IUBio

Consciousness

k p Collins kpaulc at [----------]earthlink.net
Mon Jan 19 21:19:50 EST 2004


"Wolf Kirchmeir" <wwolfkir at sympatico.can> wrote in message
news:jbysxveflzcngvpbpna.hrrjmy2.pminews at news1.sympatico.ca...
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 23:01:53 GMT, k p  Collins wrote:
>
> >That is, "vision" is nothing more than the map-
> >ping of light onto the retina.
>
> If this were true, neither hysterical blindness,
> or blindness induced by brain traumas such as
> strokes, would be possible. Yet they happen.
> Frequently, in fact.

Not True, Wolf.

It's far-more-common than what you've brought-up.

Haven't you ever sat in a room with a TV set on,
but, being deep in thought, pass the night ending-
up unable to recall anything that was on TV?

When the 'window' is obscured, or the person
'moves away from' the light, either way, the light
doesn't reach the neural Topology that 'grasps' it.

See "supersystem configuration", AoK, Ap5.

It doesn't matter how the light is 'obscured'.

'Hysteria', is 'just' a correlate of high-TD E/I,
and commensurately-ill-defined "supersystem
configuration" - the nervous system "can't"
attend to the light be-cause it's in a 'desperate'
fight [usually against on-going "rendering useless"
[AoK, Ap8]].

And such 'hysteria' ["psychic blindness"] has, thus
far during the course of Human History, has been
pretty-much =universal=.

It's why folks Kill, rather than understand, one
another, [see the discussion of the low-'level'
amygdalar "supersystem configuration" mechan-
ism, AoK, Ap5].

Get a candle, a bi-convex lens, a sheet of paper
and find the lens' focal length.

Now, why would evolutionary dynamics Waste
[=TOTALLY=] all the good stuff that's right-
there, on that sheet of paper? And, if evolutionary
dynamics were so =WASTEFUL= [they are not,
but, for the sake of the discussion, suppose they
were], and were engineering all of that fancy 'in-
ternalization' of what's already, right-there, on the
sheet of paper, why would they, simultaneously,
leave all of the tortuously-convoluted neural Top-
ology of decussation, commisures, etcetera, if not
be-cause the 'sheet of paper' that is the retina
leaves the image upside-down and left-right
reversed?

See?

All of that neural Topology has been 'engineered'
by evolutionary dynamics =BE-CAUSE= light
does, in fact, stop at the retina.

The rest of the neural Topology does 'only' interp-
retation, selective attention, information-distribution,
feeding-forward, hugely, into "supersystem configura-
tion" with respect to virtually =all= other information-
processing that occurs within nervous systems. [See
the Infinite scope of the routine problems that con-
front nervous systems, AoK, Ap1.]

Why do it again, internally, when it's all right-there
on the retina?

That'd be kind of like 'growing a third leg', the only
'purpose' of which being to 'boot one's self in the
arse' :-]

Cheers, Wolf, ken [k. p. collins]





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