Re:Are We Zeroing In on the Hard Problem of Explaining Consc...
by metamemetics on Sunday April 11, 2010 @07:12PM
(#1257885)
By On I meant active vs non-active brain areas, I did not mean to imply that an individual neuron is an information unit with the capacity of one bit!!! Information is not even stored inside neurons but is a function of their connections.
My statement is accurate. You can temporarily and manually activate and deactivate areas of the brain using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and cause all sorts of interesting shifts in conciousness including out of body experiences.
That's a wild simplification. At least you must consider that the topology of the neurosis different from person to person (and in large enough amounts of time for the same person), the fact that nothing is as discrete as ON or OFF in the biological world and the possibility (as far as I know not refuted) that some neurons might carry more state than a single bit. I don't feel, by reading neuroscience papers, that we're in any wau close to a real understanding of how brains (let alone human brains) work.