To me, perhaps naively, it seems that the synapse is a constituent bit of a substrate, and those loops etc are patterns supported by the substrate, and that they themselves are substrate for the next level of organization, and so forth. And at the mind level of organization, those patterns of patterns exist, just as the organization of atomic behaviors we call a "baseball" exists at its level - the implication would be that cause/effect explanations for their behavior would of course draw their causes and effects from the appropriate level. One speaks of fastball grips and bat speed, not quantum electrodynamics. That is not fantasy.
Also, the patterns (here referring to ones on PET scans) are virtually indistinguishable, except for which regions of the brain are involved. In my naive mind, this tells us there is a functional block diagram at some level of analysis which can be used to establish a rough picture of which brain areas are "most responsible" for consciousness, which at least should be compatible with what a neurologist would say.
That still leaves it to decide if the pulses "tickle consciousness out of the aether" -- which seems to be the idea of the folks who link consciousness to the cosmos -- or whether the nature of a pulse simply lends itself to circulation in a keep alive circuit, and that there is no electromagnetic interface to the cosmos --- which is a tempting idea to entertain. Not to mention way cool and the great stuff of sci fi.
An analogy might be an eddy in the water of a river. Notice that they are recurrent, self-reinforcing, maintained over time partly by the structure of the bed and partly by gravity and so forth, but independent in existence etc.
I had to think about this for a moment. It got me to thinking about how the keep-alive circuits in the brain began in connection with, say, motor control. For that matter the neurons that innervate the muscle tissues form a substantial part of the nervous system overall. I think in most cases those are also based on pulse trains. Also, for coordinated movement there needs to be feedback from tactile sensors, so it seems like there is something very basic about loops and repeating pulses, that was probably established before true sentience evolved. It almost seems like this is as basic as it gets, everything we think we are, and all we think about, are sets of sensations, thoughts and feelings trapped in these eddies, giving us the illusion that consciousness is something other than what it really is.
The synapse then lines up with a nexus of forces in that eddy, the firing a water molecule passing through the nexus, and so forth. You can watch eddies hit each other, combine and split, move around, change size and shape, pick up debris and move it, rise and fall in the water, and all the explanations or "causes" for this are at that level - nothing in particular at the atomic level is a "cause" of an eddy or its behavior.
This is adds some dimension to the idea of cause. If I could stitch ten neurons together in a loop, and then introduce an exciting pulse, then I should be able to predict the way this would look on, say, an oscilloscope. From this point of view, it's the delay through each cell that's creating the pulse recirculation . . . that plus the fact that it's wired as a loop. So while I could say the infrastructure is the cause, that would seem kind of trivial. Of course here we're really trying to understand what sentience means, which kicks this question into the other dimensions of cause.
It's a substrate, the water, and so it constrains but does not cause. Neurons to not cause ideas - dreams do.
I tend to agree that dreams cause ideation, because I think "dream" needs to be loosely defined. In fact I earlier was using the term "dream-like". It may be that here the idea of cause and effect is kind of problematic. If I consciously try to picture the Kundalini force as a bright light (one of the meditation techniques I practiced) then I at least initially caused that visual activity to occur as a matter of choice. But after I've become slightly non-responsive, because I've shut down my normal attention centers and gone into a trance, it may be that visual activity is enabled to run free, coupled to the imagination much like in a true dream.
I agree that neuronal tissues form a sort of substrate. I wouldn't say that neurons exclusively cause sentience, but that the substrates tends to support those eddies once they are started. If we're looking for the starting pulse that triggers a particular sentient experience, then that gets problematic, although I think we could make some headway by trying to list how it probably happens. My guess is that we will end up finding that the triggers are primarily realtime sensory stimuli, or else ideas retrieved from memory. But then those are all configured as pulse trains, too. So if we try to draw a boundary which encloses all of that, I think we end up with physical stimulation alone lying outside the boundary. One of the things they talk about in biology is that the motivational centers of the brain are set up to trigger these eddies, as we're calling them. It's probably harder to leave motivation (or the religious idea of "free will") to the artifacts of the substrate and it's various running algorithms, since that makes it so difficult to understand the physical elements of true choice. But then, that in my mind is just another case of arriving at an answer (or half-answer) which isn't very comforting in the sense that it probably runs counter to the common belief that a person is more than a biological system.
That's the hardest thing to imitate, technically, so far - as somebody once pointed out, Deep Blue required a team of maintenance guys and cable electrical service to a powerful generator just to match chess moves with a guy who had dressed himself, brought himself to the table, could carry on conversations and keep track of his surroundings, and was moving his own pieces, while running for hours on a ham sandwich .
I think this energy conservative feature is what allowed primitive brains to work in the first place. Once that infrastructure proved feasible, the evolution of new processing pathways seems inevitable -- depending on the needs of the organism within the context of the niche, of course.
From low to high that doesn't matter. Patterns are not caused or explained by substrates, in general (constraints can be visible).
In some ways they are governed by the length of the axon, and other physical processes (like myelination), and in some ways they are governed (in shape) by the actual geometry of the racetrack they are circulating in. But in other ways they are governed by outside stimulation. For example, the motor control developed in a child learning to walk can be attributed to experience, but then the shape of that pattern on a PET scan falls into the motor region, as if to say it's attributed to some particular parts of that substrate. At some point we would need to tackle PET scans to get closer to this.
The other way to look at this is that, for a given set of neurons connected for life support at birth, with, say, the beginnings of facial recognition and motor control, those neurons in the conscious regions of the brain are bombarded by a deluge of sensory stimulation -- esp. now that doctors recommend lots of bright sounds and colors for babies to process -- but in any case it's a deluge over a lifetime. The neurons might be considered a physical substrate, but additional functionality doesn't necessarily appear until after the junctions are connected -- and that generally requires sensory stimulation. So cause and effect can be considered from these different levels. We might say a junction is caused by learning, or we might say it's caused by the innate curiosity that hardwired intelligence, and therefore the genetic bootstrap is the chief cause, but then that can be attributed to the DNA and so forth.
I would also think that to wade through this we would need to consider the embryonic development of the brain, since that says something about the way the bootstrap programs physically emerge from the DNA.
From high to low it isn't true - once we have at least some aspect of the experience of qualia localized in a brain, we can both predict and measure various probabilities of specific neural firings upon evocation of that experience, repeatably.
In fact the PET scan has illustrated this remarkably well.
We can also discover and measure physical changes in neural connection patterns etc from repeated such evocations and "learning".
Right. The stuff I posted from NPR takes this thread to a another level, in that it suggests that habitual practices (religious ritual, to include prayer & meditation) seem to actually steer the way the synaptic junctions grow together, to reshape the brain, as if to say all such practices physically reinforce the
beliefs that engendered them. Once the person is wired that way it's probably hard for them to regress. Or, from their vantage point, they are enlightened now, something that can't be undone short of injury.
