How is a thought created Options

[Hey Hey]

(ps I realise that's probably not the 'why' you meant.)

What other why did you have in mind? Yes, it confers an evolutionary advantage, or it wouldn't stick around. Nature is efficient. Buy why does it give an advangage? Electronic computers can make dicisions too, and they aren't conscious. Robots have sensing and control. How would you like to be a fighter pilot being pursued by a robot combat jet fighter that can pull 100 Gs when you pass out at 10 Gs? Maybe evolution will replace us with unconscious species. That would give new meaning to some of these zombie movies, wouldn't it?

Why in terms of an emergent property from the brain. That is, why does the brain give rise to consciousness? Some seed of consciousness must have preceded the evolutionary advantage conferred by the seed of consciousness (simple order of events) that was then selected for. Why did the organic come up with the intangible? Or should it be how?

Let's also get this clear: an evolutionary advantage might be a quite poor advantage and there will be pressure to 'improve' the advantage or change it completely, especially if environmental circumstances change, which they always do. We might consider how many organisms have consciousness and for how long consciousness has been around, especially in terms of relative to the time of the first ever organisms. This will say something about the evolutionary stability of consciousness, though the 'nature' of consciousness might have changed through this period and so the actual stability of a particular form of consciousness might be difficult to establish. I also wonder of we might lose much (most) insight in the how and why if we focus on human consciousness, that is the consciousness of the very latest humanoid (us). The origins of consciousness probably relate to the environment and physical configuration (bodily form) that some early organism experienced. We should look closely at estimates of when consciousness might have arisen first (far earlier than humanoids), and then examine any possible evidence for its emergence (behaviour). Our definition of consciousness will need to be clear, flexible and unbiased (not exclusive to the human kind). Here is a starting point: in present day organisms which have consciousness?

Incidentally, the suggestion of an advantage for prey avoidance is all well and good if we include all organisms in the 'conscious' category, as all organisms have prey avoidance methodology. But many organisms (most actually) are considered not to be conscious by many researchers, yet those type of organisms have survived quite well through evolutionary time periods thank you very much, so something else is going on there - the consciousness advantage is not such an advantage. Mind you, simply having alternative adaptations to environmental circumstances is very common in nature. A good example is the maintenance of both asexual and sexual reproduction - though the latter is deemed to be "so advantageous' most organisms utilise the former still so it is actually the most successful. Though what is success in the whole scope of things? If it is survival, then perhaps consciousness is presently the only known way that organisms might find a way to survive bigger (cosmological changes) eventually, rather than the petty local changes that occur on our planet. And why would that be of value (say, infinite survival) anyway?

[adovid]

This is an interesting idea. The brain that interprets interference with a certain background state. Brain's coherent oscillations, brain-waves if you will, seem a good candidate for such a background. But there is also solid evidence that not all environmental stimuli ("disruptions") are consciously perceived. Since thoughts cannot exist without consciousness and are in a certain sense an epiphenomenon of consciousness, it follows that some stimuli will not trigger a thought. The question then becomes, how does the brain pick the particular disruptions to the conscious experience that end up becoming thoughts?

It's not all based on stimulus alone but a brain could be said to be working to create one big pattern or identity to represent itself and the world. Sometimes this involves making new inferences and abstractions based on associations that already exist and forming new associations based on what emerges.

Associations are the building blocks of cognition-- when you see a color you can only perceive it because you can connect it to it's associations. If you suddenly could see a new color like one in the UV spectrum you would first have to wait till your brain made a few associations of what that color represented in the world around you before you could make an inference that you were seeing a new color.

[Paul King]

Can anyone tell me how a thought is created? How does an initial chemical reaction become what we know as a thought?

This is a big questions. Tens of thousands of neuroscientists are hard at work trying to figure out the answer!

you are assuming some building-block approach to consciousness which is fallacious. See Searle 2000.

That is a bit of a leap. The view that thought emerges from chemical reactions in the brain is generally consistent with the entire field of neuroscience.

Searle is known for arguing against a reductionist mechanistic view (the "chinese room" metaphor), saying that the mind must be more than mechanistic interactions between deterministic components. However Searle himself has taken the position that consciousness is solely the result of biological processes going on in the brain, and that there is nothing magic to it, it just hasn't been figured out yet (Searle at the Tucson consciousness conference, 2008). So either his view has evolved, or in the past he was arguing against a very specific model. In any case, Searle himself is controversial, and his view as a philosopher is not necessarily accepted by the scientists that actually study the brain.

The current neuroscience view, in a nutshell, is that trillions of chemical reactions are happening throughout the brain in every microsecond, but none of these constitute thought, just as electrons going through a transistor don't constitute computation in a digital computer. However the chemical reactions drive the behavior of the neurons, which in turn participate in a vast electrical signaling network in the brain. The net effect of this complex network of neural activity is that information is collected from the senses and organized, categorized, prioritized, and synthesized into a model of the world that can frame and drive action. Thought is a sort of internal action happening within the brain that can lead to external action, such as saying something. All of this is guided by attention, a complex system of signal filtering and amplification that is the subject of ongoing research.

While no one chemical reaction ever "becomes thought", it is the case that a single chemical reaction can cascade into an avalache effect that alters perception at the level of consciousness. It has been shown that a single photon of light can be perceived by a human subject in the right circumstances. [correction: a single photon can be detected by a rod photoreceptor cell in the retina, and 90 photos can be detected by a human subject in pitch darkness.] This one photon activates a single light sensitive molecule in a single photoreceptor cell in the retina. A cascade of amplifying processes cause more and more neurons to be affected by that tiny signal until the quantum-scale event is eventually perceived and can be acted on.

An analogy could be made to the quantum event detectors used in particle physics experiments. The quantum events themselves are fleeting and happening amidst trillions of trillions of trillians of other quantum events that are irrelevant (so-called "noise"). The detector, however, is designed to find the one event of interest by arranging for a cascade of events to be created and detected in many places. The fact of the initial triggering event is reconstructed from the evidence using complex statistical data analysis. In essence, the quantal event is never directly perceived. Rather it is inferred from millions of other events that are detected much later and which are determined to have been side-effects of a chain reaction caused by the initial event of interest.

[Hey Hey]

It has been shown that a single photon of light can be perceived by a human subject in the right circumstances. This one photon activates a single light sensitive molecule in a single photoreceptor cell in the retina. A cascade of amplifying processes cause more and more neurons to be affected by that tiny signal until the quantum-scale event is eventually perceived and can be acted on.

'in the right circumstances' seems to be a bit of a get out clause that makes the idea of such sensitivity contrived. It follows that any such sensitivities applied to thought creation might also be contrived and thus a great deal of evidence needs presenting to make it a viable path to follow seriously. I'd look forward to seeing that evidence though.

[Paul King]

It has been shown that a single photon of light can be perceived by a human subject in the right circumstances. This one photon activates a single light sensitive molecule in a single photoreceptor cell in the retina. A cascade of amplifying processes cause more and more neurons to be affected by that tiny signal until the quantum-scale event is eventually perceived and can be acted on.

'in the right circumstances' seems to be a bit of a get out clause that makes the idea of such sensitivity contrived. It follows that any such sensitivities applied to thought creation might also be contrived and thus a great deal of evidence needs presenting to make it a viable path to follow seriously. I'd look forward to seeing that evidence though.

I've heard this comment about single photon detection at least a dozen times in neuroscience circles, including by scientists who specialize in vision. However in trying to find a reference, it turns out it might be a little bit exagerated.

A rod photoreceptor cell in the retina can respond to a single photon:
http://people.physics.illinois.edu/Selvin/...98IBR/rieke.pdf

However it may take closer to 90 photons to get a signal strong enough for human subjects to respond to:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/PhysFAQ/Quant...e_a_photon.html

Even still, it's pretty remarkable. The human ear can supposedly detect air vibrations that are subatomic in scale:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase...nd/earsens.html

Thought creation is complex and poorly understood. The comment about sensitivity was only to highlight the brain's remarkable ability to amplify a tiny signal into a large effect amidst a sea of background noise, and to show that molecular-scale events can influence global brain activity.

[Paul King]

On the flip side of the sensory sensitivity story is the data on electrical stimulation of central brain areas.

It takes a substantial amount of direct electrical stimulation of a sensory brain area by a microelectrode before it can be consciously perceived. Possibly tens of thousands of neurons and many trillians of molecular interactions need to be affected before there is even a subliminally detectable effect.

This speaks to the complex counterbalancing mechanisms involved in neural information processing which are not easily fooled by direct disruptions of the processing systems.

[Jim]

Is it possible that thoughts are to consciousness what ions are to electricity? Or maybe thoughts are form of energy along a spectrum (i.e. visible light)? I dunno

[im hungry]

you know, i read through most of these before i realized NONE of you actually answered his question but actually started getting angry boners from someone disagreeing and disapproving of what you said so you started having little brain fits.

[Joesus]

you know, i read through most of these before i realized NONE of you actually answered his question but actually started getting angry boners from someone disagreeing and disapproving of what you said so you started having little brain fits.

Maybe there's an answer to the question in that observation. People relate to the world around them thru the subconscious, and as it rises to the conscious awareness it gets recognition at the level of perception and belief.