeared from nowhere.” We tend, in other words, to focus on the lack of causal precursors, on the beforelessness of the coin’s appearance, as the amazing thing. But why should ‘beforelessness’ strike us as remarkable to the point of magic?
From an evolutionary standpoint, the uncanniness of things appearing from nowhere seems easy enough to understand. Our brains are adaptive artifacts of environments where natural objects such as coins generally didn’t ‘pop into existence.’ Our brains have evolved to process causal environments possessing natural objects with interrelated causal histories. When natural objects appear without any apparent causal history, as in a coin trick, our brains are confronted by something largely without evolutionary precedent. Instances of apparent beforelessness defeat our brains’ routine environmental processing.
The magic of coin tricks, one might say, is a function of our brains’ hardwired abhorrence of causal vacuums in local environments. The integration of natural objects into causal backgrounds is the default, which is why, we might suppose, the sense of magic immediately evaporates when we look over the magician’s shoulder and the causal history of the coin is revealed. The magic of coin tricks, in other words, depends on our brains’ relation to the coin’s causal history. Expose that causal history, and the appearing coin seems a natural object like any other. Suppress that causal history (through misdirection, sleight of hand, etc.), and the appearing coin exhibits beforelessness. It seems like magic.
I bring this up because so many intentional phenomena exhibit an eerily similar structure. Consider, for instance, your present experience of listening. The words you hear ‘are simply there.’ You experience me speaking; nowhere does the neurophysiology–the causal history–of your experience enter into that experience as something experienced. You have no inkling of sound waves striking your eardrum. You have no intuitive awareness of your cochlea or auditory cortex. Like the coin, this experience seems to arise ‘ready made.’
The Blind Brain Hypothesis proposes that this is no accident. Various experiential phenomena, it suggests, are best understood as a kind of magic trick–only one that we cannot see through or around because our brain itself is the magician.
Whether or not the so-called ‘thalamocortical system’ turns out to be the ‘seat of consciousness,’ one thing is clear: the information that finds its way to consciousness represents only a small fraction of the brain’s overall information load. This means that at any given moment, the brain’s consciousness systems possess a kind of (fixed or dynamic) information horizon. What falls outside this information horizon, we are inclined to either overlook completely or attribute to the so-called ‘unconscious’–a problematic intentional metaphor if there ever was one.
Just as the magic of coin tricks is a function of our brains’ blinkered relation to the coin’s causal history, the Blind Brain Hypothesis suggests that many central structural characteristics of consciousness are expressions of our brains’ blinkered relation to their own causal histories, an artifact of the thalamocortical information horizon.
Given that our brains are in fact largely blind to their own neurophysiological processing, it seems clear that an information horizon exists in some form. Structurally, the brain is simply too complicated to track itself. Developmentally, the brain lacked both the time and the evolutionary impetus to track itself.