5. Conscience 1

Lord Henry Wotton, the mischievous character in Wilde's only novel, once complained that there are too few mysteries left in the world to wonder about.
Yet some mysteries remain so elusive that few people wonder on or realize outside academia or philosophy quarters. Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn, believe that sentience (a quality of the conscious mind) cannot ever be understood, no matter how much progress is made by neuroscience in understanding the brain.
dissecting the "conscience" concept has let to three meanings:
1. Self -knowledge: I exist, here I am, I am, we die, I will die, clouds are white, the sea is blue (why?).
2. Access consciousness: is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behaviour. For instance, perceiving, instrospecting and remembering.
3. Sentience: Phenomenal awareness, raw sensations or feelings.

Access consciousness can obtain information from short term memory to long stored memories. Some philosophers even include Freud's unconscious concept in this category: "the unconscious is another form of storage" (although they will not say for what purpose or why it did evolve).

4. The computational theory of mind 2

1. Binary language and logic gates (neurons)? Ok but not enough.
2. Some neural networks. Ok but not enough.
3. Turing-like processes for neural networks? Ok but not enough.
4. Auto-associator networks (everything-connected-to-everything)? Ok but not enough.
5. Logical structuring of multiple layers of networks? Ok but not enough.

Getting closer.

Just look into how many disciplines we get out of this analysis:
1. Simbolism
2. Architecture
3. Programming
4. Engineering
5. Language
6. Logic
7. Organizational networks (hierarchical)

3. Paradigms at war

Before we continue this journey on understanding how the mind works, it is useful to revise the spectacular clash between some social and biological sciences.
Scientists seem to be fortressed in either two sides. Very simply put:
1. Biologists think of the mind as the result of structured organs. The architecture and the function of these structures is controlled by genes, the so called selfish replicators. Thus, brain functions have been shaped by evolution.
2. Social scientists believe in that biology and genes have a limited role in human psychology. Culture and ethic issues exist as a complex human output that cannot be explained by evolution. For instance, altruism, art or religion.

Molecules versus politics. Poloboro believes that the former go out of their way to stretch their theory to phenomenon that the really cannot explain. The latter, as Pinker says "have the tendency to buy an off-the-shelf moral package that would spare us from having to argue moral issues at all".

2. The computational theory of mind

The theory says that the basic processes that govern the mind work in a similar way to other systems: that is, information transfer, processing, storage and output.
It musn't be confused with they way computers work. Rather, computers do work according to the computational theory.
1. Boolean logic can make informational processing easier, faster and cheaper. It is interesting to quote that information processing in the brain seems to have a similar architecture, although far more complex, to that of Boolean logic.
The primary architecture of a Boolean system is made of decision gates (neurons?), and its language uses binary number combinations (0,1).
2. The mind software, given the amount of input received from the outside, could resemble a Turing machine. That is, logic circuits that follow the classic computational rules: "if-then". They are, of course, programmable.

What do neurons use as an information system? We don't know and for the sake of this discussion, we will keep it aside.
This discussion if about the systems and their origin:
What is it about gates and binary information that makes them so universal?

1. How the mind works by Steven Pinker

The first drawings of this blog will come from Steven Pinker's book "How the mind works", first published by Norton in 1997.
The big picture, as presented by Mr. Pinker, is that "the mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our evolutionary ancestors in their foraging way of life".
This is a very powerful definition, and by all means, a perfect abstract of what Mr. Pinker will say for many a chapter.
For all its strong scientific based, however, Steve Pinker resorts to philosophical questions that are, at least, out of his reach.