Here is the link to the Mitchell paper I've quoted from, "A Dyadic Theory of Consciousness":
Dyadic Model Part 1
And here is the link to the paper by Jaak Panksepp that I referred to parenthetically, "
The emergence of primary anoetic consciousness in episodic memory":
Frontiers | The Emergence of Primary Anoetic Consciousness in Episodic Memory | Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
Man, this cat needs to learn how to just say what he means.
The primary gist of the underlying concept, I think, is here:
"In other words, we do not experience the brain mechanisms of learning and memory, only their results."
Groovy. The brain's the hardware, our mind is the running app(s), and there's an OS down there between the meat and the mind.
There's some lower level processes that allow the mind (likely read-only) access to what the OS is doing, the rest is abstracted away.
This bit is cool, I didn't know that:
"For instance, research on emotion imitation (
Hennenlotter et al., 2009) showed that denervation of muscles necessary to the facial expression of emotion leads to changes in central circuitry of emotion."
But this bit:
"The difference between anoetic self-experience and semantic self-concept can be illustrated by an example of an elderly woman in later stages of Alzheimer’s dementia described by
Klein (2013a) who kept her anoetic self-experience intact but lost her episodic self. The women experienced a variety of memory problems typically associated with late stages of dementia (e.g., loss of personal recollections, difficulties in object naming, word finding difficulties, temporal disorientation, etc.). In contrast, interviewing revealed that she maintained a sense of herself as an entity, albeit one beset by confusion."
Can be far, far more simply explained by stating that there is a difference between
memory and a sense of
self. They can be impaired or enhanced separately.
Again, my view is our mind is a series of subsystems that have accreted in billions 'n billions of years of random evolutionary advantages, particularly accelerated in the past few dozen million years say.
It's how nature happened to create
us.
And likely to be how we cobble together a general-purpose AI... out of specialized artificial cognition subsystems.
"Reflective Consciousness" is the realm of the "big mind" of buddhism. It's the
me that watches
me. In fact, as Hofstadter demonstrates, there's no limit to this recursion. There can be a me that watches me watching me. And so on, turtles all the way down, baby.
They lost me with the "Episodic Memory and Autonoetic Consciousness" stuff. I mean, it seems pretty simple to think about recalling memories from your long-term storage subsystem, and then thinking about how you feel about them -- "episodic" memory. Not sure what "semantic" memory is, except that I understand what both "semantic" and "memory" mean, so I'll suppose it means "the meaning of memory" or perhaps how different memories are linked?
I'll skip the "warmth of remembrance" stuff because I couldn't make heads or tails of the point, except that some memories give you good feelings and some give you not so good feelings, and these engage different parts of the brain.
So I'll skip to the conclusion.
"unknowing consciousness, namely anoetic consciousness, allows various primordial affective feelings, and the related affective information processing of learning and memory mechanisms"
Groovy. There's hooks in the OS to allow consciousness to recall memory and think/feel about it. I'm with you there.
"In contrast to noetic consciousness, autonoetic consciousness refers to the reflective capacity to mentally represent a continuing existence one that is embedded in specific episodic contexts and associated with remembered experiences with affective quality – from “warmth and intimacy” to “dread and alienation.”"
So we have a continuity of sense of self built-in that helps us feel things about ourselves and our place in our story. Still with you.
"As a self-generative, self-knowing state, attention in autonoetic consciousness can thus be directed to memories of the past... It is accompanied with a sense of personal agency; that is, the belief that I am the cause of my thoughts and actions, a sense of personal ownership; that is, the feeling that my thoughts and acts belong to me, and the ability to think about time as an unfolding of personal happenings centered about the self"
K. We live in our own context, and even though I was a completely different person when I was 5, I still think of that person as
me.
"This form of mentalizing, surely most highly developed in humans, is heavily mediated by medial temporal lobe (hippocampal) and frontal lobe evolution and microstructure"
And all this stuff happens in the brain. What I completely and fundamentally fail to understand is how talking about what happens in our cognition tells us much about
how it emerges. So maybe I missed the point, and I certainly missed anything about quantum information theory and entanglement -- there's been nothing I've seen stating anything except there
might be quantum events that are relevant in understanding neurotransmitter uptake.
Oh, and sorry, I skipped Mitchell, mostly because I can't stand the guy after reading paragraph 2.
"Energy and information are basic attributes in nature. Information is defined as mere patterns of energy."
No. You can choose to interpret information as entropy, in other words how systems are ordered. And anything that gets ordered in the universe can be interpreted as 'energy' after Einstein, but that's like describing my buick as it's mass-energy equivalent entropic state. Or, a whole lotta hand waiving going on.
There may also be a fundamental limit in the amount of information that can be quantized in energy:
Information converted to energy - physicsworld.com
Which is quite different than the base energy state of the universe (background). Which in other words, means that there is quite a bit of energy in the universe that doesn't contain information.
Oh, and black holes may consume information for lunch, yet contain energy. It's a pattern of energy with zero information.
"Therefore energy and information may be viewed as dyadically coupled from the origin of the universe."
I disagree for reasons above.
"The organization of energy is the basis of all existence;"
Sure. We'd be dead as a doornail without being structured.
"... and information is the basis of all knowing."
And this is where we go sideways again. The author is confusing "information" in the mathematical sense, and epistemology. That's a big damn gap to jump.
"Our universe is an evolving universe which has self organized both matter and information, and displays both existence and knowing. “Knowing” is used in a general sense of apprehending and utilizing information."
I don't even know where to begin with this one. It's self-organizaiton is temporary and localized at best, and the universe in general is tending to thermodynamic
disorder, not order. It's kind of why time flows in one direction. And just because
we happen to display knowing doesn't mean the
universe does.
The only way in my mind this sentence makes any sense is if you ran the big bang backward. The highest organized state the universe has achieved was right before then.
