One Mile Walk

Chasing Consciousness

         I have been reading about consciousness since the first Personal Computers came out in the late 1970s. I developed a crude operating system for an Intel 8008 chip project in 1973. There weren't many texts on operating system design back then, so I had to experiment and try new things on my own. The first thing I had to do was create a Bootstrap Loader. Enter five commands by hand, then let the chip read those commands and load the rest of the code, overwriting the manual commands as it went. My project was tiny by today's standards, only 1024 words of memory. It had to continuously reload the memory with all the separate parts of code to make the system do anything.
         I wondered if that was sort of what we humans do with our minds. Try a task, learn from our mistakes, redo the task, until something works. The original attempts at the tasks are long forgotten and overwritten with only the successes remembered.
         So I began reading about consciousness.
         Boy, was that not how our mind works. The books on consciousness quickly descend into the neurologic structure of the brain. Massively interconnected circuits from all parts of the brain. The memories don't get overwritten, but slightly modified with every recall. The result is referred to as qualia.
         Recently reading Roger Orpwood who says in his Information and the Origin of Qualia:
...there is another side to the importance of information in a neural context which seems to cause some concern, and that is the importance of semantic information. Semantic information is the meaning associated with physical information. It is the message that is embodied in, and communicated by, the physical information. In the brain a key aspect of semantic information is the message embodied in the firing of action potentials. It is the meaning conveyed by the massive inter-neuronal communication and processing of physical information. All the information communicated via action potentials throughout the nervous system clearly underlies the inner mental world in some way but the link between these purely physical events and the wealth of inner meanings that they underpin is bewildering. But this problem is at the heart of neuroscience. How does the physical information of neuronal firings relate to the semantic information of the meanings of our inner world?

         I think he is too stuck on the factuality of the semantic information in the qualia. There are errors, deceptions, and incomplete/partial physical information that underlie the generation of semantic information. Misjudgments lead to misjudgments, lies lead to lies (and if repeated enough to false truths). A large amount of randomness is baked into the qualia.
         The introduction of the concept of re-entrant feedback (he and many other authors have explored) is the process for self correcting unreliable semantic information.
         That is what we do when we change our values and beliefs. Something doesn't quite fit, so we embrace something new.
         That is not as blunt as my 8008 project. But that is how we learn and grow.
C.Don