I have an idea...

I have an idea...

On the MURG newsgroup today, Eugene Leitl linked to this article, which prompted this question:

Could the rate of refreshment be considered Time, or give illusion of time-space? Anna

As a perception (rather than "illusion") of the passage of time, absolutely. It is a nonreversible process, which is why the proteins need to be refreshed almost continuously - everything in the brain, in fact, at all levels, each structure at its own rate.

And everything changes over time in this forming and re-forming of brain structure: this explains why we learn at all. Lasting memories are a set of interrelated connections that remain a long time, reforming many many times.

There is thus no real "center" for long-term memories; they are present throughout the brain, as a set of connections. Think about a red ball: every synapse in your mind associated with "red ball" just fired; twice actually, a few seconds apart. Your memory, those neurons and their structure and connections associated with those two words was just triggered, along with all the other neurons that happen to be firing right now. The long-term memory is whatever change which will persist in the structure of your brain as a result of the event of "thinking of a red ball".

"Dreaming" isn't something one does at night - it happens all the time, but is suppressed by our exposure to stimuli from the real world. Only when daydreaming, sleeping, or in an altered state of consciousness does this process take a higher profile; it may be as simple as a synapse that lasts for only one or two refresh cycles before being redirected, a symptom of background noise, an extremely-short-term memory.

And it is that stimuli, and all the associated activity of the routing system and waves of electrical activity throughout the brain as time passes, that allows extremely short term memories to either be repeated in the next cycle and become a short term memory, or change direction.

So then... the development of "ideas" is the process by which extremely short term memories become short- term, and "thought" is the process by which short-term become long-term, and "knowledge" is the collected store of the long-term memories in toto, and "consciousness" is the state in which ideas and thought occur. I guess that makes "language facility" a routing system, and "wisdom" the application of the process of thought to long term memory, a feedback structure within the brain that grows over time as short-term memories trigger long-term memories. The various proteins and hormones being produced by the brain at any one moment, and their relative concentrations, determine one's mood and emotions; they modify and regulate the way in which short term memories and, for strong emotions, long term memories are formed. A sense of identity, of Self, follows naturally from all this structure interacting with the real world through the sensory and motor neurons: it amounts to the sum total of the brain and all its activity. Individuality is supplied by the unique genetic code of every person (which sets up the methods that form the initial structures and that forms future structures) along with the unique perspective of the particular body to which the brain is connected and the unique resulting set of long term memories and feedback structures.

yikes. mind uploading and strong AI just got a whole lot harder or a whole lot easier....

Ed