Consciousness

11/27/2013
Behaviors are sequences of outputs of nervous system. Behaviors are generated in response to perceptions. Does consciousness direct behavior or is consciousness a reflection of behavior after the fact or is it a combination of the two? Suppose all or some of the time consciousness directs behavior. Implication is that consciousness decides behavior in response to the perceived world. So consciousness reads the sensory inputs, memories, and inputs from mental simulations of various possibilities in the real world for each of the possible action. And then it decides on the behavior that is a best fit for the desired result. Desired result has to be predetermined as a goal. Goals are needed to direct behavior. We experience the drive to reach goals as desire. In every step of the way, feeling is experienced of sensory and neurological inputs. It is feelings - feel food, rights, pleasant, fear, anger, irritation etc..  that guide us toward our goals. It is also feeling that makes us set goals. eg. I want a good job goal. To come to this goal, I simulate life with a good job and life with out one. The simulations generate information and we can feel the consequences in simulated feelings. We sense a feeling of the would be future in our imagination. Now, if it feels good, we set the goal as something we want to accomplish in the real world.
  Suppose consciousness directs behavior. This can be possible if consciousness is a state of mind that is always simulating a model of the world and integrating information coming through senses. The state of mind also uses information from memory and then generates behavior so as to move closer to goals. Drives to do anything is experienced as a desire for or against. That feeling keeps guiding actions. Now the big problem is how is brain able to produce consciousness or how does it feel any thing. If we can solve that problem, then synthesizing consciousness in machines can be worked on. An example - think of a robot that can feel hungry when it is battery needs charging. It then proceeds to a power outlet and charges itself.  Artificial Intelligence is being used to implement such automatic machines. Such machines can perform as programmed. But they do not have a desire to produce any particular behavior because they do not feel. If they could feel, then they will start behaving as animals rather than machines. If we can produce feeling in a machine, then self awareness will be possible. Self awareness is a feeling of one's self being apart from the world around. Self aware beings model the world around them with themselves being apart from it but inside this world.

Letting reason intercept emotion

11/25/13
Brain has physiological (breathing, digesting food etc), emotional (eg. urge to win an argument even when we are wrong) and rational (eg. let me not spend my last bit of money on booze) functions. In the evolutionary context, recognizing harmless events as threats even at the cost of erring favoured survival more so than erring by dismissing real threats. So, we were naturally selected to latch on to negative perceptions - for example we remember unpleasant experiences more frequently than positive experiences. We can alert our brains when we feel a negative emotion such as anger, frustration, fear, avarice etc.. by naming the emotion we feel precisely without any judgement (eg. I am jealous that a coworker found a better job). Expressing the feeling in language brings the higher functions of the brain (language, reason etc. )to be stimulated by the experience. Language is handled by that part of the brain which also provides for rational thinking. The same can also be done in case of postive emotions, but it is more important to regulate our selves under the spell of negative emotions (eg. car driven badly by a fellow road user). By alerting our selves to the negative emotion we experience, we give the logical brain to come up with responses that are more effective in the real world.