Mind Scan Notebook

“Consciousness is not a process in the brain but a kind of behavior that, of course, is controlled by the brain like any other behavior. Human consciousness emerges on the interface between three components of animal behavior: communication, play, and the use of tools. These three components interact on the basis of anticipatory behavioral control, which is common for all complex forms of animal life. The serial character of human conscious experience is a highly salient and, from the point of view of many neurophysiologists, an almost mysterious feature. While the brain (which is supposed to be the seat of mind) works as a parallel distributed network with virtually unlimited resources, conscious events are consecutive, happen one at a moment, and their momentary capacity is strongly limited. Theories regarding consciousness as a particular case of brain information processing must, therefore, suggest a specific mechanism creating serial processing from parallel. This compromise the aesthetics of the corresponding theories, because in addition to the multiple brain mechanisms generating conscious contents one more mechanism is postulated to make these contents run in a row.”