To understand consciousness, why can't we just look at the difference between brain activity during all the conscious processes (e.g. listening to someone speak) and all the unconscious ones (e.g. breathing)?
Obviously neuroscientists will have thought of this, so my question is why didn't it work?
Or an even better example, when we are actually breathing consciously/manually compared to normal unconscious breathing.
How does that not reveal what cosciousness is and how it works?
define "consciousness"
that's what we want to find out...
That's already done by the majority of the cortex, user. A decorticate person can still be "alive", whereas destruction of the brainstem kills them by cessating vital functions. But that doesn't mean the cortex is the "seat" of "consciousness" in the Cartesian way you're implying. Perception (please say this instead of consciousness, consciousness is a loaded word) requires thalamic relay to the cortex before it is properly "perceived", and severe perceptual abnormalities can be induced by this means. Direct stimulation of thalamic bodies with electricity, or interruption of the complex and delicate circuits of the brainstem that arise to relay sensory transduction (your eyes, ears, etc.) into the thalamus, as in the case of stroke and atypical hallucinogens like ibogaine, which irritate the peduncle and the cerebellum.
That's great and all, but the problem is nobody really "gets" how the thalamus turns, or helps turn, glutaminergic transduction into perceptions, or even the best way to measure this, because the known method to manage the thalamus (sticking an electrode in it) is very invasive, imprecise, and potentially very disruptive to the health of the organism.
Basically, if you figure out the monster complexity of thalamic-subcortical inhibition-excitation burst-tonic circuits, regardless of cortical processes, perception and "qualae" would be very easy to understand. But nobody does yet, and nobody quite understands how to go about it.
Does awareness of our memories and imagination also count as perception according to this?
Yes. You can't have memories of things you haven't yet perceived from a sense organ. Of course the actual process of encoding memories from sensory processes is relatively well-understood, with modern examinations of CAMKII and GABAnergic amnesia agents. Everyone has blacked out or roofied themselves, and have some intuitive understanding that excitement makes remembering things easier in a "flashbulb" way. It's everything that comes before that, the transition of a flashbulb sensation into a perception that's very complex and irritating.
>You can't have memories of things you haven't yet perceived from a sense organ.
Including semantic memory?
A semantic memory isn't more special than other kinds of memory. A fact is something that requires prior sensory knowledge just like an episodic memory of it happening to you. You couldn't remember, lets say, that an outhouse like feces if you had never smelled feces before or associated it with the word, image, feeling of a model outhouse, and so on, with associations concerning at the base, sensory inputs.
One more question. What do you think about this song? How does it make you feel? Do you enjoy it?
youtube.com
>A fact is something that requires prior sensory knowledge
Are you sure about that? Mathematicians for example can tell you facts about 'infinity' but nobody has ever seen something infinite.
>A semantic memory isn't more special than other kinds of memory.
Oh?
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
A drug, seizure activity, damage or something like synesthesia could crosswire sensory channels that already exist in a "hallucinatory" way, but unfortunately it doesn't make the problem of binding these stimuli less of a cluster-fuck. How does a synesthete really see a word as a color? How does LSD really make a sound a shape? How can mind-blind people process visual tasks without having a copy in their "minds eye"? It is a mystery, and the reason why perceptual neuroscience concerns itself with practical problems fixing transduction more than anything else.
ayy lmao
Do you know what a semantic memory actually is?
Actually we do had a good idea of what the thalamus does. It doesn't turn things into perception like u said. It's responsible for inferring precision or uncertainty of cortical representations which corresponds very well to its proposed roles in cortical binding. we've had good thalamus theories for about 25 years and no its not independent of cortical processing either. I''m pretty sure we have a good theoretical basis for what the thalamus does and there have been empirical studies that have had some promise. We are on the verge of understanding these monster circuits. The tools and theoretics are there.
Because unconscious va conscious is more complicated than you say. There is no line. Tbh theres actually alot of good ideas and theories about consciousness in terms of global integration and structural models of the brain but won't solve hard problem.
I wd had to go into a fairly long chat about this but story short this article is irrelevant and didnt portray the full story of semantic vs episodic memories
It's complicated.
Also though uve never seen something infinite its generally well accepted that all memories and relational concepts are empirically based. Abstract concepts however can be abstracted from concrete ones ( abstract cognition relies on areas which are phylogenetically associated with egocentric spatial cognition). Pretty sure if you can understand what a beginning and end is you can abstract something that has neither.
Pretty sure we know quite abit about binding. Theres many possible nonexclusive mechanisms. And what is mind-blind?
nytimes.com
Aphantasia, lack of "internal visuals". Compare to dyslexics, who apparently have _only_ visuals and no true "inner speech".
Also why do you talk like glutamatergic transmission is specific to the thalamus. And atm we have a rough idea of what they do i think. The very fundamental basis is in homeostatic plasticity i.e. inhib exit balance and given other neurotransmitters the precision of cortical representations/sequences can be regulated.
If you think about it we do most visual tasks without a "minds eye". You might be making assumptions. Otherwise aphantasics wdnt be able to do alot of visuospatial processing
It's not like it's a mystery just that maybe this "minds eye" isnt necessarily what you think it is, but another type of mental process. I'm not sure imagining objects is the same as visuospatial processing.
Im pretty sure dyslexic people have inner speech.
I dunno but if i had to guess might be somin to do with the problems of the prefrontal cortex modulating hippocampal areas to recollect areas in the posterior visual cortices. Doesnt mean these areas dont work right but some kind of specific interactions problem. Plus recognition is different to retrieval.
But yes we do not know.
Have you ever asked a dyslexic person? You'd be surprised. One of my classmates doesn't and she didn't even understand the concept of an "internal monologue" when I tried to explain it.
>inner speech
so you literally talk to yourself in your head? i've heard of the minds eye, but never the minds ear.
Ive heard of people without it but ive notheard it in dyslexics. im sure people with dyslxia atleast can have inner speech.