Germination of an Idea

Marcus is a friend of mine and in conversation he brought up an idea. I followed up with an internet search of ideas as they occurred to me and the email reveals my train of thought. What is most interesting to me is the possibility of gaining an understanding of not only consciousness but also of mind, self-awareness, self-identity, and personhood. The approach may be a bit of a stretch, no more so than AI producing a self-aware automaton. I offer the notion as a candidate for possible further investigation.

Marcus

The path I took began with the action of a neuron which fires when there is sufficient neural input from other neurons to exceed a threshold. So, the picture emerged that a neuron is a part of a network of neurons. I then stumbled upon the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) which constitute the smallest set of neural events and structures sufficient for a given conscious percept or explicit memory. I then spliced together NCC and self-organizing systems and came across an NIH paper by Sergey B. Yurchenko: "From the origin to the stream of consciousness and its neural correlates". The abstract is very interesting and includes, with other ideas, self-organization. Self-organizing systems or emergent phenomena is an idea of which I heard shortly after graduation. It is allied to deterministic chaos theory and fractals.

These ideas are very interesting with the notion of consciousness emerging from the actions of a swarm of neurons. The reasonings are physiological except for the idea of emergence.

Bill