So what EXACTLY is experience?

Discussion in 'Science and Nature' started by ancientmutai, Nov 28, 2014.

  1. I'm talking about what each of us experience every waking moment of our lives. Sensory experience, smell, vision, hearing, the feelings that go paired with them. What makes them how they are? Why is the wavelength of red light experienced as red? Animals experience these too, hell i don't know maybe insects experience them in a more primitive way, limited by their neural capacities. 
     
    We can give metaphysical or spiritual explanation to them, but even them, something is going on in your mind. Some process is taking place. I believe experience, or consciousness or whatever you may call it, is a natural process, like osmosis or a volcanic eruption or DNA transcription. It is, however, very complex, involving so many different variables. But how exactly is this experience generated? I believe it must be happening inside a neuron. Neural activity. They define experience as each experience is reflected in neural activity. It's not just the neuron, it's the active neuron. This electric current must pass through it to generate this experience. So is it in the electricity, the electrochemical gradient? But as each action potential is the same, but red and green are different, the neuron itself must be playing a more important role. So is it in the neuron itself, does the neuron somehow use the electric impulse to decode information and generate this simulation of reality? Is the action potential the encoding of input, and this experience the decoding of the code - encoded by the action potention? Or Is it the synchronous activity of neurons? And even then, the individual neuron is doing something. Is it a quantum process? A wave-function collapse? 
     
    All i know is that I - literally - AM these active neurons. They are me and I am them, just as a rock is a rock. From this, i can truthfully say that BEING active neurons is paired with some experience. How are they doing this?

     
  2. You ever watch Lucy? 

    This neuron "Experience" you call it, in the brain, is a fundamental unanswered question of science, with only "crazy" theories being projected.
     
    They all seem crazy until they are proved, I was thinking the other day how we go through our lives with 3% conscious decisions average every day. like we're 97% programmed through these neurons. Walking zombies who don't think as much as we think we think. 
     
  3. 3% ? Shit. My day at work I mainly focus on being self aware lol .100%. with the odd meditation break.

    Incorporating awareness towards everything you do should be the way to go no?


    To OP: I think consciousness/experience lives on a different plane than the physical...though it must relate to it through some material form. The material will never be the totality of it, only the bridge. As such we experience feelings of all sorts seemingly not in this realm...
     
  4. I'm not talking about being self aware, thats the core fact that makes us human.

    I'm talking about being consciously aware of every action, every movement, everything you do.

    If you think you are, you are wrong, and you really have to pay attention to everything you do without thinking about it.
     
    In a sense it's like breathing, you instinctively breathe, as you instinctively also live your everyday life without being aware of every action you do. 
     
  5. Understood, though I fail to see your point, forgive me... I'm not some scholar. Are you trying to say every neuron in our body has the capability of awareness as it is inherently us. Yet, we cannot tap into that since it's complex as fuck?

    Are you talking about being consciously aware of every neurons action then? Lost tbh after reading and re reading the middle paragraph in your op.
     
  6. #6 Smooth Criminal, Nov 28, 2014
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 28, 2014
    If we where consciously aware of every neuron's action,we would be God's.
     
  7. It's a great question.  The greatest question in fact.  If we could definitively say "experience is..." then we could solve the rest of life's mysteries in a very methodical pattern.
     
    For instance.  There are 5 branches of philosophy.
     
    1) Metaphysics: The study of origin.  The big picture philosophy.
    2) Epistemology:  The study of knowledge.  How do we know what we know?
    3) Ethics:  The study of morality.  What decides the rightness or wrongness of an action?
    4) Aesthetics:  The study of beauty.  What makes something beautiful?
    5) Logic:  The study of reason.  How can we define pattern, soundness (definitive reasoning) and validity (truthful reasons)
     
    The question of experience, if answered would provide a foot hold to solving the mysteries of every branch on that list.  For, experience defines the logic of life - the flow of time, perception, and pattern.  It would provide us with the resolution of what beauty is, why do we remember the "ugly, frightening or stressful" just as easily as the "awe inspiring, beautiful and profound".  This would unfold into what we understand as rightness, through the definitive answer of what experience is we can tap into the essence of a "well experienced" or "happily experienced life" in which case we could derive the rightness or wrongness of actions toward one another through understanding the impact of experience.  This would also define in many ways how we know what we know.  Experience is at its essence knowledge.  Knowing one would lead to knowing the other.
     
    On the grand scale, having settled on an experiential truth, we could deduce the truth of reality.  If we can define what experience is in all its forms we can uncover what the reasons for it would be, where this unfolding pattern originated and for what purpose our understandings as we experience them are meant to bring about in the future.
     
    So, in no simple terms - your question, is THE question.
     
    For my own two cents.  Experience as we know it is nothing more than the atomic response to the heartbeat of the universe, expressed as a pattern of ever evolving wave information that is interpretable within us.  DNA is the codification of life.  This "wave sensor of the universe" is fundamentally more than DNA, it is the fibers within us, the hum of harmonic resonance that responds and shifts but never breaks.  Like an eternal ripple across a rolling ocean, it folds and bends with the waves, elongates and shrinks with the crest and the break of the ocean but never ceases its outward journey.
     
    Ultimately.  In the end.  We can only know the truth of experience when our perception of what experience is, ends.  So, I'm afraid like the rest of us, you will just have to wait until death takes you, to answer your question.  I hope it's just another journey. 
     
  8. Experience is the total ammount of saved sensory files in.you brain

    Every time there is time, each of your 6 senses saves information about the time to your memory.

    Each time you sense something, you have experienced something

    Your decision making is based on the sum.ttotal "experiences" you've had

    -yuri
     
  9. Or having a seizure.
     
  10. It seems that the inter-connectivity and resulting "processing" (to fire or not to fire...) of neurons, especially in the frontal lobe, along with the the comparative strength of those connections (propensity to fire) for various combinatorial axonal inputs, somehow "manufactures" experience. That doesn't help at all, I know.
     
    How could mere selectivity in inter-neuronal firing sequences create experience??? And what is it that does the experiencing??? But, all we have to do is stimulate or inhibit various conduction pathways or affect the degree that neurotransmitters and other control molecules are present or absent in particular neural regions (nuclei), whether by electric probes, or chemicals (drugs, etc), or whatever (deliberate sensory stimulation or deprivation, etc), and voila - modified experience!
     
    In other words, it's total fucking magic! lol  :confused_2:
     
  11. I have a feeling out brain processes information physically in a similar way to a computer

    -yuri
     
  12.  
    Actually, it works surprisingly little like a computer. :smoking: For example, it doesn't work by selectively calling up stored programs in memory modules or manipulating data in addressed memory locations. There is no central processor in the brain that executes instructions. The processing of information and even memory itself are distributed, even co-mingling.
     
    Nor does the brain function as a binary machine. Neural firing is determined by each neuron's summing of dendritic inputs coupled with its propensity to fire ("synaptic strength") based on everything from prevalent neurotransmitter levels to dynamically changing gene expression. Furthermore, neural "logic" is subject to not only simultaneous dendritic voltage input summing (sometimes as many as 100,000 at a time), but it's also determined by the frequency of such spike inputs as well their phase relationships in time. This can actually be simulated in a binary machine such as a computer but that doesn't imply that the brain works anything like a binary machine. Outputs aren't either on or off. Neurons usually "fire" their action potentials in varying frequencies of spike trains. 
     
    However, like I said before, a computer program running on a sufficiently fast machine with sufficient memory can, at least in principle, simulate the connectivity and dynamic weightings of the brain's path conduction properties.
     
    It's been estimated that to simulate the roughly 100 trillion connections of the 100 to 200 billion or so neurons in the average brain would require a computer (or system of computers) that could perform between 10<sup>18</sup> to 10<sup>19</sup> FLOPS (floating point operations per second). It's projected that in terms of computer power, we'll have that degree of computational savy in the next 10 to 20 years.
     
    [​IMG]
     
    So the problem of simulating a brain doesn't lie in computer power, or our ability to simulate the various factors that affect neural connectivity and conductivity. The problem is in obtaining the human connectome and the detailed knowledge of the crucial molecular interactions by which its functions are governed - by non-destructive means. We kill mice and rats and worms every day. Kill people might not be such a socuially acceptable practice.
     
    Those difficulties will probably push the simulation decades further into the 21st century than most futurists predict. Henry Markham of the Blue Brain Project has already simulated one complete neuron in 2005, the year the project was initiated. In 2008 his team simulated an entire neocortical column of a rat brain, consisting of 10,000 neurons. By 2011 this expanded to 100 columns, totaling a million cells, which he calls a mesocircuit.They've now turned to a massively coordinated effort to simulating the human brain. See - the Human Brain Project
     
    [media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS3wMC2BpxU[/media]
     
    Apologies for rambling so long. I have a need for weed!  :cry:
     
  13. The green orbs you pick up in Minecraft when you kill zombies.
     
  14.  
    I completely agree with you. But in a way, i feel like understanding this[​IMG]
    to the very details, understanding each pathway and connection the different visual areas make, you have no real idea of how it produces an experience. What is an experience in all this? Is it a byproduct? An inevitable "result" of neural activity?
    And yes, we do not function by the binary code...it makes me wonder, maybe "experience" is the code of neural organisms. It's like a stable language to decode the universe around us as an organism, which is exactly why they have taken over the world (bacteria, technically, still own this planet but majority but you know what I mean)
     
  15.  
    In the neural sciences, I've never read or heard anyone that has even the slightest clue what experience is. It is known that somehow the brain produces it but how or what it is that's doing the experiencing seems to be a complete mystery, as far as I can tell. Sheer magic. :confused_2:  
     
  16. Kind of steering off topic here - sorry op - but suppose we actually do one day accurately model the human brain's functionality in ass-kicking super computers (as far as neural connectivity and dynamic response to real time functionality), will that computer have a sentient mind?
     
    Any opinions?
     
  17.  
    You will loose your mind if you are 100% aware always. You are fooling yourself. You do more things than you think out of reflex, you cannot be fast and efficient at a task without using some level of reflex. and; Being able to forget long repetitive tasks is a adaptation our ancestors acquired when they started having to walk long distance for food. If you remembered every arduous step of a 14 hour journey you would have strong incentive to not do that again. Forgetting is good, it soothes the mind and cleanses the brain of unnecessary information.
     
  18.  
    This might sound really freaking weird... But I am self aware almost 100% of the time. I have a bad legal history and since I've been out of it, I've been extremely self aware. Every thought, every action, I think about before I do. I know it might sound weird but I've had way too much shit happen to me. I used to be an 'in the moment' person never thinking of the consequences, but now I try to focus on everything I do.
     
    I've been in fights, been fired, been arrested all for doing/saying really stupid things that could have been avoided if I just *thought* about it before hand. 
     
    Now when I'm talking to someone, I really think before I talk. 
     
    It's sort of changed me as a person a bit. My life sort of feels like I'm seeing it through a third person view because I'm always thinking about what I'm doing and how it will positively/negativity affect me. 
     

  19. I think the question you may be getting at is "what experiences?". Is the universe experiencing itself? Is that what 'I' am? Or is the universe something for 'me' to experience?

    The answer is more philosophical than scienctific, and science relies on philosophical assumptions such as the reality of the external world. So your answer might as well be a philosophical deduction.
     

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