Consciousness

[prime]

Through the lens of computer science, there are at least three levels of information overload: "neural and cognitive mechanisms on the individual level... information and decisions at the group level... (and) societal level interactions among individuals, groups, and information providers." These levels do not operate independently, so the flow of information may be treated as a multilevel network with nodes, which may give rise to an abrupt change. The researchers cite teamwork as an example: one team member's information overload may cause the group's performance to be hindered. It is a complex problem.

"Information overload can have severe implications," said Curt Breneman, Ph.D., dean of Rensselaer's School of Science. "It begins by eroding our emotional health, job performance, and satisfaction, subsequently influencing the actions of groups and ultimately, entire societies. I hope that Dr. Szymanski's letter, written with colleagues from across the world, will raise public awareness of the problem and enable solutions to be studied and implemented."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240314122208.htm

We need silence so our noise can be heard:

First, the team of scientists measured the neural activity of each cell that makes up a primitive brain in the roundworms' head area. To achieve this, the worms were placed in a microfluidic chip, a tiny device designed for worms to be able to "wiggle" backward and forward while keeping them within the field of view of the objective lens. Then, using a confocal microscope, the scientists filmed how the neurons reacted to changes in salt concentrations.

The data derived from these "films" of roundworm brains were then used to create computer simulations of roundworm brains. However, the first simulations that contained only deterministic elements generated decaying "neural" activity. By adding "noise" to the models, the team achieved an accurate representation of the roundworms' whole-brain activity. The scientists were not only able to estimate the strength of connectivity between neurons but also demonstrated that "noise" is essential to brain activity. This mathematical model could even potentially be applied to analyze neuronal activity in cases where complete connectome data is not yet available.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240315161022.htm

Think of as all:

In previous studies, the authors had shown that when teens and adults think about issues and situations in a transcendent way, many brain systems coordinate their activity, among them two major networks important for psychological functioning: the executive control network and the default mode network. The executive control network is involved in managing focused and goal-directed thinking, while the default mode network is active during all kinds of thinking that transcends the "here and now," such as when recalling personal experiences, imagining the future, feeling enduring emotions such as compassion, gratitude and admiration for virtue, daydreaming or thinking creatively.

What the researchers found is that all teens in the experiment talked at least some about the bigger picture -- what lessons they took from a particularly poignant story, or how a story may have changed their perspective on something in their own life or the lives and futures of others. However, they found that while all of the participating teens could think transcendently, some did it far more than others. And that was what made the difference. The more a teen grappled with the bigger picture and tried to learn from the stories, the more that teen increased the coordination between brain networks over the next two years, regardless of their IQ or their socioeconomic status. This brain growth -- not how a teen's brain compared to other teens' brains but how a teen's brain compared to their own brain two years earlier -- in turn predicted important developmental milestones, like identity development in the late teen years and life satisfaction in young adulthood, about five years later.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240318142218.htm

Some philosophers think that consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain—this is the "physicalist" position. Others think it's the other way around: consciousness is primary, and the physical world emerges from consciousness. A version of this is the "panpsychist" view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality, with the word deriving from the two Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul or mind).

Still others think that both consciousness and the physical world are fundamental but radically different—this is the view of the "dualist." Crucially, you can't distinguish between these views with an experiment, because, for any scientific data, each of the views will interpret that data in their own terms.

For example, suppose we discover scientifically that a certain form of brain activity is correlated with the conscious experience of an organism. The physicalist will interpret this as the form of organization which turns non-conscious physical processes—such as electrical signals between brain cells—into conscious experience, whereas the panpsychist will interpret it as the form of organization which unifies individual conscious particles into one larger conscious system. Thus we find two very different philosophical interpretations of the same scientific data.

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-mystery-consciousness-limit-science.html

The basic idea of internalism is that justification is solely determined by factors that are internal to a person. Externalists deny this, asserting that justification depends on additional factors that are external to a person.

https://iep.utm.edu/int-ext/

Internalism in the first instance is a thesis about the basis of either knowledge or justified belief. This first form of internalism holds that a person either does or can have a form of access to the basis for knowledge or justified belief. The key idea is that the person either is or can be aware of this basis. Externalists, by contrast, deny that one always can have this sort of access to the basis for one's knowledge and justified belief. A second form of internalism, connected just to justified belief but probably extendable to knowledge as well, concerns not access but rather what the basis for a justified belief really is. Mentalism is the thesis that what ultimately justifies any belief is some mental state of the epistemic agent holding that belief. Externalism on this dimension, then, would be the view that things other than mental states operate as justifiers. A third form of internalism concerns the very concept of justification, rather than access to or the nature of justifiers. This third form of internalism is the deontological concept of justification, whose main idea is that the concept of epistemic justification is to be analyzed in terms of fulfilling one's intellectual duties or responsibilities. Externalism with respect to the concept of epistemic justification would be the thesis that this concept is to be analyzed in terms other than special duties or responsibilities.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-intext/