What’s the difference between that which is alive and that which isn’t?

Consciousness and Cognition:

“Crick and Koch (1990) have proposed that gamma-band synchronous oscillatory activities of neurons in visual cortex constitute the neural correlate of visual awareness.”

-I wouldn go so far as to use the term “awareness” but they definitely on to somethin, of course

recounted how Koch had come up the stairs and knocked, followed by the student, describing everything they had said to each other;

C and C:

“It should be noted at this point that when we speak of ‘visual awareness’, we are referring to the sensory awareness of the visual surround and that recognition of objects within that surround is not directly implied.”

-well, dat much is good

Dretske’s back again:

“How much info a message carries is not a function of how much info the recipient thinks it carries. It is a function, simply, of the actual possibilities that exist and the conditional probabilities of these various possibilities after the message has been received.”

-what does this have to do with anything? how can we differentiate the actual possibilities from the ones that we only think exist? I suppose this has everything to do with awareness.

C and C:

“Crick and Koch (1990, 1994) have argued that there are two forms of visual awareness, one brief and transitory and the other associated with selective visual attention. They believe that the latter form, coupled with short-term memory, mediates vivid awareness, but that in the absence of fleeting awareness, our visual environment would have the appearance of a tunnel, in which the current focus of attention appears in vivid detail and everything else is either invisible or hazy.”

Koch stayed behind and gently moved the bell-pull once again; the bell gave a single clank.

DRETSKE:

“The receiver of the signal may be more interested in one piece of info than he is in any other, he may succeed in extracting one piece of information without another.”

C and C:

“If synchronous oscillatory neuronal activities constitute the neural correlate of consciousness, and we know that these activities are not restricted to the cortex, then there is no reason to suppose that subcortical synchronous oscillations should not participate in awareness.”

Before we left the fire to go in we had to study te sky: the weather, the stars.

“They just pop your spine with a little hydro-gun... Now. Let me see. To get an illegal unregistered bioport installed at about midnight - we just drive up to your local country gas station, right?”

The atmosphere, April told us, would have an immense influence on how the next few days would unfold. For instance, I could go ask someone at a gas station for directions. After consulting and conferring with one another, April and her friends concluded that our stay would prove to be particularly spiritually enlightening (especially for you, she added, pointing to me with a simultaneous wink).

“You still operate a gas station, don’t you?”

“Only on the most pathetic level of reality.”

The attendant says, “Oh yeah. I know where that is.”

“Those are sterilized aren’t they?”

“Not to worry, the way they set things up, you could fire in a bioport in a slaughterhouse and never generate an infection.”

This is somehow comforting?

A list of directions. I copy them down diligently on a scrap piece of paper.

“Oops. I got that all wrong. I was thinking of somewhere else.”

Begins again with another list of directions.

“This is it, you see. This is the cage of your own making which keeps you trapped and pacing about in the smallest possible space forever.”

DRETSKE:

“But these differences are irrelevant to the info the signal contains. As the example indicates, a receiver’s background knowledge is relevant to the info he receives (both how much info and what info). A system’s intentional states drive their content, not from the appropriateness or inappropriateness of their effects on the system’s output but from their information-carrying role - from the sort of situation they were developed to represent.”

Davidson maintains that a similar problem, one that he calls ‘radical interpretation’, occurs between two speakers of the same language. Because we cannot be sure that the meaning of a speaker’s utterance will match the meaning that an interpreter will take, it is necessary to assume that something else must be at work when the process of interpretation takes place. There must be something in place that allows a speaker and an interpreter to assume understanding of one another’s utterances.

What is the primary level of explanation in the understanding of delusion?

E. DAPRATI et al.: “Verbal hallucinations seem to be liable to this explanation. According to Frith (1996), the normal mechanism for attributing thought to its internal origin would be a comparison between the executive commands leading to speech and the anticipated sensory consequences of these commands.”

CREUTZFELDT et al: “Normally, execution of the speech motor commands implies that the related sensory signals will be inhibited.”

E. DAPRATI et al.: “During verbal hallucinations in schizophrenic patients, by contrast, the sensory areas for language remain active, which suggests that the cancellation process does not operate. The nervous system in these patients behaves as if it were actually processing the speech of an external speaker. Hence their perception of their own thinking as originating from the outside world.”

Hmmm.

Davidson maintains that as long as an atomistic approach is taken to theories of truth and meaning, it will be impossible to determine what mechanism allows speaker and interpreter to assume comprehension of one another’s utterances. Neurobiological, cognitive, intentional?

The only way to understand how radical interpretation takes place is to assume that meaning, belief, and truth, FUNCTION in relation to one another. In other words, these concepts must FUNCTION together in a holistic manner.

DAVIDSON: “A speaker holds a sentence to be true because of what the sentence (in his language) means, and because of what he believes.”

Are delusions disorders of the self or disorders of reality monitoring?

Uh-oh. Here comes Kretschy, monitoring me again, o’course. Probly just received my report or somethin.

KRETSCHMAR: “A delusion is defined as a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what all most everyone else believes, and despite what constitutes incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.”

C’mon Carey, save me from dis tedious bullshit.

ME: It would seem that a large part of our seeing an object AS of this or that shape or nature is integral to the act of visual perception, and likewise for the other senses.

Speaking o’delusions, here she is, de girl o’d’hour. You know her. You love her. You can’t get enough of her: Carey.

There are witches. I feel like they are trying to groom me, woo me and my friends over to their side. They have me in their midst, their grips and I feel that there is some evil that is threatening to take me over. It is much worse than they are. I am being cultivated. There are scenes of Hell, showing people being punished for their sins. My grandmother points out a clay figure whose tongue is being pulled out at least a foot while simultaneously being cut up by by two devils with spiky hair standing on end like hedgehogs and eyes bulging like frogs. The man being tortured had been a liar in his previous life, she said - and this was what would happen to me if I told lies.

Seems like she might actually get into things today, instead of all dat stupid sex talk she usually does. Interesting. Maybe she felt at an early age that she really had to believe in her own lies in order to avoid severe punishment. Maybe. Hmm. Somethin bout’his reminding me of a dream I once had. I am somewhere close to the state line. The other I is actually still somewhere in Chicago, scratchin litter into a wall most-likely. MALEBOLGE: amphitheatre for lectures (much like the ones used in old-fashioned days to dissect bodies, etc.). In the first instance, discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able to at each moment, too, supervise the conduct of each individual, access it, judge it, calculate its qualities or merits. It is a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Observe their presence and absence and constitute a general and permanent register. How one was to distribute patients, separate them from one another, divide up the hospital space and make a systematic classification of diseases: these were all twin operations in which the two elements - distribution and analysis, supervision and intelligibility - are inextricably bound up. Kretschmar is quoting Foucault again. “Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations.” Discipline and Punishment

“The table is both a technique of power and a procedure of knowledge. It is a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument to cover it and to master it; it is a question of imposing order.”

Hey, where’d Carey go? I’s almost as though Kretschy scared her away or somethin. But’hat’s impossible, right? unknown territory. I know that a path can be made. So, to get to a point dat is out of dis world maybe I just have to confirm a path. I wonder how I do that. Movement and action takes a certain amount of time or continuity. How do we do this? How do we account for this? Back to Libet. “There is no experimental evidence against possibility that the control process may appear without prior unconscious processes (that specifically develop it).”

I’s like Carey jus’totally disappeared. How did that happen?!