IUBio

Specific and non-specific activation (tangential to Re: The hippocampus is =not= a 'spatial' map)

Peter F. effectivespamblock at ozemail.com.au
Sat Jan 24 20:44:59 EST 2004


"k p Collins" <kpaulc@[----------]earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:1JGPb.18521$i4.9300 at newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> It's a "supersystem configuration" [AoK, Ap6] 'map' -
> an array-processor in which, ***via the alternating merging
> of specific and non-specific activation*** [PF's highlight]

Just to say that this component of Kenneth Collin's schematic view is a
profoundly scientifically validated one.

A.R. Luria used the same phraseology as part of his - as if for me
ready-made cornerstone of - 'neuropsychophysiological' insight. You will
find it in chapter 2 (titled The Three Principlal Functional Units) of
Luria's book The Working Brain An Introduction To Neuropsychology"
[published by Penguin].

Part of my largely 'Collins-supporting' point in this post, is that in this
book Luria presents us with the by far *most workable*, hence most
begging to be generally adopted, definition of the word "consciousness".

This word (consciousness) is, BTW, one of the most widely abused (as in
inconsistently used)
and wasted-time-on (in scientific and philosohical circles) concepts.

Not entirely unlike Collins's vast and to me clearly talanted (if not
perfectly transparent to scientific-minded traditionalists) effort, I have
cobbled together a relatively simple and crude mosaic picture of what is
going on
mainly as far as people's selective awareness/unconsiousness and
PARTLY corresponding behaviours, psychologies, personalities, cultures, and
societal/international interactions, are concerned.

I used (as did Collins) the readily available resource of by Science
(holistically defined) sufficiently solidly established principles theories
interpretations & concepts" - or what I like to
abbreviate and express as "SEPTIC informational matter".

EPT is the result of small samples of SEPTIC info having accumulated and
fermented within my personal think tank (brain) -- after I had siphoened it
all off from the total available content of the collectively human owned
reservoire of professionally predigested SEPTIC informational matter [or
systematically tested, more or less enlightening, perceptions (including
serendipitous pattern-recognitions) and thoughts].

Hence EPT reflects that I have, as if, parasited on, sampled from, looked
for
cross-correlations within, with poetic freedom paraphrased, and in few
instances extracted fibers of truth from, "SEPTIC informational matter".

EPT contains a handful of emphatically
plaited together novel looking and/or novel meaning concEPTs. A few of these
turned out to have a somewhat ironic tone and/or to be
playfully put with a touch of puerile (and in a sense purposely homeopathic)
septic humor (suitably so).

These days I endeavor to with
exceeding persistence and temerity present to people with this my partly
'evolutionary psychology type' explanatory platform-terminology or
encompassing philosophical take of What Is going on.

An effectively philosophy terminating, eclectically put together,
explanatory prophylactic thinking about how why and what we are, EPT was not
arrived at via some plan to dent Dennet's (or some similarly sophisticated
and deep thinkers') deserved self-respect but, as it turned out, EPT can *in
principle* be used, also by such people, to focuse their tendency to commit
to
intelligent pursuits in more realistically worthwhile directions than to
surperfluosly trying and following false and futile leads to what
consciousness is.







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