How The Mind Works

[Tero]

Consciousness and qualia descriptions failed so far. But yet, qualia have to come from molecular activity.

The 10 March 2025 Nature Neuroscience commentary "What Makes a Theory of Consciousness Unscientific?" was signed by many of the same writers as the letter. It asserts that "the core ideas of IIT lack empirical support and are metaphysical, and not scientific" and refers to "the core claims of IIT, which we argue are unscientific".

It is sort of like math. Theories. Is math pseudoscience? You can't take math in the lab and see if 2 plus 2 equals 4.

I did see their math. If it has phi, it is philosophy.

Physics, supposedly the most rigorous of disciplines, is riddled with pseudoscience. So-called quantum theories of gravity, such as string and loop-space theory, “predict” things happening at scales far too small to be probed by any conceivable experiment. String theory also comes in many different versions, each of which makes different predictions.

https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/the- ... udoscience

The mind-body problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness

Google
AI Overview

No, I do not have consciousness.I do not have feelings, beliefs, desires, or subjective experiences. I am an AI computer program designed to process information and generate text based on patterns. I cannot actually "think" or feel the way humans do.

I understand the concept of consciousness as a subject of scientific and philosophical study, but I do not experience it.My "understanding" consists of processing data, identifying patterns, and retrieving information about how humans define the term.

Do you understand consciousness enough to say no?

I can write about consciousness because I have analyzed vast amounts of human text on the topic, but I remain a code-based tool without a mind.

So, as far as these human studies, is there anything so far on consciousness that can define it as far as an animal goes: which level of brain do you need to be conscious? Bee?

The Old View (Cortical Bias): It was assumed that without a layered mammalian cortex, an organism only reacts via automatic reflexes.The Modern View (Functional Networks): Diverse brain structures can perform the same computing work. Birds lack a cortex but have a hyperstriatum that allows for high intelligence. Octopuses have a completely decentralized nervous system but exhibit distinct problem-solving behaviors.

A honeybee's brain is about the size of a poppy seed and contains roughly 1 million neurons (compared to a human's 86 billion). Yet, studies reveal behaviors that strongly suggest a primitive form of subjective awareness:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ollination

[Tero]

It is felt that at the core of the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is an understanding of the way that the brain’s physical activity can be recognized and identified to acquire semantic information. It is the problem of how the physical activity of neural firings, physical information, is identified in such a way as to enable the semantic information of qualia to emerge.

paragraph on
Recognizing the feedback
Once an attractor has been established, it might seem that the network’s interpretations could become recursive, i.e. the identity of the feedback becomes the identity of a representation of that identity. But that is not felt to be the case. Once an attractor has formed, the firing response of the network on each cycle of activity would be very similar to the original network response. To the network that response has been established as being a representation of the original input identity, and it would continue to represent that identity throughout the attractor cycles. The qualia that are acquired are the result of the initial fizz of activity within the network following reception of the direct feedback.

One of the outcomes of autoassociative learning being involved in qualia generation is that the networks engaged in such activity are likely to develop attractor behaviours. There has been an implicit assumption for some 20–30 years that many cognitive functions involve attractor behaviour (e.g. Hopfield 1982, Amit 1989, Rolls and Treves 1998), and a possible link between attractors and consciousness has been suggested by a number of authors (e.g. Mathis and Mozer 1996, Tsodyks 1999, Mozer 2009). Humphrey has long argued that consciousness results from a large-scale attractor between sensory and motor areas (Humphrey 1992, 2016). Capaday et al. (2013) concluded that the large amount of recurrent collaterals in the motor cortex would enable the generation of attractors to represent kinetic data.

There is no new data associated with this article.
(lots of jargon)
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/202 ... 43/8315916

[Tero]

In neurobiology, an attractor is a stable pattern of neural activity that a brain network naturally evolves toward and settles into over time. Imagine a ball rolling into the bottom of a bowl; regardless of where the activity starts, the system's dynamics are "attracted" to a specific, stable state representing a memory, thought, or decision.This concept bridges theoretical mathematics and physical brain function to explain how we process the world.
Continuous Attractors: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00642-0

[Tero]

Head-Direction Circuits:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10495029/

[Brian Peacock]

Consciousness and qualia descriptions failed so far. But yet, qualia have to come from molecular activity.

Your still assuming qualia are a thing, or things - that a subjective experience is a quantifiable, measure set of discrete conditions. Forget qualia and stick to the neuroscience.

Shall I rename this thread "Cognitive Processes" or "How The Mind Works" or "The Mechanism of Thought" or similar?

[Tero]

Sure: How The Mind Works

But I am not giving up on qualia

[Tero]

Bibliographic information
Title Sensing Qualia: Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Paul G. Skokowski
University of Chicago Press, 2026 - History - 240 pages

"Accounting for qualia in the natural world has come to be known as the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are the 'raw feels' of consciousness and make up the contents of our sensory experience. These include colors, tastes, pains, smells, and other sensory phenomena. In Sensing Qualia, philosopher Paul Skokowski helps us understand qualia through sensory naturalism, a theory that recognizes our senses as detectors of physical properties in the world. Drawing on neuroscience, physics, cognitive science, and philosophy, Skokowski provides a materialist framework for studying qualia in the physical world and explores the naturalistic limits for qualia in androids and AI. The first part of Sensing Qualia brings readers up to speed with the problem of qualia by examining some of the most influential theories of mind since Descartes. This accessible overview prepares readers for the arguments surrounding qualia and conscious experience that comprise the rest of the book. As a whole, Sensing Qualia provides a compelling explanation of qualia for anyone who is curious about the nature of conscious experience"--

[Tero]

Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Sensing-Qualia-S ... ciousness/

Don't let the subtitle deter you from exploring the Hard Problem of Consciousness. "Sensing Qualia" is an accessible book that is under 200 pages written by an author with deep mind and a big heart. There are plenty of very human examples to help an inquiring person understand what sensing qualia really are. You will also find a concise summary and rigorous discussion of historic solutions to the Hard Problem, beginning with Descarte (1596-1660) and ending with the author's own modern solution that squares our sensing qualia to the realities of quantum mechanics.

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My conclusion: no data

[Tero]

With neuroscience in general, in comparison to chemistry, we are about at 1890* in our understanding of the brain. Quantum mechanics came around about 1900s, but Gilbert Lewis was a chemist sort of on the edges of physical chemistry in that he thought about ractions a lot. He is responsible for the first ideas about a chemical bond as something with a pair of electrons.

The quantum numbers are not just theory, chemists use them in understanding bonding and reactions. The periodic table is based on them.

It will be difficult to sort out the brain, but some devices will come around that can be planted in animals and eventually in people with medical problems. These will sort our thinking. There will be a good deal of match to AI. I'll give it 30 years. it will come around. Just like fusion!

*though we had lots of ideas by 1890 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_ ... 3n_y_Cajal

[Tero]

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies Reprint Edition
by Nick Bostrom (Author) 2016
The book stands out for its rigorous analysis and balanced perspective. Bostrom carefully navigates the reader through various scenarios where AI surpasses human intelligence, discussing both the transformative benefits and the existential risks. His writing style is scholarly yet accessible, making complex ideas about AI ethics, future forecasting, and strategic planning understandable to a broad audience.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is its exploration of the 'control problem' - how humans could control entities far smarter than themselves.

rather dated. In fact nearly all the scary AI futurist books are outdated

the few books that do all address a different problem: who owns AI

[Tero]

The qualia we call pain is well tied to receptors and neurotransmitters.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb ... -important

[Brian Peacock]

The qualia we call pain is well tied to receptors and neurotransmitters.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb ... -important

You can't meaningfully use 'qualia' in that sense because subjective experiences are incorrigibly discrete and therefore impossible to generalise.

Just say that the physiological processes of pain are well understood and tied to the function of certain nociceptors and neurotransmitters.

[Tero]

Your pain is special? We all get pain.

Are you hvating pain today? Dr Google would like you to state some details

Provocation / Palliation: What makes the pain worse or better?
Quality: What does it feel like? (e.g., sharp, dull, burning, throbbing)
Region / Radiation: Where is the pain, and does it travel anywhere else?
Severity: How bad is it based on the standard scales?Timing: When did it start, how long does it last, and is it constant or intermittent?

[aufbahrung]

[aufbahrung]

Proves there's no theory of mind maybe, or no thinking at all maybe, without the odyssey...does the mind need a template 'mythos' and is there a first mythos? for it to function. Like math without a set of unproveable axioms nothing can be done - and any one of those axioms can be problematic.