Got caught up in a conversation that I normally avoid like the plague, whether or not it’s possible to replicate human “consciousness” in human created systems (that aren’t biological in origin). An interesting though arose, since mechanics necessary to instantiate system level control are such a tiny percentage of total nervous system size, instead of replicating an entire brain we can replicate only the necessary structures to instantiate “sense of self” and let brains train themselves back up.
I think I’ve been hung up on the philosophical undertones of this question and missed some interesting practical ones. This would definitely be an amazing thing to experiment with as it would provide strong guidance toward how much of our responses to things are innate and how much is modifiable.
Do we have multiple discrete points which are necessary to sustain consciousness e.g. globes AND olives rather than one or the other? That you exist in the homeostatic balance between these two discrete systems? I find the concept interesting in comparison with “exhibitory/inhibitory balance” models of behavior and recent stimulation studies targeting various brain regions. Perhaps “feeling like you” is the phenomenological representation of balanced systems.
For some reason, all of this reminds me of Mike the headless chicken who demonstrated pretty convincingly exactly how little of our brains we actually need to control the rest of the body.
It’s kind of messed up that for the last few million years our species has been moving toward increasingly metabolically expensive devices to create granular internal information, all of which is getting completely wiped out in a single human generation by our creation which performs the same functions just faster and with far higher precision than most humans are capable of. Technology has lifted humans from the realm of the “natural” to something of our own construction at least a few generations ago. Might even be worth arguing that we’ve been something of our own creation at least since the dawn of agriculture, no later than introduction of metal smithing (and the dramatic effects that’s had on humanity).
Central Pattern Generators – I owe someone an apology about this one. Kind of a dumb headed mistake to make too. It’s weird that so much of our behavior is an auto generated pattern with small modifications. Lol. Which begs an interesting question… is “personality” an artifact of these CPGs?