re: emergent properties

[babusyatanya]

Emergent Phenomena in Science and Everyday Life

Dr White (Neuroscientist from Duke University) once pointed out that brain differs from the other organs of human body, because it can
study itself. Liver can not even try to understand itself, but a human being with a brain - can. The problem of consciousness has started to be formulated and reformulated long ago, when people got interested in understanding the ways in which humans perceive/feel construct the objects of the word and themselves. That understanding was initially formulated via defining sensations, intentions, decision making.

In my view, consciousness is a misnomer, as it is used as a general concept in relation to quite different phenomena considered from the brain topology perspective. For example, memory as part of our experience of being conscious can be related to activity of the brain areas located in different parts of the brain: (1) our memory of a melody of our childhood lullaby (an audial image that involves firing neurones of audial areas of cortex) vs. (2) our memory of how to play that melody with a music instrument (a manual skill memory that involves firing neurones of the motor cortex).

Consciousness as the quality of inner perception, when we feel ourselves as being conscious as opposed to feeling nothing or being unconscious, relates to our brain's frontal cortex activity. In unconscious states, brain still works and serves the body's automated functions by firing the neurones responsible for breathing and heart beating.

I think the concept of emergent patterns - clusters of firing neurones is a better tool to describe and understand the brain functions, and it's most mysterious function which we call consciousness.The mystery of consciousness I see in the phenomenon of understanding. When at the moment prior to understanding of, say how 2+2 makes 4, there is no pattern in neuronal firing. It seems that an "aha moment" or "eureka" - is the moment when we get a cluster of neurones, which start firing together, and we feel or somehow distinguish this combined firing as something important - this is the moment when an understanding gets established and a pattern of neural firing get formed.