On the nature of conscious things 

Summary

Introduction

• Present when we are awake and alert sustains wakefulness.  It extends from the brain stem through the midbrain to the thalamus and cortex.  It relays sensory stimuli from the sensory systems and distributes them diffusely to the cerebral cortex.  It includes von Economo's wakefulness center in the upper brain stem, without which coma results. 
  , allowing us to summon prior and present knowledge of the world. 
  
• Perceptions of our proximate environment are observed from our perspective, and we are the subject.  These experiences are integrated into a multi-dimensional view oriented in
  Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  time and space.  The objects is a collection of: happenings, occurrences and processes; including emergent entities, as required by relativity, explains Rovelli.  But natural selection has improved our fitness by representing this perception, in our minds, as an unchanging thing, as explained by Pinker.  Dehaene explains the object modeling and construction process within the unconscious and conscious brain. 
  appear properly formed, clear, and inspectable.  And there is no homunculus needed. 
  
• As adults, we assume of mind is the capability of adults, and even young children, to see that others think and perceive the world differently to them.  It typically develops around age three to four.  It supports the child's development of empathy.  It is associated with the DMPFC, precuneus, superior temporal sulcus & temporoparietal junction.  Subsequently more capabilities appear including: Understanding a second person's theory of mind about a third person, Perspectives and Irony. 
  others will perceive from their perspective.  
• We experience aspects of our own
  This page reviews the implications of reproduction initially generating a single child cell.  The mechanism and resulting strategic options are discussed. 
  
  organism: feelings are subjective models: sad, glad, mad, scared, surprised, and compassionate; of the organism and its proximate environment, including ratings of situations signalled by broadly distributed chemicals and neural circuits.  These feelings become highly salient inputs, evolutionarily associated, to higher level emotions encoded in neural circuits: amygdala, and insula.  Deacon shows James' conception of feeling can build sentience.  Damasio, similarly, asserts feelings reveal to the conscious mind the subjective status of life: good, bad, in between; within a higher organism.  They especially indicate the affective situation within the old interior world of the viscera located in the abdomen, thorax and thick of the skin - so smiling makes one feel happy; but augmented with the reports from the situation of the new interior world of voluntary muscles.  Repeated experiences build intermediate narratives, in the mind, which reduce the salience.  Damasio concludes feelings relate closely and consistently with homeostasis, acting as its mental deputies once organisms developed 'nervous systems' about 600 million years ago, and building on the precursor regulatory devices supplied by evolution to social insects and prokaryotes and leveraging analogous dynamic constraints.  Damasio suggests feelings contribute to the development of culture:
  • As motives for intellectual creation: prompting detection and diagnosis of homeostatic deficiencies, identifying desirable states worthy of creative effort.
    
  • As monitors of the success and failure of cultural instruments and practices
  • As participants in the negotiation of adjustments required by the cultural process over time 
  bring in affect including qualia are the direct qualities of percepts according to Haikonen.  He argues they do not require interpretation or any evocation of meaning.  Colors are colors and pain is pain.  The human visual hierarchy seems at odds with this interpretation with meaning being associated with letters by signalling from the letterbox to the frontal lobes and used in the feedback flows that identify and prime morphemes.  Damasio suggests qualia are a type of provoked feeling, triggered by stimuli like taste or vision, which results in an emotive response. 
  and body relative emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  .  

• How CAS learn about themselves and their environment
  
• How perception works in different CAS
• What additional complications occur with large networks of cooperating agents? 
  
• The implications of emergent constraints on how we can represent perceptions. 
  
• What are the differences between evolved intelligence enables the achievement of goals in the face of obstacles.  The goals are sub-goals of genes' survival and reproduction and include:
  • Obtaining and eating food
  • Sex
    
  • Finding and maintaining shelter
    
  • Fighting for resources - in the preferred hunter gatherer environment loss of resources was critical while possession was often transient. 
    
  • Understanding the proximate environment
    
  • Securing the cooperation of others 
  and engineered intelligence? 
  

The problem of learning about ourselves and our local environment

• Over
  Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  time evolution can build into the genes details of a self organized physical network of cellular agents.  This genetic representation is modeled by Hofstadter & Mitchell with the Copycat
  This page describes the Copycat Slipnet. 
  The goal of the Slipnet is reviewed. 
  Smiley's specialized use of the Slipnet is introduced. 
  The initial Slipnet network used by the 'Merge Streams' and 'Virtual Robot' agent-based applications is setup in initchemistry and is included. 
  The Slipnet infrastructure and initialization functions are included. 
  
  Slipnet. 
• Each time an organism develops its 'Slipnet' will indirectly encounter signals from the sensory neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  associated with its network.  The position of these signal flows will indicate the types of percepts are internal appearences of the external world and the body according to Haikonen.  RSS views them as evolved models that are:
  
  • Associated schematically with the signals generated in response to epi-phenomena detected by sensory receptors and
    
  • Acted on by emergent agents.  
  and will allow the organism to tailor a '
  This page describes the Copycat Workspace. 
  The specialized use of the Workspace by the adaptive web framework's (AWF) Smiley is discussed. 
  How text and XML are imported into the Smiley Workspace is described. 
  Telomeric aging of schematic structures is introduced. 
  The internal data structure used to represent the state of each workspace object is included. 
  The Workspace infrastructure functions are included. 
  
  Workspace' that represents its model of the local environment -- representations of its self-perceptions and its external environment. 
  
• The process will occur with massive parallelization by adaptation in evolutionary biology is a trait that increased the number of surviving offspring in an organism's ancestral lineage.  In Deacon's conception of evolution an adaptation is the realization of a set of constraints on candidate mechanisms, and so long as these constraints are maintained, other features are arbitrary. 
  of the cells of the organism based on the signals they have sent and received.  Neurons that do not build strong feedback networks will kill themselves as part of this developmental process, helping limit combinatorial interference and regain resources.  Other neurons that are associated with signals that are rich in this environment will remain and build models of the proximate situation.  Hofstadter & Mitchell's simplified equivalent of the cellular agent infrastructure is the
  This page describes the Copycat Coderack. 
  The details of the codelet architecture are described. 
  The specialized use of the Coderack by the adaptive web framework's (AWF) Smiley is discussed. 
  The codelet scheduling mechanism is discussed. 
  A variety of Smiley extensions to the Coderack are reviewed. 
  The Coderack infrastructure functions are included. 
  
  Coderack which RSS has extended to support
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  schematic
  Plans change in complex adaptive systems (CAS) due to the action of genetic operations such as mutation, splitting and recombination.  The nature of the operations is described. 
  
  operations. 

Modeling in the visual system

• Made with evolved neural structures that individually know only about representing some limited aspect of the object, such as a line segment.  The use of real world constraints, captured by natural selection, within the
  The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
  
  modeling infrastructure and the potential for combinatorial explosion when multiple sensory streams are integrated and constrained keeps the unconscious sensory pathways separated until attention is the mutli-faceted capability allowing access to consciousness.  It includes selective attention, vigilance, allocating attention, goal focus, and meta-awareness. 
  allows a small relevant subset to become the current focus.  
• Between their own position and the inputs they have received during the iterative process leading to
  Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for centuries.  Now it is finally being characterized scientifically.  That required a transformation of approach. 
  Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access. 
  In the book he outlines the limitations of previous psychological dogma.  Instead his use of subjective assessments opened the window to contrast totally unconscious brain activity with those including consciousness. 
  He describes the research methods.  He explains the contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to specific neural activity. 
  He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal workspace' to position all the experimental details into a whole. 
  He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and treatment of real world mental illnesses. 
  The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent consciousness research are outlined. 
  Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and operation introduce constraints which are discussed. 
  
  
  conscious access.  At this point the well-known '
  This page describes the Copycat Slipnet. 
  The goal of the Slipnet is reviewed. 
  Smiley's specialized use of the Slipnet is introduced. 
  The initial Slipnet network used by the 'Merge Streams' and 'Virtual Robot' agent-based applications is setup in initchemistry and is included. 
  The Slipnet infrastructure and initialization functions are included. 
  
  Slipnet' structure, the significant emotional are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  , or logical, entity, such as the amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
    
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
    
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
    
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
    
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
    
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
    
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
  for fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
  , is associated as the observer and 'we' can consciously view the subjective 'image'. 
  
• Initially observing Bill Clinton allows newly generated neurons in the hippocampus is a part of the medial temporal lobe of the brain involved in the temporary storage or coding of long-term episodic memory.  It includes the dentate gyrus.  Memory formation in the cells of the hippocampus uses the MAP kinase signalling network which is impacted by sleep deprivation.  The hippocampus dependent memory system is directly affected by cholinergic changes throughout the wake-sleep cycle.  Increased acetylcholine during REM sleep promotes information attained during wakefulness to be stored in the hippocampus by suppressing previous excitatory connections while facilitating encoding without interference from previously stored information.  During slow-wave sleep low levels of acetylcholine cause the release of the suppression and allow for spontaneous recovery of hippocampal neurons resulting in memory consolidation.  It was initially associated with memory formation by McGill University's Dr. Brenda Milner, via studies of 'HM' Henry Molaison, whose medial temporal lobes had been surgically destroyed leaving him unable to create new explicit memories.  The size of neurons' dendritic trees expands and contracts over a female rat's ovulatory cycle, with the peak in size and cognitive skills at the estrogen high point.  Adult neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus (3% of neurons are replaced each month) where the new neurons integrate into preexisting circuits.  It is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors explains Sapolsky.  Prolonged stress makes the hippocampus atrophy.  He notes the new neurons are essential for integrating new information into preexisting schemas -- learning that two things you thought were the same are actually different.  Specific cells within the hippocampus and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer's disease.  It directly signals area 25. 
  to be associated by position with axons, a long extension of a neuron which has a membrane constructed to support the uni-directional flow of action potential from the dendritic tree and cell body to the synaptic terminals.   from
  This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Small world and scale free networks are considered. 
  
  networks across the brain that are interested in aspects that apply to the ex-President.  The visual network supports processing of visual data into what and how.  To do this it has two distinct paths: The ventral path and the dorsal path. 
  has already transformed the low level aspects detected in the retina into activity in neural
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents representing objects: Faces is a region of the brain which supports advanced mechanisms of shape recognition and implements the early stages of reading.  Subliminal priming with words did not depend on the shape of the word.  The fusiform gyrus was able to process the abstract identity of a word without caring if it was upper or lower case.   While high up in the cortex it can operate below the level of conscious experience.  It contributes to social emotions with:
  
  • Its face area being more activated by faces with in-group skin color.  
  • It activating when shown pictures of cars in automobile aficionados. 
    
  • It activating when shown pictures of birds in birdwatchers; since it really recognizes examples of items from an individual's emotionally salient categories. 
    
  ; & emotions are low level fast unconscious agents distributed across the brain and body which associate, via the amygdala and rich club hubs, important environmental signals with encoded high speed sensors, and distributed programs of action to model: predict, prioritize guidance signals, select and respond effectively, coherently and rapidly to the initial signal.  The majority of emotion centered brain regions interface to the midbrain through the hypothalamus.  The cerebellum and basal ganglia support the integration of emotion and motor functions, rewarding rhythmic movement.  The most accessible signs of emotions are the hard to control and universal facial expressions.  Emotions provide prioritization for conscious access given that an animal has only one body, but possibly many cells, with which to achieve its highest level goals.  Because of this emotions clash with group goals and are disparaged by the powerful.  Evolutionary psychology argues evolution shaped human emotions during the long period of hunter-gatherer existence in the African savanna.  Human emotions are universal and include: Anger, Appreciation of natural beauty, Disgust, Fear, Gratitude, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Honor, Jealousy, Liking, Love, Rage, Romantic love, Lust for revenge, Passion, Sadness, Self-control, Shame, Sympathy, Surprise; and the sham emotions and distrust induced by reciprocal altruism. 
  : happiness is an emotion which functions to mobilize the mind to seek capabilities and resources that support Darwinian fitness.  Today happiness is associated with Epicurean ideas that were rediscovered during the renaissance and promoted by Thomas Jefferson.  But natural selection has 'designed' happiness to support hunter-gatherer fitness in the African savanna.  It is assessed: Relative to other's situations, Based on small gains or losses relative to one's current situation; and so what makes us [un-]happy and our responses can seem a counter-productive treadmill.  For Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the savanna there were many ways for losses to undermine fitness and so losses still make us very unhappy.  Smoking, drinking and excessive eating were not significant and so don't make us unhappy even though they impact longevity.   with winning in the accumbens is a region of the basal forebrain (striatum) rostral to the preoptic area and immediately adjacent to the septum.  The nucleus accumbens was closely associated with the limbic system, mediates the impact of emotion and plays an important role in reinforcement.  If a rodent wins a fight on his home territory, there are long-lasting increases in levels of testosterone receptors enhancing pleasurable effects.  When prairie voles first mate, epi-genetic state changes are induced in the accumbens to support pair-bonding.  The accumbens projects to brain regions associated with movement.  The major pathways of dopaminergic neurons begin in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental area.  The amygdala projects back to the accumbens.  The tegmentostriatal system begins in the ventral tegmental area and projects to the nucleus accumbens.  The nucleus accumbens includes high levels of D1, D2 and D3 dopamine receptors located on the spine & shafts of dendrites of excitatory cells reduce the transfer of excitation from the dendrites to the cell bodies, so only especially strong excitatory inputs get through to the cell body to elicit excitation.  It also has D4 dopamine receptors which are highly variable.  The accumbens responds differently to rewards depending on maturity: In juveniles all reward levels result in the same response activity level, During adolescence the accumbens responds to small rewards negatively, and large rewards hugely, In adults the rewards result in measured scaled positive responses.  Chronic stress depletes dopamine from the nucleus accumbens biasing humans towards depression.  , passion is a doomsday machine emotion, providing the participant in a strategic conflict with a constraint on rational arguments. 
  , disgust is a universal human emotion.  Pinker notes it has its own facial expression and is codified in food taboos.  The mind must be associated with the proximate environment and parents minimize the risk for their omnivorous children by teaching them what foods to eat and what to avoid.  The children's minds are initially receptive to trying all foods but their brains subsequently lock in on the foods they have experienced.  These parental choices are affected by schematic influence on what has been beneficial.  Adolescent's brain developments undermine these constraints enabling intergroup transfers.  Disgust is modulated by the insula cortex which projects signals to the amygdala.  Adult humans merge moral and physical disgust enabling metaphorical out grouping. 
  in the insula is part of the cerebral cortex folded deep within the lateral sulcus.  It includes: anterior, posterior insula; and is overlaid by the operculum.  Kandel notes the anterior insula is where feelings are calibrated by evaluating and integrating the importance of the stimuli.  It directly signals area 25.  LeDoux showed there are two routes for signals of feelings and emotions to the amygdala: a fast unconscious one and a slow one that involves the anterior insula.  So the insula is assumed to participate in consciousness where it has been linked to emotion, salience & body homeostasis functions:
  
  • Perception,
    
  • Motor control: Hand-&-eye motor movement, Swallowing, Gastric motility, Speech articulation;
    
  • Self-awareness,
    
  • Inter-personal experiences: Disgust at smells, contamination & mutilation which generate visceral responses, that are projected to the amygdala; binding physical and moral aspects of purity (Macbeth effect)
  • Suffering of others can be projected by the insula to the amygdala and made increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
    
  • Homeostatic regulation of the sympathetic network, parasympathetic network, and immune system.  Heart rate and sweat gland activity are monitored.   When the amygdala signals concern, the insula prepares the body for action, increasing blood flow to the muscles etc.
    
  , fear is an emotion which prepares the body for time sensitive action: Blood is sent to the muscles from the gut and skin, Adrenalin is released stimulating: Fuel to be released from the liver, Blood is encouraged to clot, and Face is wide-eyed and fearful.  The short-term high priority goal, experienced as a sense of urgency, is to flee, fight or deflect the danger.  There are both 'innate' - really high priority learning - which are mediated by the central amygdala and learned fears which are mediated by the BLA which learns to fear a stimulus and then signals the central amygdala.  Tara Brach notes we experience fear as a painfully constricted throat, chest and belly, and racing heart.  The mind can build stories of the future which include fearful situations making us anxious about current ideas and actions that we associate with the potential future scenario.  And it can associate traumatic events from early childhood with our being at fault.  Consequent assumptions of our being unworthy can result in shame and fear of losing friendships.  The mechanism for human fear was significantly evolved to protect us in the African savanna.  This does not align perfectly with our needs in current environments: U.S. Grant was unusually un-afraid of the noise or risk of guns and trusted his horses' judgment, which mostly benefited his agency as a modern soldier. 
  in the amygdala contains > 12 distinct areas: Central, Lateral.  It receives simple signals from the lower parts of the brain: pain from the PAG; and abstract complex information from the highest areas: Disgust, heart rate, and suffering from the insula cortex, allowing it to orchestrate emotion.  It connects strongly to attention focusing networks.  It sends signals to almost every other part of the brain, including to the decision making circuitry of the frontal lobes.  It has high levels of D(1) dopamine receptors.  During extreme fear the amygdala drives the hippocampus into fear learning.  It outputs directly to subcortical reflexive motor pathways when speed is required.  Its central nucleus projects to the BNST.  It signals the locus ceruleus.  It directly signals area 25.  The amygdala:
  
  • Promotes aggression.  Stimulating the amygdala promotes rage.  It converts anger into aggression and when impaired it impacts the ability to detect angry facial expressions.  
  • Participates in disgust
  • Perceives fear promoting stimuli, focusing our attention on these.  In PTSD sufferers the Amygdala overreacts to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow to calm down and the amygdala expands in size over a period of months.  Fear is processed by the lateral nucleus which serves as the input from various senses, and the central nucleus which outputs to the brain stem (central grey - freezing, lateral hypothalamus - blood pressure, activates paraventricular hypothalamus => crf -> hormone adjustments). 
    
  • Has lots of receptors for and is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids.  Stress inhibits the GABA interneurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) allowing the excitatory glutamate releasing neurons to excite more. 
    
  • Is sensitive to unsettling/uncertain social situations where it promotes anxiety and makes us distracted.  It is also interested in uncertain but potentially painful situations.  The amygdala contributes to social and emotional decision making where the BLA supports rejecting an unacceptable offer, as allowed in the Ultimatum Game, by injecting implicit mistrust and vigilance, generating an anger driven rejection that is used as punishment.  The amygdala is very rapidly excited by subliminal signals from the thalamus of outgroup skin color.  The amygdala subsequently tips social emotions against outgroups unless restrained by the frontal lobe or influenced by subliminal priming to prioritize inclusion.  The fast path from the thalamus rapidly but inaccurately signals its identified a weapon. 
    
  • Sees suffering of others as increasingly salient with loving-kindness meditation practice, Goleman & Davidson explain. 
    
  • Promotes male, but not female, sexual motivation when it is an uncertain potential pleasure. 
    
  • Responds to the longing for uncertain potential pleasures and fear that the reward will not be worth it if it happens.  The amygdala turns off during orgasm. 
    
  • Uses but is not directly involved in vision.  
  , romantic love is a passionate emotion reflecting the risky agreement to commit resources to the long term activity of raising children. The genes ensure that once a person has chosen, the critical-thinking pathways shut down.  That is especially necessary for women to ignore the uncertainty - they become more passionately in love than men.  For both partners initial separations remove the oxytocin (and vasopressin in men) and dopamine rewards from touching & hugging, generating withdrawal driving the couple closer.  The same circuits, driven again by oxytocin signalling, encourage a mother to fall in love with her newborn baby. 
  (pairing is an increase in the strength of relationship between parents and parents and children in some species: prairie voles, bonobos - not monogamous, and humans.  NIMH's Thomas Insel, Emory's Larry Young & Illinois's Sue Carter's research highlighted prairie voles, where pair-bonding is enabled by a genetic difference from montane voles in the operon controlling generation of the vasopressin receptor.  Oxytocin is associated with pair bonding.  There are: Higher levels of receptors in males (vasopressin) having lots of sex and in females (oxytocin) performing grooming & physical contact, Sex releases oxytocin in the nucleus accumbens of female prairie voles.  Such pair-bonded males are less interested in other females. Insel, Young & Carter engineered: (1) Male mice brains to express the prairie vole version of the vasopressin receptor in their brains resulting in grooming and huddling with familiar females.  (2) Male montane vole brains to add vasopressin receptors to the nucleus accumbens resulting in their being more socially affiliative with individual females.  ) in the accumbens; if they are evoked for this specific individual by what they 'see'. 
  

Perception, fast and slow

• The
  This page discusses the interdependence of perception and representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Hofstadter and Mitchell's research with Copycat is reviewed.  The bridging of a node from a network of 'well known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and abstractly. 
  
  perception and representation mechanism must be able to respond as fast as a competitor can act.  Eukaryotes is a relatively large multi-component cell type.  It initially emerged from prokaryotic archaea subsuming eubacteria, from which single and multi-celled plants, multi celled fungi, including single-cell variant yeast, drips, protozoa and metazoa, including humans, are constructed.  A eukaryotic cell contains modules including a nucleus and production functions such as chloroplasts and mitochondria. 
  can support this need for speed through massive parallelism based on connected networks of neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  .  But it must also be able to learn about new situations.  Evolution has provided a mechanism which uses repetition -- practice -- to build associations within the fast thinking areas of the brain stem includes: medulla, raphe, pons, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area, pituitary, superior colliculi, cerebellum, thalamus (LGN), basal ganglia including caudate nucleus and striatum; amygdala, hypothalamus, nucleus accumbens; that coordinate muscle operation.   And for muscle related operations that have been evolutionarily useful
  Representing state in emergent entities is essential but difficult.  Various structures are used to enhance the rate and scope of state transitions.  Examples are discussed. 
  
  specialized fast circuits have been added to the tool set. 
• The ability to slowly and repetitively practice allows the building of associations between the brain stem includes: medulla, raphe, pons, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area, pituitary, superior colliculi, cerebellum, thalamus (LGN), basal ganglia including caudate nucleus and striatum; amygdala, hypothalamus, nucleus accumbens; and the high-level representations that must be responded to.  The indirect nature of these associations allows novel configurations and sequences of details to be associated with the fast sensor and motor regions.  After practice the slow processes disengage and an additional fast operation has been added to the memetic toolbox.  
• Meditation includes a variety of practices with the contemplative goal of altering traits to free the subject of suffering.  Goleman & Davidson see three distinct levels of practice: beginner, long term meditator, Yogi; with radically different levels of commitment.  Beginners typically do a limited-time-investment mindfulness meditation such as MBSR.  Long term meditators typically practice vipassana meditation.  Yogis practice Tibetan meditations Dzogchen and Mahamudra, which start like vipassana but in a non-dual stance developing a more subtle meta-awareness.  Richard Davidson, Cortland Dahl and Antoine Lutz developed a typology of the practices:
  • Attentional - train aspects of attention. 
    
  • Constructive - cultivate virtuous qualities: loving-kindness;
    
  • Destructive - use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience.  These include non-dual approaches where ordinary cognition no longer dominates. 
    
  leverages practice to strengthen workspace network structures and alter traits reflect changes to four neural pathways that Goleman & Davidson identify in Altered Traits.  These networks support: stress reactions - induced experimentally with the TSST, compassion and empathy, attention, sense of self; and are altered by different types of meditation.  An altered state refers to changes that occur only during meditation.  All meditation has the contemplative goal of altered traits leading to being free of suffering by revealing our Bhudda nature.  An altered trait indicates that the practice of meditation has tranformed the brain so the induced changes are seen before beginning to meditate.  Goleman & Davidson developed a robust behavioral measure for attention: the ability to maintain focus while counting breaths.  The test requires pressing a keyboard's down arrow on each outbreath except on the nineth when a different key is pressed and counting restarts at one.  The objective metric is the difference between the subjective count and the actual number of breaths taken.  . 
  
• It is unlikely that new low level perceptual neurons, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  are being deployed.  Indeed consciousness helps avoid a combinatorial explosion of conjunctions between sensory streams.  But certainly during development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  it is possible for neuronal recycling is Stanislas Dehaene's hypothesis that human brain architecture obeys strong genetic constraints, but some circuits have evolved to tolerate some variability.  Part of the visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes in the environment.  A range of brain circuits, defined by genes, provides "pre-representations" that our brains can compare to future developments in its environment.  During brain development, learning mechanisms select which pre-representations are best adapted to a given situation.  Within an otherwise well-structured brain, visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.  to be used to leverage current genetically built puzzle pieces in novel ways.  In humans adolescence in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  allows social regrouping to occur. 
  
• Cats constrained during their neuron, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  network's development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  phase from ever seeing horizontal lines cannot represent them when they are perceived later in life. 
  

• Modulatory neurons allow for plan-ahead. 
  
• Memory neurons is a part of the medial temporal lobe of the brain involved in the temporary storage or coding of long-term episodic memory.  It includes the dentate gyrus.  Memory formation in the cells of the hippocampus uses the MAP kinase signalling network which is impacted by sleep deprivation.  The hippocampus dependent memory system is directly affected by cholinergic changes throughout the wake-sleep cycle.  Increased acetylcholine during REM sleep promotes information attained during wakefulness to be stored in the hippocampus by suppressing previous excitatory connections while facilitating encoding without interference from previously stored information.  During slow-wave sleep low levels of acetylcholine cause the release of the suppression and allow for spontaneous recovery of hippocampal neurons resulting in memory consolidation.  It was initially associated with memory formation by McGill University's Dr. Brenda Milner, via studies of 'HM' Henry Molaison, whose medial temporal lobes had been surgically destroyed leaving him unable to create new explicit memories.  The size of neurons' dendritic trees expands and contracts over a female rat's ovulatory cycle, with the peak in size and cognitive skills at the estrogen high point.  Adult neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus (3% of neurons are replaced each month) where the new neurons integrate into preexisting circuits.  It is enhanced by learning, exercise, estrogen, antidepressants, environmental enrichment, and brain injury and inhibited by various stressors explains Sapolsky.  Prolonged stress makes the hippocampus atrophy.  He notes the new neurons are essential for integrating new information into preexisting schemas -- learning that two things you thought were the same are actually different.  Specific cells within the hippocampus and its gateway, the entorhinal cortex, are compromised by Alzheimer's disease.  It directly signals area 25. 
  allow for
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  memetic structures to be encoded by the neuron network which can be used as
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  schematic state analogously to epigenetic updates represent state surfaces within cells and eggs which can be operationally modified so as to provide a heritable structure.  DNA, histones and other stable structures provide surfaces where these states may be setup.  Egg carriers are in a particularly powerful position to induce epi-genetic changes.  Sapolsky notes [childhood] events which persistently alter brain structure and behavior via epi-genetic mechanisms including: pair-bonding in prairie voles, as they first mate, is supported by changes in oxytocin & vasopressin receptor gene regulation in the nucleus accumbens. 
  to the histones, in the eukaryotic cell are enzymes which bind to the DNA polymers supporting them and controlling their interactions with other enzymes.  In particular sets of DNA operons can be enabled or disabled by histone induced changes in the DNA polymers shape.  In AWF the histone control of DNA has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation of operon controlled programmed case control.   and DNA (DNA), a polymer composed of a chain of deoxy ribose sugars with purine or pyrimidine side chains.  DNA naturally forms into helical pairs with the side chains stacked in the center of the helix.  It is a natural form of schematic string.  The purines and pyrimidines couple so that AT and GC pairs make up the stackable items.  A code of triplets of base pairs (enabling 64 separate items to be named) has evolved which now redundantly represents each of the 20 amino-acids that are deployed into proteins, along with triplets representing the termination sequence.  Chemical modifications and histone binding (chromatin) allow cells to represent state directly on the DNA schema.  To cope with inconsistencies in the cell wide state second messenger and evolved amplification strategies are used. 
  .  But instead of proteins being generated as the active aspect of genetic agency, deployment of practiced episodic strategies into unconscious structures associated with the cerebellum is involved with the efficiency of fine movement. It modulates the force and range of motion and is involved in motor coordination and the learning of motor skills.  Damage to the cerebellum impairs standing, walking, or performance of coordinated movements. A virtuoso pianist or other performing musician depends on their cerebellum.  The cerebellum receives visual, auditory, vestibular, and somatosensory information.  It also receives information about individual muscular movements being directed by the brain.  The cerebellum integrates this information and modifies the motor outflow, exerting a coordinating and smoothing effect on the movements.  However, patients born without a cerebellum have survived reasonably well.  The cerebellum is part of the implicit learning mechanism.  It is required for the rabbit eye-blink to be classically conditioned to respond to a sound, and puff of air (threat to eye).  It integrates the sound and puff and outputs the response to the motor area (blink).  Levitin has shown the cerebellum participates in aspects of emotion and auditory processing.  He found the cerebellum and basal ganglia were active throughout a session listening to music, modeling the beat, rewarding a match between the internal and external rhythm and integrating movement. And he notes the cerebellum providing Williams syndrome sufferers with their capability to play music.   , spine and muscle groups occurs where fast activity can be leveraged. 
  
• Existence of persistent memetic structures allows evolution to act.  Teaching of aural and written records both supports this capability. 
  

Slow conscious processes

No explanatory gap found

• Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.  This page reviews how these events become signals associated with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  CAS signals emerge from the Darwinian information model.  Signals can indicate decision summaries and level of uncertainty. 
  
  Sensors,
  
• Motor infrastructure and the
  
• Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  Genetic
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory is positioned relative to the natural sciences.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. 
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  CAS which is present and highly differentiated in each live neuron, specialized eukaryotic cells include channels which control flows of sodium and potassium ions across the massively extended cell membrane supporting an electro-chemical wave which is then converted into an outgoing chemical signal transmission from synapses which target nearby neuron or muscle cell receptors.  Neurons are supported by glial cells.  Neurons include a:
  • Receptive element - dendrites
    
  • Transmitting element - axon and synaptic terminals.  The axon may be myelinated, focusing the signals through synaptic transmission, or unmyelinated - where crosstalk is leveraged. 
  • Highly variable DNA schema using transposons. 
    
  . 
  

Amazon advancing

• A physical supply process with human operations, and or robots.  This is integrated with
  
• Adaptive models about what customers' desire and are purchasing.  They use these computer based models to generate personal
  
• Signal based offers to their customers.  They also have 
  
• Echo inside their customers' homes providing additional feedback and encouraging voice based enhanced intelligence services that can run as
  
• Amazon web services.  
• A platform is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents. 
  enabling a powerful market share based business model. 
  

• No mutation capture mechanism associated with business style reorganization and
  
• No designer or strategist involved in the cellular processes. 
  This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  Extended phenotypic alignment can act on societal
  Plans emerge in complex adaptive systems (CAS) to provide the instructions that agents use to perform actions.  The component architecture and structure of the plans is reviewed. 
  
  memetic structures that alter the chance of survival within the human gene pool.  But the phenotypic expression of genes as neural circuits, a network of interconnected neurons which perform signalling, modeling and control functions.  In Cajal's basic neural circuits the signalling is unidirectional.  He identified three classes of neurons in the circuits:
  • Sensory, Interneurons, Motor; which are biochemically distinct and suffer different disease states. 
    
  is still directly governed by Darwinian evolution. 

Some acknowledgements

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