Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[Soupie]

Edge.org is becoming quite the rabbit hole for me. Wow. I stumbled across the following article and insightful comments:

IS LIFE ANALOG OR DIGITAL? | Edge.org

IS LIFE ANALOG OR DIGITAL?​

Freeman Dyson: ... Silicon-based life and dust-based life are fiction and not fact. I use them as examples to illustrate an abstract argument. The examples are taken from science-fiction but the abstract argument is rigorous science. The abstract concepts are valid, whether or not the examples are real. The concepts are digital-life and analog-life. The concepts are based on a broad definition of life. For the purposes of this discussion, life is defined as a material system that can acquire, store, process, and use information to organize its activities. In this broad view, the essence of life is information, but information is not synonymous with life. To be alive, a system must not only hold information but process and use it. It is the active use of information, and not the passive storage, that constitutes life. ...

Steve Grand responds: When it comes to life, we see the analogue/digital distinction disappear completely, to be replaced by the spectrum of forms of encoding it really is. Take a nerve signal: at a theoretical level we can treat an action potential as a differentiated square wave, i.e. a spike of infinitesimal width and infinite height ‹ the ultimate in digital. But in practice the cell membrane takes a finite time to transit between polarised and depolarised states and so forms a smooth (if sharp) curve ‹ this is an analogue change (discrete at the quantum level). But then again, there are only two significant states, polarised and depolarised, so we're back to a digital system. And yet what really matters is the choice of encoding scheme, which for the majority of neurons seems to be frequency modulation, and so the true signal is analogue and can vary continuously. Mind you, two spike peaks can only vary in distance by a whole number of molecules, and so this analogue signal is really discrete... Argh!​

Much the same mess and mix of mechanisms applies to DNA too. ACTG may be digital, but genes are also encoded by the folding structure of DNA, RNA and the relevant enzymes, so although the resultant protein's amino acid sequence is defined digitally, the particular physical form it takes on (proteins can often fold up in many different ways, with different properties) depends on much less clear-cut factors.​

The idea of digital might seem like a neat trick to us humans, who've only just discovered it. But nature simply isn't impressed either way. ...

So "is life digital or analogue?" is surely therefore a non question, since the word "is" implies that it's a practical question, not a theoretical one? "Could life be digital or analogue" is a theoretical question (although it's a practical one for people like me, who work in Artificial Life). But the answer here is surely: it doesn't care. Whenever a network of cause and effect is capable of sustaining itself, it will. Perhaps it now boils down to how discrete such information flows need to be in order to be self-sustaining, and my hunch here is that highly discretised signals (like ACTG) are an advantage but not a necessity.

Jordan Pollack responds: ... As a computer scientist, whether life is analog or digital seems to me to be the wrong question. It is a similar question as whether a chair must be made out of wood or plastic. "Chairness" is in the organization which enables a platform of a certain height to support a certain weight. Similarly "life" is a measurement of the organization in a system. The yes or no answer to the "is it alive?", is like the yes or no answer to the question to "is it hot?"

So it doesnt matter whether a system is made from silicon, carbon, chips, polymers, potentiometers, relays and motors, legos, or tinkertoys or even pure software. What matters is where the biologically complex organization will come from. ...

The amount of organization in a single autonomous biological cell dramatically exceeds the amount of organization of a modern computer program. The real question is how do we get self-organization of systems going to the point they achieve biological complexity, not whether they are digital or analog in nature.​

 

[Constance]

From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology:
Francisco Varela’s exploration of the biophysics of being
DAVID RUDRAUF, ANTOINE LUTZ, DIEGO COSMELLI, JEAN-PHILIPPE LACHAUX,
and MICHEL LE VAN QUYEN
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Cérébrale, CNRS UPR 640,Paris, France

ABSTRACT
This paper reviews in detail Francisco Varela’s work on subjectivity and consciousness in the biological sciences. His original approach to this “hard problem” presents a subjectivity that is radically intertwined with its biological and physical roots. It must be understood within the framework of his theory of a concrete, embodied dynamics, grounded in his general theory of autonomous systems. Through concepts and paradigms such as biological autonomy, embodiment and neurophenomenology, the article explores the multiple levels of circular causality assumed by Varela to play a fundamental role in the emergence of human experience. The concept of biological autonomy provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for characterizing biological life and identity as an emergent and circular self-producing process. Embodiment provides a systemic and dynamical framework for understanding how a cognitive self—a mind—can arise in an organism in the midst of its operational cycles of internal regulation and ongoing sensorimotor coupling. Global subjective properties can emerge at different levels from the interactions of components and can reciprocally constrain local processes through an ongoing, recursive morphodynamics. Neurophenomenology is a supplementary step in the study of consciousness. Through a rigorous method, it advocates the careful examination of experience with first-person methodologies. It attempts to create
heuristic mutual constraints between biophysical data and data produced by accounts of subjective experience. The aim is to explicitly ground the active and disciplined insight the subject has about his/her experience in a biophysical emergent process. Finally, we discuss Varela’s essential contribution to our understanding of the generation of consciousness in the framework of what we call his “biophysics of being.”

http://www.scielo.cl/pdf/bres/v36n1/art05.pdf

 

[Constance]

"The existence of coherent social groups with a functional cohesiveness of a quality that led Wheeler [63] to describe them as ‘superorganisms’ first appeared about 100 Myr ago. There can be no certainty as to the first appearance of modern human culture, but let us guess at a figure in the region of 70 000–100 000 years BP. Now the reason why the impressive social functioning of a hive of bees acting collectively as a ‘superorganism’ is nonetheless of a lower order than the functional integrity of the individual bees making up the colony is probably attributable to group selection in social insects having had only in the region of a sixth or seventh of the time for evolution at the group level to have occurred than evolution working upon each individual in the group. Six or seven hundred million years of evolutionary time is likely to have had significant effects on the degree of functional integration that might evolve. If there is any truth to this argument, then it must apply also to the evolution of human culture. This is highly speculative, but it may be that humans give rise to social constructions that are maladaptive because there has not been enough time for social reality to reach the point where such social constructions have been eliminated by the evolution of constraints that make such beliefs and values impossible to be held by groups of humans. However, it must be conceded that it is also possible that Lewontin was right and that the notion of adaptation is as bad an organizing concept for understanding the evolution of human culture as it is for understanding evolution at large."

Human nature, cultural diversity and evolutionary theory
Henry Plotkin
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2010.0160 Published 3 January 2011

Human nature, cultural diversity and evolutionary theory | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

 

[Constance]

International Conference Phenomenology of Cognitive Experiences
Posted on May 6, 2014 by martajorba
November 5-7, 2014
University College Dublin
"This conference seeks to explore the nature and character of conscious thinking from a philosophical and phenomenological perspective. While consciousness studies have been mainly focused on sensations, perceptions and emotions, cognition has received less attention with respect to its conscious and experiential character. Within the broad domain of conscious thinking we find the experience of entertaining, considering, understanding, deliberating, doubting, intending, calculating, judging, etc., among others. This conference wants to shed light into the nature of these and other cognitive experiences through the discussion of some of their features: conscious and phenomenal character, linguistic dimension, temporality, embodiment, active/passive aspects, first-person access, or their relation to imagination, rationality and pathological cases of thought."

International Conference Phenomenology of Cognitive Experiences | Cognitive Experiences

Click on 'Abstracts' to see the contributions made in the papers.

 

[Constance]

This one sounds especially good:

Jingjing LI (McGill University)
The Possibility of Intuiting Concepts: A Phenomenological Re-examination

"There was a debate between Kant and Fichte on whether it is possible for humans to intuit concepts. This possibility of intuiting concepts finds itself determined by the content of intuition – if concepts, like sensible manifolds, are directly given in intuition, concepts can be intuited and this intuition is intellectual. Yet, intellectual intuition was negated by Kant as the impossible cognition for humans, so as to mark the limits of human cognition. Soon afterwards, Kant’s negation was objected by Fichte, who construed intuition as mediating and dialectical, thereby enabling intuition’s content to be conceptual and intuition to be intellectual. In this paper, I attempt to defend Fichte’s position, yet do so by a non-dialectical method, that is, by Husserl phenomenology. I believe phenomenology can justify the possibility of intellectual intuition for humans. My thesis, in a nutshell, is that intuition can directly grasp concepts in cognitive experiences. My attempt is accomplished within three sections. The first one presents Kant’s denial of intellectual intuition in his Critique of Pure Reason and the objections from Fichte in his Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty known as the Grundriss. Next, section two introduces Husserl’s phenomenology as a method for retackling the ‘contentious’ intellectual intuition. In the end, I reflect on four suspended issues in first two sections, which are, the transcendental agenda, the role of imagination, the distinction between inner and outer intuition, and the twofold meaning of intellectual intuition."

I'll see if there's a conference volume coming out, or perhaps an online version of this paper at the author's site.

 

[Constance]

Jean Hyppolite:

"Man is consciousness and universal self-consciousness (this proposition must not be inverted by expressing universal self-consciousness in terms of man). The manifestation of this universal self-consciousness is no longer the State, but authentic language, which is the dwelling place [demeure] of Being. It is not man who interprets Being, but Being which comes to speech [se dit] in man, and this revealing of Being, this absolute logic – substituted for a metaphysics (which would be more or less theology) – goes through man."

Jean Hyppolite, ‘Ruse de la raison et histoire chez Hegel’

Hyppolite is the one who has established for us all of the problems which are ours… Logic and Existence…is one of the great works of our time.
--Michel Foucalt

J. Hyppolite (1907-1968)
Jean Hyppolite was a figure of pivotal importance in twentieth century French philosophy. As a translator he produced the first full French translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; as a scholar his careful and innovative readings of Hegel’s entire corpus established him as an authority at home and abroad; and as a teacher and a philosopher he exerted a crucial influence on the generation of thinkers that included Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, raising questions about difference, immanence, sense, and method that continue to resonate through contemporary philosophy.

For its twenty-fourth volume, Pli invites papers on any aspect of Hyppolite’s work, his development, and his influence both on his own generation and beyond. Possible topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

• The unhappy consciousness: Hegel and Kierkegaard in France
• The ‘most obscure dialectical synthesis': Hegel, Marx and the relation between logic and history
• ‘There is no primacy of the thesis’: the Absolute as mediation in Logic and Existence
• The ontological status of Hegel’s Logic and the nature of Hegel’s critique of Kant
• ‘The Structuralism Controversy’ and Hyppolite’s contribution to the John Hopkins symposium
• Hyppolite and Heidegger: onto-logy and the critique of Humanism
• Sense and nonsense in Hyppolite and beyond
• ‘The only secret is that there is no secret’: forms of the rejection of essentialism
• Logics of contradiction and logics of repetition: from Hyppolite to Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas…
• Hyppolite, Lacan and Verneinung
• Hyppolite’s writings on figures other than Hegel, for example, Fichte, Marx, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty
• Key concepts in Hyppolite, for example, language, sense, immanence, difference, mediation, ontology, and logos.

 

[Soupie]

BBC - Future - Can you live a normal life with half a brain?

How much of our brain do we actually need? A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged. These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor. It isn't just that we don't understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain. By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have. This isn't just brain damage – the whole structure is absent. Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth. A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.

The woman wasn't completely unaffected – she had suffered from uncertain, clumsy, movements her whole life. But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates. ...

Part of the explanation for the brain's apparent resilience is its 'plasticity' – an ability to adapt its structure based on experience. But another clue comes from a concept advocated by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. He noticed that biological functions are often supported by multiple structures – single physical features are coded for by multiple genes, for example, so that knocking out any single gene can't prevent that feature from developing apparently normally. He called the ability of multiple different structures to support a single function 'degeneracy'.

And so it is with the brain. The important functions our brain carries out are not farmed out to single distinct brain regions, but instead supported by multiple regions, often in similar but slightly different ways. If one structure breaks down, the others can pick up the slack.

This helps explain why cognitive neuroscientists have such problems working out what different brain regions do. If you try and understand brain areas using a simple one-function-per-region and one-region-per-function rule you'll never be able to design the experiments needed to unpick the degenerate tangle of structure and function. ...
​

It's important to note that although people with these shocking brain abnormalities are able to lead essentially normal lives, there are notable behavioral (and one would think phenomenological) consequences. Following are two cases noted in the above article.

Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain - health - 10 September 2014 - New Scientist

A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing (see scan, below left). The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.
​

Man with tiny brain shocks doctors - health - 20 July 2007 - New Scientist

A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image, right).

"It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50% to 75% reduction," says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.

Feuillet and his colleagues describe the case of this patient in The Lancet. He is a married father of two children, and works as a civil servant. ...

Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled.

"The whole brain was reduced - frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes - on both left and right sides. These regions control motion, sensibility, language, vision, audition, and emotional and cognitive functions," Feuillet told New Scientist. ...
​

What I take from this is that organisms are robust, resilient systems. They are such that they can take a lickin' and keep on ticking. What this also reinforces for me is the idea that consciousness is distributed throughout the body-brain; that consciousness is not generated by one specific consciousness circuit in the brain.

 

[smcder]

The Trickster in me couldn't resist ... I mean this in good humor and I wish all a Merry Christmas!

How Dawkweill Stole Christmas
by Dr. Suss

Every Who Down in Whoville Liked Christmas a lot...
But Dawkweill,Who lived just north of Whoville, Did NOT!

The Dawk hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don't ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

It could be his head wasn't bolted on just right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all,
May have been that his heart evolved two sizes too small.

Whatever the reason, His heart or his shoes,
He stood there on Christmas Eve, hating the Whos,

Staring down from his cave with a sour, Dennety frown,
At the warm lighted windows below in their town.

For he knew every Who down in Whoville beneath,
Was busy now, hanging a mistletoe wreath.

"And they're hanging their stockings!" he snarled with a sneer,
"Tomorrow is Christmas! It's practically here!"

Then he growled, with his Hitchy fingers nervously drumming,
"I MUST find some way to stop Christmas from coming!"

For Tomorrow, he knew, all the Who girls and boys,
Would wake bright and early. They'd rush for their toys!

And then! Oh, the noise! Oh, the Noise!
Noise! Noise! Noise!

That's one thing he hated! The NOISE!
NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!

Then the Whos, young and old, would sit down to a feast.
And they'd feast! And they'd feast! And they'd FEAST!

FEAST! FEAST! FEAST!

They would feast on Who-pudding, and rare Who-roast beast.
But they wouldn't take one supplement, not one in the least!

And THEN They'd do something He liked least of all!
Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small,

Would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing.
They'd stand hand-in-hand. And the Whos would start singing!

They'd sing! And they'd sing! And they'd SING!
SING! SING! SING!

And the more Dawkweill thought of this Who ChristmasSing,
The more he thought, "I must stop this whole thing!"

"Why, for seventy-three years I've put up with it now!"
"I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! But HOW?"

Then he got an idea! An awful idea!
DAWKWEILL GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!

"I know just what to do!" The Dawk laughed in his throat.
And he made a quick Santy Claus hat and a coat.

And he chuckled, and clucked, "What a great Dennetty trick!"
"With this coat and this hat, I look just like Saint Hitch!"

...

 

[Constance]

 

[Constance]

Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, and “Essences”
Oct 7th, 2013 | By Marc Applebaum | Category: Human Science

Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, and “Essences” - PhenomenologyBlog

“It is one thing to sift the data of inner observation conceptually and to set them up as compounds, then to decompose these into ultimate ‘simple’ elements and to study through artificial variation by observation and experiment, the conditions and results of such combinations. It is quite another to describe and understand the units of experience and meaning which are contained in the totality of man’s life itself and have not merely been created by an artificial process of ‘division’ and ‘synthesis.’ The first method, influenced by the natural sciences, is that of a synthetic-constructive psychology which wants to explain. The second method characterizes an analytic and descriptive psychology which wants to understand.”
-- Max Scheler, Prefatory Remarks to his book Ressentiment (1961, p. 37).


"One of the most stubborn artifacts of the empirical attitude to bring to my students’ attention is their confusion of explanation with understanding. The problem is probably compounded by Americans’ pragmatic focus on “getting things done” and “making things happen”! As if, by generating a causal account that claims to explain why something occurred, we therefore understand what it means for the people who lived it.

Husserl referred to the process of becoming a phenomenologist as a “‘conversion'” (in Fink, 1988, p. 191). Significantly, Husserl placed the word conversion in quotes! Phenomenology isn’t a religion, but it is a kind of awakening to a new way of seeing and living, and that’s perhaps true of any serious engagement with philosophy. This takes time, attention, and commitment: a primary challenge for students and researchers is to pause from our rushing around long enough to attend to what’s in front of us, in the lives of others. But then as psychologists, when we arrive at phenomenological or hermeneutic findings, we must turn back to the world of action and ask–what are the practical implications of this discovery?

In Aalborg this summer I argued that phenomenological psychology has a phronetic mission that is different from, though reliant upon, phenomenological philosophy’s devotion to Φιλοσοφία (philo-sophia),the love of wisdom for its own sake. In contrast, Φρόνησις (phronesis) is a knowledge embedded in worldly praxis; for this reason I think it is always messier and more provisional than philosophical knowledge.

I’m in the middle of conducting a psychological study of executives’ experiences of facing an unexpected leadership challenge–and their descriptions show such experiences to be full of ethical dilemmas, the uncertainties and ambivalences of living in the work world with responsibilities for both others’ well-being and a business’s bottom line. In the middle of my data analysis, as constituents of the psychological structure of the experience begin to present themselves, I’m struck by how beautiful is the experience Husserl calls “eidetic seeing”–the Wesenschau. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) writes,

“Wesenshau is based on the imaginary ‘free variation’ of certain facts. In order to grasp an essence, we consider a concrete experience, and then we make it change in our thought, trying to imagine it as effectively modified in all respects. That which remains invariable through these changes is the essence of the phenomenon in question” (p. 70).

The experience is beautiful because it’s a discovery process–not a case of verifying my preconceptions, but an experience of seeing something new, within the context of the lives of my research participants, but with meanings that extend beyond those lives. The concrete experiences we study are always given within describable intersubjective contexts, and this context matters a great deal. The implications of the situatedness of lived-experiences can be reflected upon hermeneutically or phenomenologically without conflict–in fact arguably, the perspectives are complementary.

I’d argue that for us psychologists, the embeddedness of both our data and our findings in the lived-world is a reflection of our mission, to grasp and then work with the living of experiences: our work doesn’t find its fulfillment solely in formal cognitive achievements. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) claim about the worldly contingency of not just facts but essences themselves is critically important. He writes:

“It follows on principle from Husserl’s point of departure and what he proposed to do–namely, to show that this knowledge of essences is altogether experiential, that it does not involve any kind of supersensible faculty, and that in the last analysis the essence is just as contingent as the fact” (p. 72).

The embeddedness of our “essential” research findings in lived-contexts that can be described means we are never seeking universality, our work is always situated. At the same time this is the virtue of our work: we’re always speaking within and to intersubjective communities, and seeking to bring generalizable knowledge that has meaning for the living of the experiences we study. As qualitative psychologists this is our way of doing science–which, as Husserl wrote in the second volume of Ideas (1989), “is to be realized only by way of relative and temporary validities and in an infinite historical process” (p. 406).

References
Husserl, E. (1998). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book (R. Rojcewizc and A. Schuwer, Trans.). Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Fink, E. (1988). Sixth Cartesian Meditation: the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, With Textual Notations by Edmung Husserl (R. Bruzina, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man (J. Wild, Trans.), in J. M. Edie (Ed.), The Primacy of Perception (pp. 43-95).Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Scheler, M. (1972). Ressentiment (W. W. Holdheim, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books.

- See more at: Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, and “Essences” - PhenomenologyBlog

 

[Constance]

BBC - Future - Can you live a normal life with half a brain?

How much of our brain do we actually need? A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged. These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor. It isn't just that we don't understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain. By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have. This isn't just brain damage – the whole structure is absent. Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth. A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.

The woman wasn't completely unaffected – she had suffered from uncertain, clumsy, movements her whole life. But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates. ...

Part of the explanation for the brain's apparent resilience is its 'plasticity' – an ability to adapt its structure based on experience. But another clue comes from a concept advocated by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. He noticed that biological functions are often supported by multiple structures – single physical features are coded for by multiple genes, for example, so that knocking out any single gene can't prevent that feature from developing apparently normally. He called the ability of multiple different structures to support a single function 'degeneracy'.

And so it is with the brain. The important functions our brain carries out are not farmed out to single distinct brain regions, but instead supported by multiple regions, often in similar but slightly different ways. If one structure breaks down, the others can pick up the slack.

This helps explain why cognitive neuroscientists have such problems working out what different brain regions do. If you try and understand brain areas using a simple one-function-per-region and one-region-per-function rule you'll never be able to design the experiments needed to unpick the degenerate tangle of structure and function. ...
​

It's important to note that although people with these shocking brain abnormalities are able to lead essentially normal lives, there are notable behavioral (and one would think phenomenological) consequences. Following are two cases noted in the above article.

Woman of 24 found to have no cerebellum in her brain - health - 10 September 2014 - New Scientist

A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she'd had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn't walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing (see scan, below left). The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.
​

Man with tiny brain shocks doctors - health - 20 July 2007 - New Scientist

A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image, right).

"It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50% to 75% reduction," says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.

Feuillet and his colleagues describe the case of this patient in The Lancet. He is a married father of two children, and works as a civil servant. ...

Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled.

"The whole brain was reduced - frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes - on both left and right sides. These regions control motion, sensibility, language, vision, audition, and emotional and cognitive functions," Feuillet told New Scientist. ...
​

What I take from this is that organisms are robust, resilient systems. They are such that they can take a lickin' and keep on ticking. What this also reinforces for me is the idea that consciousness is distributed throughout the body-brain; that consciousness is not generated by one specific consciousness circuit in the brain.

"'And so it is with the brain. The important functions our brain carries out are not farmed out to single distinct brain regions, but instead supported by multiple regions, often in similar but slightly different ways. If one structure breaks down, the others can pick up the slack.'"

"What I take from this is that organisms are robust, resilient systems. They are such that they can take a lickin' and keep on ticking. What this also reinforces for me is the idea that consciousness is distributed throughout the body-brain; that consciousness is not generated by one specific consciousness circuit in the brain."

I love this article and your comments on it, Soupie. For me this research supports the view that the brain cannot be understood as a computer that works predominantly with information of an abstract type received somehow directly by the brain itself. Rather, it seems apparent that what primarily motivates the brain's activities is its 'sense-making' on behalf of the organism, based in the accumulation of experience of self and world transmitted through and by the organism's bodily sense of presence in a situation and its perceptions of the specific environment within which it is required to function. This seems particularly clear in the second case described in the article you quoted, concerning the woman who could not use language competently until the age of seven, and who needed longer than that to achieve normal control over her bodily movements in the environment. Somewhat like Helen Keller (though on account of different limiting conditions), she had to struggle for years to gain a solid 'grip' on the world she lived in. How can we account for the persistence of such struggles to 'bootstrap' the individual's comprehension and competence in his or her situated existence in the world? These gradual attainments point to self-motivated activity, not passive development. This suggests, like Panksepp's identification of 'affectivity' in even simple, primordial organisms, that awareness, feeling, and protoconsciousness exist germinally in living organisms. What is germinal appears to be the sense of both 'self'-hood and an encompassing environment that must be negotiated by the individual organism. This situational sense seems to me to be the wellspring of the impetus to explore and comprehend the world in which living organisms find themselves already existing. Comprehension and competence are not 'given' from the outside but gained from the inside through the organisms's intentional efforts to connect with the world it inhabits.

 

[smcder]

This is something I used to when I was writing a new story - I would write a "review" of it - it makes you think about the most important elements and check for consistency and take the high level view "the story of your story" to see if it even makes sense. So this is a fake review of a story about a homeless guy who finds a book in the library with the call number

999.99

in the Dewey Decimal system that's 999 History of other areas: Extraterresterial worlds

The book describes another world where everyone has evolved to live at the Library. It's a framework that's big enough to accomodate several related short stories (see the TOC below) but with an over-arching parallel story line about two men: the one who writes the book and the one who finds it.

Lots of work to do on it, yet - and it may not survive - I'm just getting back into this creative writing thing. I hope you don't mind my posting here? - maybe we should make a creative writing thread.

025413 A Review
If you just read one book this year about a homeless guy who might or might not visit an extraterrestrial world where everyone lives at the library and no one goes outside … ever – then it should be 025413.
025.413 is the Dewey Decimal number for the Dewey Decimal system for you lovers of the obscure.
025431 may or may not take place in the mind of an unnamed homeless man who practically lives in his public library – despite claiming to love the outside world. He moves between a day and a night world and between time and space, a Billy Pilgrim for the bibliophile set. His take on the world is unreliable in many ways.
The author makes us two promises at the outset:
1. This is not one of those “it was all in his head” stories.
2. At its heart, it’s a love story.
All we will say here is that the author’s take on the world is also unreliable in many ways …
Even if it might be a (dre(dre(dream)am)am) world, the author is definitely up to something more – maybe a full on critique of reality itself. If you’re going to write a big story you need a big setting … and a library can hold all the stories in the world – except for the story of the library itself. In this case, there are two libraries, each holding an “anthropologist from Mars POV” on the other.
A conversation between two Librarians on the other world gives a feel for the book:
On this world, there is only the Library. Librarians are the only ones who go home at night. Workers have evolved to need a minimum of sleep and then there are the Shelvers, who are something else entirely.
In this excerpt, one Librarian is explaining how books survived:
“The Library itself, its physical structure is a kind of lattice work that repeats at every level … and every book repeats that same pattern too … so that within each book is every other book.”
“So if a patron wants Moby Dick and it’s not available?”
“Then you give them Don Quixote – point them to the chapter with the giants and within that text, there is a linguistic tunnel, it requires a vowel shift – but once the reader does this, then he finds himself at the bottom of the ocean floor with Pip inside Moby Dick. There is an Ideation connection there with the coral animals and the weaver god, the blind god and the windmills – from there the reader can tessellate out and begin to generate Moby Dick.”
“Tessellate out … and this won’t interrupt the first patron’s reading?”
“Not at all – the tunnel and the vowel shift mean they are on separate tessellations - they actually then begin to grow their own story. So if you haven’t read Moby Dick recently, you are in for a treat … it’s evolved.”
“And we don’t – we don’t have to check any technology out to them? Any kind of a reader?”
The first Librarian laughed.
“Not at all.” She paused. “It’s an organic process … There was a time when I was very young when people almost stopped reading. And that’s when the books began to evolve. They were aggressive at first, but are symbiotes now. You can quite safely have your nose buried in a book for long periods of time, they actually provide readers with additional oxygen.”
And so it goes with dream-like logic.
The book is a spare 150 pages in length and is structured around a series of short stories:
Table of Contents
The Dream
1. News from the Outside
2. The Desk
3. The Fringes
4. Inside the Library
5. The Shelvers
6. The Sage at the Center of the Library
7. The Children’s Room
8. The Reference Room
9. The Garden
10. Exit
11. Outside
We won’t give away the ending of course, but we will say the author is as busy unwriting as he is writing and at the last sentence, you can feel a great weight lifted. So, perhaps it is a love story after all.
- Jessica Harper writes for Autopoesis and Janus magazines and is owned by two cats, Schrodinger and Bill

 

[Soupie]

@smcder Have you ever read any of Jorge Borges' writing?

 

[smcder]

@smcder Have you ever read any of Jorge Borges' writing?

Let me read your mind:

The Library of Babel




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[Soupie]

Let me read your mind:

The Library of Babel

I wasn't thinking of a specific book, just the plot/narrative style.

 

[smcder]

I wasn't thinking of a specific book, just the plot/narrative style.

Library of Babel got me started on it - well, working in the library, a real comversation with an intern was actually what started the whole thing ... the back windows of the library are huge and we spend the last two hours of a shift looking out into the night and I wondered what it would be like to never go out there - maybe for it to be always night ... we have regulars and the homeless, the eccentric - it's a small community and a real combination of high and low tech, we have people come in to research micro-film because the data isn't anywhere on line and likely won't be (local newspapers) any time soon because of cost ... at least

but Borges, yes Kafka is in there too ... "magical realism" - ... and right now, the idea is to have a lot of recursive elements ... the review itself may become part of the story, this goes all the way back to Cervantes - in which a book he wrote is kept by the priest when they are going through Don Quixote's library finding books to burn ... (in case he ever writes the second part) ... recursion is a big theme for Borges

Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim, Romeo and Julitet - Don Quixote himself makes an appearance ... right now I have the hard work of paring it all down into something that makes some kind of sense and without being too heavy handed in referencing all this material ...

 

[smcder]

Another element is that the text in the book the man finds is flexible, it changes, it changes according to the language and intentions of the reader ... blank pages fill up when you look at them

of course this is one element that makes you think it's in the head of the narrator - who may be mentally ill - Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim has been looked at in terms of PTSD - and this element is from the many conversations I've had with persons whose view on reality is less than reliable ... one man told me that to thank me he was going to take me to lunch and we weren't going to talk about "any of that stuff I'm always going on about - that craZy stuff" and true to his word, we had an excellent lunch and good conversation - as soon as lunch was over, he didn't miss a beat, telling me about the Bush Family, the Mexican Mafia and the Catholic Church and The Whistling Men ... and he never crossed himself, never made a mistake or told a different story - this was absolute reality to him ... really brilliant

and to close the loop, I'm tying elements of this story in with real life events at the library so that the external story, my real experiences come into the story and then decisions made in the story - I'm going to carry back outside into my work relationships at the library -

 

[Constance]

I think this will be a magnificent book, Steve, and I'm looking forward to reading it, including reading partial installments you post here. The more the better. I do suggest, however, that you send the parts of the ms written so far (including some of the descriptions of the book you've posted here) and the provisional table of contents and title to the US copyright office post haste. Like tomorrow.

 

[smcder]

I think this will be a magnificent book, Steve, and I'm looking forward to reading it, including reading partial installments you post here. The more the better. I do suggest, however, that you send the parts of the ms written so far (including some of the descriptions of the book you've posted here) and the provisional table of contents and title to the US copyright office post haste. Like tomorrow.

Thanks Constance Bill and Jorge are dead ... So I think I'm safe ... ;-)

No - it's a good idea, thank you.



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[Soupie]

Thanks Constance Bill and Jorge are dead ... So I think I'm safe ... ;-)

No - it's a good idea, thank you.

Can I make a bold request? Can you include somewhere in your story the following sentence or some form of it?:

The sentence is not written in English.