Consciousness

Here’s my foray into the art of meta-blogging. I found motime linking to me in my referral logs today, and at first I wasn’t overly impressed. Yet another blogging company, I thought. Looking a little deeper though I found a nice little newbie service for blogging. I figure this is a good thing because we do need more people blogging. I know a lot of people think there’s too many blogging out there as it is but I figure that when this phenomenon takes off – and I believe it will – there will be fundamental shifts in the global consciousness. As you may or may not know I am a firm believer in a global consciousness. I believe that if complexity leads to consciousness, then increasing that complexity leads to increased consciousness.
But then what is consciousness?
I’ve started to read an interesting “Research Paper Abstract” by a Mr. Chris King entitled Fractal Neurodyamics and Quantum Chaos : Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics. This paper (courtesy of Wally) was written in 1996 and although it is extremely technical and I barely understand it, there are parts coming through that resonate with some of the things I’ve been saying. In particular this stood out (emphasis added):

2.2.1 Complexity : Consciousness as a property of complex computational systems. One common idea about the emergence of mind is that it is somehow a product of the very complexity of the brain. However neither computer circuits nor artificial neural nets are ascribed to possess the attribute of mind in addition to their functioning at any given level of numerical complexity.

Complexity is the root of consciousness. All else is just levels.

4 thoughts on “Consciousness”

  1. I was arrested once.
    This happened over thirty years ago. I was still a young man and looking to make some real money. A friends parents had an indoor swimming pool in New Jersey they never used anymore, and we decided to try and make some money by raising dolphins and selling them to the navy.
    We had heard the navy used porpoise for recovery at sea and finding and defusing mines. We also heard they use young dolphins they caught in the wild. We figured if we could breed them the navy would buy them from us rather than catching them.
    We filled his parents pool with sea water. Hired a fisherman to catch a few dolphins, and threw them in the pool and waited. And waited some more. Nothing. It was costing us plenty to feed them and they were not holding up their end. We got some guy who said he knew about dolphins to check them out, just to make sure we didn’t have all one sex. Nope, there was two female and one male.
    He than told us that dolphins do not breed well in captivity. If we wanted to get them to relax, we would have to simulate their natural surroundings. He suggested we place rocks, coral and seaweed in the pool, and surround it with trees and bushes to give them some privacy.
    What he told us next sounds stupid, and we should have known better, but we were willing to try almost anything. He told us that for some unknown reason Mynah birds make dolphins amorous. He said to get a couple dozen birds and release them into the indoor pool. Their singing would drive the dolphins wild with passion, and we would have little ones in no time.
    We called around and the only place that carried that many Mynahs was a store in New York, just across the border. Well not thinking much about it we borrowed a station wagon, drove to New York and bought two dozen Mynahs. It was just as we crossed back over into New Jersey that we were stopped by a cop for some silly reason or another, I don’t remember anymore. Maybe it was a broken taillight or not using my turn signals to pass, all I remember is it was silly.
    When he saw all the birds he got curious, and stared asking questions. Not knowing any better we told him the whole story. That is when he arrested us for… and get this, he arrested us for “Transporting Mynahs across the state line for immoral porpoise’s.”
    Disclaimer: This is just my rendition of an old joke I heard about 35 years ago!
    This looked like a good place for a little humor!
    Chuck ‘O)

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