Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
Consciousness in its basis has a collective activity to transform the surrounding world for collective needs.
As a result of the expansion of activities, the phenomenon of collective cognition of the surrounding world and the phenomenon of language appear, and as a result, the phenomenon of consciousness appears.
Space, time, numbers and logic are the laws of the surrounding world, which consciousness learns, i.e. discovers in the process of collective activity.
Therefore, rather not, even if we take into account that as a result of the discovery of these laws of the surrounding world, space, time, numbers and logic become the main tools of further knowledge, they remain primarily the subject of knowledge, and the basis of consciousness continues to be collective activity.
PS
Therefore, our smaller brothers have nervous activity, but it does not reach consciousness due to the absence of the phenomenon of cognition and the phenomenon of language. Our smaller brothers can use materials that they find in the world around them, but they cannot make tools, although they can transform the world around them in some way, but rather for their own rather than for collective needs.
Therefore, consciousness as a phenomenon manifests itself only in humans and it is based on collective activity.
And absolutely no one needs to agree, the Russian scientist Pavlov has already shown that the basis of nervous activity is the processes of inhibition and arousal,and the neural network that makes up our brain and the brain of our smaller brothers is only a mechanism for these processes.
At the same time, consciousness is a superstructure that defines additional mechanisms of inhibition and arousal, which are caused by collective needs, sometimes at odds with the needs of a particular individual.
Consciousness determines conscious, that is, collective behavior.
In my opinion, there is no generally accepted idea of what consciousness is. Philosophers and neuroscientists have not yet agreed.
But neuroscientists already know that there are structures in our brains that are responsible for orientation in space and the sense of number.
Grid neurons are responsible for orientation in space, they are not only in humans. The work of lattice neurons has been studied mainly in rats, but humans also have them.
Grid neurons contain an imaginary coordinate system in space. These neurons are activated when we move around. It doesn't necessarily reach our consciousness; there are a lot of things going on in the brain that don't reach our consciousness.
There are neurons responsible for the sense of number. They model something like a fuzzy number line and help us compare quantities. Even people from remote tribes who have not developed the concept of numbers can estimate that 100 objects is more than 50. The sense of number is built into the brain of not only people, but also some animals.
Stanislas Dean is a professional neuroscientist who came to neuroscience from mathematics. For the sense of number, see his book Number sense. How the mind creates mathematics.
http://cognitionandculture.net/wp-content/uploads/the-number-sense-how-the-mind-creates-mathematics.pdf
In the same book, Dean writes that our brain can not be called a logical machine.
Some of Dean's books have been translated into Russian:
Consciousness and the brain
How we learn
If” consciousness “” lives ” in the human brain, then it lives in the same space and time as the brain. The human brain displays the actual reality with the help of sensors built into the body-eyes, ears, nose, skin. And in order to navigate the surrounding reality, these sensors must receive adequate information and have it in the structures of the brain-therefore, the brain has an adequate model of the environment. If it is not Euclidean or Cartesian, then in any case, the order of relations of elements (closer-here-further, earlier-now-later) they should display. But all this can be said in relation to almost all living organisms. Is this an act of consciousness? Or is it before consciousness?
So what about numbers and logic? In materialistic terms, “consciousness” is a state of the brain, and all states of the brain can be counted by numbers. Then “logic” can be represented as a dynamic change in its state over time. And logic itself is the ability to purposefully change its structure. Otherwise, chance wins.
By” state ” of the brain, I mean not only its structure (the arrangement of its elements), but also the state of each of its structural elements (in the bioelectric sense) – as information bits.
Is there a place for consciousness here? There is, if you combine it with a purposeful structuring of brain activity based on the existing experience stored in the “memory” of the brain about past experiences. But the question remains – from what moment is consciousness “inhaled” into a person? When does he become a conscious person? After all, if an embryo consisting of one cell cannot have a state, but an adult person does-then there must be a moment when consciousness appears? There is some kind of qualitative leap in the phase state of the brain. According to the laws of mathematics, no continuous line between minus and plus can bypass the zero point-the point that decides whether to be or not to be (to consciousness).
This is a materialistic approach. There is an idealistic one – the soul and consciousness are given to a person from above and they can exist even without a person. Like the ether of ancient scientists.
Numbers and logic-probably not. After all, there are people who do not know the score, and even more so there are people who are not familiar with the rules of logical inference. Logic is too artificial a construct to be assumed pre-built into consciousness. But the perception of space and time is most likely innate. I don't remember about the time, but I think there were some experiments on babies about understanding space.
If we adhere to the understanding that our brain is a neural network, and our consciousness is the state and dynamics of this neural network, then it turns out that this is the purest mathematics of the values of synapse node excitation. Our consciousness can be completely digitized, so far theoretically.
True, now we do not have not only the technical means to remove the values of nodes, but also the computational means to reproduce such a huge neural network as the human brain.
But…. Do not deny some consciousness to our smaller brothers ). We can already make a worm neural network, and we will soon reach the full fly neural network….