[ExI] what's the use?

[Jason Resch]

It's an example of consciousness pursing it's own goals (e.g. seeking novel
experiences), and suppressing purely evolutionary goals. You can't explain
bungee jumping in evolutionary terms, but you can when you recognize that
all value is rooted in states of conscious experience.

I think it is useful to recognize as Sperry does here, that even within the
same system of a human body, there any many distinct systems of causality
at play, operating simultaneously:


"I am going to align myself in a counterstand, along with that
approximately 0.1 per cent mentalist minority, in support of a hypothetical
brain model in which consciousness and mental forces generally are given
their due representation as important features in the chain of control.
These appear as active operational forces and dynamic properties that
interact with and upon the physiological machinery. Any model or
description that leaves out conscious forces, according to this view, is
bound to be pretty sadly incomplete and unsatisfactory. The conscious mind
in this scheme, far from being put aside and dispensed with as an
"inconsequential byproduct," "epiphenomenon," or "inner aspect," as is the
customary treatment these days, gets located, instead, front and center,
directly in the midst of the causal interplay of cerebral mechanisms.

Mental forces in this particular scheme are put in the driver's seat, as it
were. They give the orders and they push and haul around the physiology and
physicochemical processes as much as or more than the latter control them.
This is a scheme that puts mind back in its old post, over matter, in a
sense-not under, outside, or beside it. It's a scheme that idealizes ideas
and ideals over physico-chemical interactions, nerve impulse traffic-or
DNA. It's a brain model in which conscious, mental, psychic forces are
recognized to be the crowning achievement of some five hundred million
years or more of evolution.

[...] The basic reasoning is simple: First, we contend that conscious or
mental phenomena are dynamic, emergent, pattern (or configurational)
properties of the living brain in action -- a point accepted by many,
including some of the more tough-minded brain researchers. Second, the
argument goes a critical step further, and insists that these emergent
pattern properties in the brain have causal control potency -- just as they
do elsewhere in the universe. And there we have the answer to the age-old
enigma of consciousness.

To put it very simply, it becomes a question largely of who pushes whom
around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. There
exists within the human cranium a whole world of diverse causal forces;
what is more, there are forces within forces within forces, as in no other
cubic half-foot of universe that we know.

[...] Along with their internal atomic and subnuclear parts, the brain
molecules are obliged to submit to a course of activity in time and space
that is determined very largely by the overall dynamic and spatial
properties of the whole brain cell as an entity. Even the brain cells,
however, with their long fibers and impulse conducting elements, do not
have very much to say either about when or in what time pattern, for
example, they are going to fire their messages. The firing orders come from
a higher command. [...]

In short, if one climbs upward through the chain of command within the
brain, one finds at the very top those overall organizational forces and
dynamic properties of the large patterns of cerebral excitation that
constitute the mental or psychic phenomena. [...]

Near the apex of this compound command system in the brain we find ideas.
In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea, or an
ideal, becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell, or a nerve
impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with
each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring
brains, and in distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with real
consequence upon the external surroundings to produce in toto an explosive
advance in evolution on this globe far beyond anything known before,
including the emergence of the living cell."


-- Roger Sperry in "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values" (1966)



Jason

On Sat, Oct 5, 2024, 9:51 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 at 14:29, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> > Enjoyment still unexplained.    bill w
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> It is the excitement and thrill caused by the chemicals flooded into
> the body by the reaction to the loud noise.
> And then relief that there is no danger after all, but feeling brave
> that we conquered our fear.
> Very enoyable!  :)
>
> BillK
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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