This forum has discussed consciousness many times.

I found an interesting analogy in my reading. Parliament, Page, and Queen.

For starters, consciousness has been observed to lag 120 milliseconds behind action. By the time a person has decided to act, the action is already in progress.

The analogy works as follows (summarised). The Parliament in the brain is a loose collection of neurons that gets information and debates what needs to be done, proposing and rejecting ideas until a decision is made. As that decision is moving towards the muscles, it is also being carried by the Page, a collection of fibres, to the Queen who makes the announcement and is effectively what we think of as consciousness.

Now in what I’m reading, if the Page is delayed sufficiently or the Queen is otherwise occupied, then a person acts like a zombie – able to walk, talk and act almost normally but without a consciousness. We can think of an animal with a primitive nervous system as like this,

mollwollfumble said:

This forum has discussed consciousness many times.

I found an interesting analogy in my reading. Parliament, Page, and Queen.

For starters, consciousness has been observed to lag 120 milliseconds behind action. By the time a person has decided to act, the action is already in progress.

The analogy works as follows (summarised). The Parliament in the brain is a loose collection of neurons that gets information and debates what needs to be done, proposing and rejecting ideas until a decision is made. As that decision is moving towards the muscles, it is also being carried by the Page, a collection of fibres, to the Queen who makes the announcement and is effectively what we think of as consciousness.

Now in what I’m reading, if the Page is delayed sufficiently or the Queen is otherwise occupied, then a person acts like a zombie – able to walk, talk and act almost normally but without a consciousness. We can think of an animal with a primitive nervous system as like this,

The point i’m trying to get across is that we never make a “conscious decision to act”. Any decision made by consciousness is not immediately followed by a action. Rather, the decision to act is made first, and consciousness only becomes aware of it 120 milliseconds later.

That means that consciousness is not, overall, particularly significant. Or even particularly useful. This helps to explain why some creatures, such as the starfish and venus flytrap, manage to cope quite well without a brain.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

This forum has discussed consciousness many times.

I found an interesting analogy in my reading. Parliament, Page, and Queen.

For starters, consciousness has been observed to lag 120 milliseconds behind action. By the time a person has decided to act, the action is already in progress.

The analogy works as follows (summarised). The Parliament in the brain is a loose collection of neurons that gets information and debates what needs to be done, proposing and rejecting ideas until a decision is made. As that decision is moving towards the muscles, it is also being carried by the Page, a collection of fibres, to the Queen who makes the announcement and is effectively what we think of as consciousness.

Now in what I’m reading, if the Page is delayed sufficiently or the Queen is otherwise occupied, then a person acts like a zombie – able to walk, talk and act almost normally but without a consciousness. We can think of an animal with a primitive nervous system as like this,

The point i’m trying to get across is that we never make a “conscious decision to act”. Any decision made by consciousness is not immediately followed by a action. Rather, the decision to act is made first, and consciousness only becomes aware of it 120 milliseconds later.

That means that consciousness is not, overall, particularly significant. Or even particularly useful. This helps to explain why some creatures, such as the starfish and venus flytrap, manage to cope quite well without a brain.

There is a lot of stuff around treating this delay as being highly significant, to the extent of making consciousness an “illusion”.

I think that’s all nonsense.

Making a reflex reaction and making a considered decision (otherwise known as a conscious decision) are fundamentally different, and the fact that the brain processes involved in making the considered decision are complete before we become directly aware what that decision was does not make them the same.

The Rev Dodgson said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

This forum has discussed consciousness many times.

I found an interesting analogy in my reading. Parliament, Page, and Queen.

For starters, consciousness has been observed to lag 120 milliseconds behind action. By the time a person has decided to act, the action is already in progress.

The analogy works as follows (summarised). The Parliament in the brain is a loose collection of neurons that gets information and debates what needs to be done, proposing and rejecting ideas until a decision is made. As that decision is moving towards the muscles, it is also being carried by the Page, a collection of fibres, to the Queen who makes the announcement and is effectively what we think of as consciousness.

Now in what I’m reading, if the Page is delayed sufficiently or the Queen is otherwise occupied, then a person acts like a zombie – able to walk, talk and act almost normally but without a consciousness. We can think of an animal with a primitive nervous system as like this,

The point i’m trying to get across is that we never make a “conscious decision to act”. Any decision made by consciousness is not immediately followed by a action. Rather, the decision to act is made first, and consciousness only becomes aware of it 120 milliseconds later.

That means that consciousness is not, overall, particularly significant. Or even particularly useful. This helps to explain why some creatures, such as the starfish and venus flytrap, manage to cope quite well without a brain.

There is a lot of stuff around treating this delay as being highly significant, to the extent of making consciousness an “illusion”.

I think that’s all nonsense.

Making a reflex reaction and making a considered decision (otherwise known as a conscious decision) are fundamentally different, and the fact that the brain processes involved in making the considered decision are complete before we become directly aware what that decision was does not make them the same.

I’m a bit confused.
Sometimes I begin a reflex action then before completing it my brain issues a stop signal. How does this fit in with what we are discussing?

>That means that consciousness is not, overall, particularly significant. Or even particularly useful. This helps to explain why some creatures, such as the starfish and venus flytrap, manage to cope quite well without a brain.

the entire proposition looks different if you consider most deliberation (conscious or otherwise) results in no action, less action, deferred action, or another or different action, that it is inhibitory in a sense. Consider learned impulse control when very young, along with the evolving internal voices don’t do that

fact is doing a lot of not much saves energy, and is less dangerous, you’d be surprised how much of it even very active people do

and even when you’re busy doing well-thought-out intentional stuff, that doing displaces a lot of other possibilities, that aren’t being done, so I wouldn’t buy into the bullshit consciousness results in variously more output, that more is its trajectory. Maybe see it as a mediator, a global restraining force. Lends to imaginative internal distractions too

more important though mechanisms of will (related consciousness) allow detachment of internal mental states from beliefs, and even reality. Like sustained stress (anxiety included) is an endocrine and immune system dysruptor, it could be said, in fact you could say sustained stress is a dysruptor to maintaining pleasant (non-suffering) equilibrium internal mental states

so consciousness allows, potentially, detachment from the structure of beliefs, own and others. Contrary to the idea it’s an awareness generator, that sort of ties into stuff external. Of course you are somewhat tied into the external environment, but that can’t be unlimited, open-ended

I see consciousness, self-aware consciousness, as part of homeostasis, or homeostatic mechanisms in the broadest sense.