nineteen ways of looking at consciousness by patrick house

They evolved, from the very first living cell, so at each step of the evolutionary ladder, whatever traits favored survival and reproduction became dominant, pushing prior adaptations into the DNA equivalent of attic storage. The book is a collection of possible mechanisms, histories, observations, data, and theories of consciousness told nineteen different ways, as translations of a few moments described in a one-page scientific paper in Nature, published in 1998, titled “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter.” The idea is an homage to a short book of poetry and criticism, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes the poem “Deer Park” by Wang Wei and analyzes nineteen different translations of it in the centuries since it was originally written.He points out more than once that our brains did not emerge in an instant, all sparkling, from the build-a-brain factory. How do the characteristics of zombie food come to be, and how do they combine to create something far greater than a tasty meal for the hungry dead? He looks at many of the currently popular ideas that try to get a handle on the fog that is consciousness. neuroscientist, researcher and writer, offers a wide range of looks at what consciousness might be, mostly by looking at details of the brain.

Patrick House - image from Attention Fwd -> But how did this gelatinous, gross substance, come to develop awareness of self? And just what is consciousness, anyway? We are who and what we are, and saying so, thinking so, makes us conscious, at the very least. Somehow, within that biological organ, there is a thing we refer to as consciousness. But consider the human brain, with billions of neurons, and a nearly infinite possible range of interactions among them. Fairly simple and straightforward once one knows how it works. Does it have a borderline around it? How wide is that line? Does it have a background color? How about a foreground color? Can it display images, text, both? Where does it get its information, keyboard entry, internal calculation? and on and on and on. Under what conditions did one appear? Physical dimensions, like width and height. When I was still a programmer it was necessary to understand the many characteristics of, and rules about using, the objects that we would place on the screen in an application.

It is not drawn from a recycled tap of special kinds of cells or dredged from the vein of free will. …consciousness is not something passed on or recycled-like single molecules of water, which are retained as they move about the earth as ice, water, or dew-from one living creature to the next…instead consciousness should be grown from “scratch” with only a few well-timed molecular parts from plans laid out. The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.

Nineteen ways of looking at consciousness by patrick house