On Tue, 14 Dec 1999, Clinton O'Dell wrote:
>
> I have a hypothesis that consciousness is nothing more than memory
> exchanges in the brain along with a pattern matching and pattern
> searching (guessing what will come next) processes.
For those of you interested in this, there is a good article in the December Scientific American, "How the Brain Creates the Mind" by Antonio R. Damasio (pg 112). He is the author of "Decartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain", and "The Feeling of What Happens", two books that are now high on my list.
He discusses the "Movie in the Mind" aspect of consciousness and the fact that our "self"-concept may arise as an emergent property of the brain recreating the sensory environment.
For those of you who are lacking something to do (do we have people like that on this list?), the Dec. Scientific American and the 2 Dec. 1999 issue of Nature (in a supplement, "Impacts of forseeable science"), are both jammed with stuff of interest to us - Robots, Genomes, Space, Climate, etc. I'd list both of them as "required reading" for future extropians.
Robert