What actually is consciousness

From here

This article is a kind of response to the article "What is consciousness" , in which two extremely important topics are touched upon - human consciousness and the potential possibility of digitizing it. Surely we all would like to live more than a hundred years, even if in the form of a code that imitates consciousness somewhere in the computer.

After reading the above article, you can be upset about the uncopyability of consciousness or the futility of copying. Well, in fact, everything is not so bad, and it seems that humanity still has a chance to become SkyNet itself.

Brain, consciousness and talamic nuclei

If you have not read the above article, I recommend reading it - I saw in it a more or less slender definition of consciousness with a manual, why things are like this. Briefly: consciousness is, as it were, the result of the brain's work at the moment (in the author's opinion), minus autonomous neural networks like the gastric one.

Alas, in the opinion of medicine and logic, everything is far from being so rosy. Consciousness is more like a personal slave in the hands of the brain, and it may be that it exists at all only as long as the brain likes the way it behaves. A kind of slave-manager. The proof is funny: the brain causes consciousness when it is time to respond to external stimuli, waking him up as a personal driver, and, as it seems to me, plunges into sleep, when it is time to respond to internal stimuli.

It seems that I understood what specifically in our brain, how, when and why it creates, “lulls”, wakes, and maybe even kills our consciousness. I would not be surprised if genetics once said that cancer or Alzheimer's syndrome is the mechanism [s] of the brain for a voluntary (in his opinion) end. But the stories are known cases from "crawling X time without the feet of the water food crawled" to ignoring the pain caused by burning in a yoga pose. It turns out that consciousness is potentially capable of giving the brain high-priority orders that are contrary to its opinion, but this behavior is observed only among desperate and mentally ill patients.

From which I conclude that the brain is subject to the orders of the consciousness — the slave-manager, because it clearly understands that, figuratively, the code of consciousness is more intelligent, fast and functional than the brain code, but there is a shell that feeds both of us, about whose work the consciousness does not know a damn thing, and if the consciousness is not put to sleep for a long time, then the shell begins to rust. The rusty shell is more dangerous than the stainless, so that in order to survive, the brain lulls the mind about once a day, apparently because it is more convenient because of the schedule of the home star.

But why does the shell rust if consciousness does not turn off every day? And then I remembered one interesting idea of ​​a certain comrade Pigarev (a lecture with a demonstration here ). His idea is that the brain, falling asleep, switches the routing of traffic from external nerve tissues oriented to the environment to the internal nervous tissues oriented to the inside of the carrier robot, but valves somewhere in the brain that are responsible for filtering data sometimes fail. For unknown reasons, passing traffic from the entrails to the input consciousness, thanks to which we see dreams.

And I thought: all this is very strange. After all, if a dream is an infa processed from the internal organs, then I can’t see in my dreams anything from the outer life. No people, no light, not even any familiar phenomena. Rather hallucinations on all ranges of sensations (we are analog computers). Comrade Pigarev explains this by saying that the signal mutates strongly, passing through all layers of censorship on the way to the cortex, but then it turns out that everything new and unknown must be compiled from the old information by me. Yes, we have associations and stereotypes, but according to his theory it turns out that the new picture should look to us, apparently, glued together from pieces of pictures that we have already seen. A vicious circle is formed, because then we would only remember the first picture, and see each other as an exact copy of the first. And so with everything - in any way.

Comrade Pigarev, undoubtedly, knows medicine better than me, so he was close to unraveling. But the clue, apparently, is this: the traffic gates really exist, only in a dream everything is fine with them, otherwise in dreams we would see not a sample of our own associative series, but stable many-hour indescribable hallucinatory roundabouts.

By changing the input to output, I assumed that it was not the brain that was disturbed by the drowsy mind (deliberately drowned!), But the mind was adapting to the drowsy, like a pupil to bright light or darkness. And I asked myself: what, then, prevents consciousness from being awake, when the brain is busy with the shell - falling asleep, getting to nowhere, but not losing ourselves - why can't we think adequately about ourselves during the entire sleep period?

It seems that the internal organs and consciousness use something that cannot be shared for two, and the brain, based on information about the state of both organs and consciousness, optimally distributes the schedule for using the non-shareable resource. I thought for a long time what can be used at one moment either only by consciousness or only by the shell, while being a necessity for both. Finally understood!

Battery. Kcal, all there vitamins, glucose, etc. In wakefulness, the bulk of energy is spent on consciousness activities, including the specific costs of actions taken on the orders of consciousness (like walking). At this time, the brain leaves the bodies of a certain reserve of energy, continuously moving the reserve bar here and there, depending on the state under control. So, by the end of the activity, sleep begins - organs make the request in the style: “it’s time for us, or our productivity will decrease and the shell will become more vulnerable,” and if consciousness doesn’t have higher priority tasks, then we turn off until consciousness is hungry. And just as the shell, during the day, a small reserve of energy is allocated for functioning, the same reserve is allocated to the sleeping consciousness.

You see, the structure of the mathematical model of the "neural network" is such that the persistence of the data is not peculiar to it, so I dare to assume that if the brain completely turns off the power supply to the consciousness, it will die, the same can be said about the shell. To prevent this from happening, the brain turns off all unnecessary things when it lulls the mind, so that in a dream you can easily eat a hundred cockroaches and enjoy it, or become a cockroach, without being surprised at all by the metamorphosis.

It seems that a dream is an attempt by a frightened consciousness to survive after losing access to some of its computing power and food. Judge for yourself: almost all people in a dream are limited, so to speak, to a single context. That is, there is a theme (event, location, dream, fear, etc.), some of the memories, plus some fresh bytecode of a weakened compiler, devoid of eyes, ears, mouth, skin, and a sense of balance. He is scared, he is sharply furious, and how do you think he is starting to do? At random, try to read the available info from what the brain left him for the night to prevent death. At random, he tries to process it somehow, because these are all the tools of life that are now available to consciousness. It is now too stupid and weak to understand at least something and it begins, apparently, to speak with itself in the language of images available to it, in order to find a way out of the situation. The next morning, the brain realizes that the traces of yesterday's neuropulses will soon die out strongly, and it is time to wake up the consciousness and give it rutovy access to still undampened tracks for their backup, categorization, censoring and evaluation. Maybe that's why people have long believed that the morning of the evening is wiser.

Well, I promised to tell you what exactly is responsible for such management management inside our heads, where this thing is and why it needs it.

Let's carefully follow the nerve impulse from one of the external stimuli. It appears as a result of a chemical reaction in the membrane of the nervous tissue. The circulation of potassium ions maintains a high potential between one and the other side of the neuron's membrane, if the membrane is at rest. The irritated membrane is reflexively modified in some way, perhaps for self-defense, reducing its own penetrability for potassium ions. As a result, potassium accumulated on one side of the membrane reaches a critical mass, which leads to membrane depolarization and ionic currents along the membrane along its surface. The energies of these currents grow due to the potential existing up to this point, which leads to repolarization and the transition of the potential into an electrostatic form known to us as a nerve impulse.

The first gates in the brain that meet these impulses almost from everywhere are 4 thalamic nuclei, each of which analyzes its own sensory field - visual, tactile, auditory and balance. In principle, it is not surprising that the sense of smell is served somewhere else - there is also a direct passage to the brain, plus breathing, plus the disposal of bravely warding against their antibodies (snot). It seems to me that the sense of smell is handled directly by the senor supreme mechanism, but I have not yet figured out what it is.

Next to the thalamic nuclei there is the hypothalamus, which is responsible for homeostasis. Wikipedia defines homeostasis, including as "the ability to dynamically maintain the constancy of its internal state in any open system . " The first line of ordering is to manage tasks and their priorities for the sake of maintaining stable viability while nature allows.

And that's what happens. I have not yet studied all the mechanisms of the brain and consciousness, but the facts speak for themselves - it seems that we are slaves of our pathetic meat bodies, possibly potentially programmed to self-destruct with our own brain.

In this case, somewhere there is a certain basic consciousness that can survive for a certain period of time (which is what is busy daily), almost not eating and not having access to the data center. The energy released by the dormant brain is enough to maintain and process only fragments of memories, and then - within the same context (a yard is dreaming, a person is dreaming, greens are dreaming, well, wait, figuratively speaking).

Given that such a consciousness has access to higher images (associations, realtime speech, friends in dreams), I dare to suggest that it is localized approximately where the highest images are processed - in the granular cortex of the second and fourth cortex. In animals, apparently, something similar to consciousness is located in a more primitive structure than the granular bark, if there is any, because the higher primates and, in my opinion, dolphins are the only known carriers of the granular bark.

Knowing where consciousness is localized, we can not only digitize it, imitating neural networks of the desired architecture (I don’t say it will be easy), but also scale it linearly, connecting additional resources and getting a linear increase in efficiency! Well, what does AI say now? Welcome to the brave new world.