OTHER EXPERIMENTS could be done for other muscle groups, specific muscles, and volitional speech (in the latter, one must monitor the brain’s speech center, the Broca’s area).
The devil will be in the details again. Does present science and technology have the capacity to do such close monitoring of the brain’s electrochemical activities?
The monitoring instrument must be quick enough to detect the changes in the electrochemical pattern of the brain’s cortex in the time interval from the decision to move a muscle by the mind to the firing of the UMN, and be super accurate to boot.
The only things that I can think of that can approach such capability is the PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography), or perhaps some kind of supersensitive EEG (Electroencephalography). But there may be others I am not aware of.
If such an experiment is possible, then it should be done. Let me be clear on my opinion on that. But even if such an experiment is done, I don’t think it will answer the question of the nature of the mind.
It would not answer the question: What triggers the changes in the electrochemical pattern of the cerebral hemisphere’s cortex?
You might say offhand, our mind of course. We will it to happen; it happens.
So what is the process by which the mind directs changes in the electrochemical pattern of the cerebral hemisphere’s cortex?
Suppose we are able to answer the above. There will be a next question. Say how is the ARAS involved? And a next. Say how is the limbic system (deep gray matter, that is neuronal cell bodies, in the telencephalon and their connections, said to be the seat of subjective emotions) involved? And a next. And a next. For each question, we must be able to do experiments that require quick and accurate monitoring of those parts of the brain that are involved.
Soon we will see ourselves getting to the point of asking again: what is the nature of the mind? Because that’s where volitional movement starts, and so far, we are just investigating the processes from mind to muscle.
Do scientists know how we move our muscles?
Yes. No. Don’t know. Not sure. Hu-o. Indi. Ambot. Ambot.
We trek along the mind-body problem.
Out of a blackhole, into another.
Since AIs cannot have cognition or self-awareness without being conscious, and we don’t even know much about consciousness (we just know that the ARAS has to be activated for us to become conscious as explained above)…
It’s a real mess, isn’t it? (Send comments and suggestions to mabuhibisaya2017@gmail.com)/PN
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow