Oliver Sacks on Consciousness

[Frank Wimberly-2]

"Since the last third of the twentieth century, the whole tenor of neurology and Neuroscience has been moving towards such a dynamic and constructional view of the brain, a sense that even at the most Elementary levels--as, for example, in the "filling in" of a blind spot or a scotoma or the seeing of a visual illusion, as both Richard Gregory and V. S. Ramachandran have demonstrated--the brain constructs a plausible hypothesis or pattern or scene. In his theory of neuronal group selection, Gerald Edelman--drawing on the data of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, of embryology and evolutionary biology, of clinical and experimental work, and of synthetic neural modeling--proposes a detailed neurobiological model of the mind in which the brain's Central role is precisely that of constructing categories--first perceptual then conceptual--and VB of an ascending process of "bootstrapping" where through repeating recategorization at higher and higher levels, consciousness is finally achieved. This, for Edelman, every perception is a creation and every memory a re-creation or recategorization.

Such categories, he feels, depend on the "values" of the organism, those biases and dispositions [partly innate, partly learned] which, for Freud, were characterized as "drives", "instincts" and "affects." The attunement here between Freud's view and Edelman's is striking; here, at least, one has the sense that psychoanalysis and neurobiology can be fully at home with one another, congruent and mutually supportive.  And it may be that in this equation of Nachtra:glichkeit  with "recategorization" we see a hint of how the two seemingly disparate universes--the universes of human meaning and of natural science--may come together."

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[Grant Holland]

Great citation. Thanks, Frank.

G.

On Dec 17, 2019, at 2:36 PM, Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Since the last third of the twentieth century, the whole tenor of neurology and Neuroscience has been moving towards such a dynamic and constructional view of the brain, a sense that even at the most Elementary levels--as, for example, in the "filling in" of a blind spot or a scotoma or the seeing of a visual illusion, as both Richard Gregory and V. S. Ramachandran have demonstrated--the brain constructs a plausible hypothesis or pattern or scene. In his theory of neuronal group selection, Gerald Edelman--drawing on the data of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, of embryology and evolutionary biology, of clinical and experimental work, and of synthetic neural modeling--proposes a detailed neurobiological model of the mind in which the brain's Central role is precisely that of constructing categories--first perceptual then conceptual--and VB of an ascending process of "bootstrapping" where through repeating recategorization at higher and higher levels, consciousness is finally achieved. This, for Edelman, every perception is a creation and every memory a re-creation or recategorization.

Such categories, he feels, depend on the "values" of the organism, those biases and dispositions [partly innate, partly learned] which, for Freud, were characterized as "drives", "instincts" and "affects." The attunement here between Freud's view and Edelman's is striking; here, at least, one has the sense that psychoanalysis and neurobiology can be fully at home with one another, congruent and mutually supportive.  And it may be that in this equation of Nachtra:glichkeit  with "recategorization" we see a hint of how the two seemingly disparate universes--the universes of human meaning and of natural science--may come together."

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove