M. S. Gazzaniga, "The Consciousness Instinct" 에서

 

 

 

 

Michael S. Gazzaniga, "The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling

The mystery Of How The Brain Makes The Mind" (2018)

 

 

Pattee, who has been a keen observer of human thought,

feels that philosophers have approached the mind/brain divide

from the wrong end of evolution. (p 176)

 

Howard Pattee doesn't concern himself with the gap between

the material brain and the immaterial mind.... The gap between

living and non-living is at the root of the gap between the mind

and the brain and offers a framework for addressing

the mind/brain problem.

 

Pattee argues that living matter is distinguished from

non-living matter by its ability to replicate and

to evolve over the course of time.

 

Life did not just make more life. Life could increase in complexity;

it could evolve.... He[Von Neumann] concluded that it needed

a symbolic self-description, a genotype, a physical structure

independent of the structure it was describing, the phenotype.

 

He correctly predicted how cells actually replicate before

Watson and Crick did.... He did not address the physical

requirements for implementing his logic....

Pattee took up the challenge.

 

There must be a physical manifestation of von Neumann's

symbols. What Pattee calls the physics of symbols produces

certain problems.... Any living thing that "records" information

is introducing a form of subjectivity into the system.

 

The second problem is the relationship between the genotype

and the phenotype. For example, when we consider DNA, the

genotype is the DNA sequence that contains instructions for the

living organism. The phenotype is the observable characteristics

of an organism, such as its anatomy, biochemistry,

physiology, and behavior. The genotype interacts

with the environment to produce the phenotype.

 

For one, the genotype is non-dynamic ... on the other hand,

the phenotype ... is dynamic and uses energy.

 

[I]t was from the control interface between these two layers

that the epistemic cut [the unavoidable conceptual separation

of the symbolic record of an event and the event itself] arose.

 

Pattee extended von Neumann's logic by contending that

the symbol themselves, which make up instructions (the

hereditary record), must have a material structure and that

the material structure, during the phenotype construction

process (the building of the new automaton), constrains

the process in a way that follows newton's laws.

 

In one life, symbols are made of physical material (DNA is ...)

that follows Newton's laws.... However, in the other life,

as repositories of information, the symbols ignore these laws.

 

The implication is that the gap between subjective conscious

experience and the objective neural firings of our physical

brains, those two modes of descriptions, may be bridged

by a similar set of processes,, and it could even be

possible that they are occurring inside cells. (p 194)

 

[E]ach mental event is managed by brain modules that

possess the capacity to make us conscious of the results

of their processing. The results bubble up from various

modules like bubbles in a boiling pot of water. Bubble after

bubble, each the end result of a module's or a group of

modules' processing, pops up and bursts forth for a moment,

only to be replaced by others in a constant dynamic motion.

 

Rebecca Saxe, at MIT. has discovered ... that there is a

special human brain hardware in the right half brain that

appears specialized for determining what the

intentions of another person might be.

 

[T]he left brain, which benefits from modules that

enable abstract thinking, verbal coding, and much more,

does not have the module to take into account

the intentions of others. (p 212)

 

In the end, we must realize that consciousness is an

instinct. Consciousness is part of organismic life.

We never have to learn how to produce it or

how to utilize it. (p 237)