Are we getting closer to understanding consciousness, memory, or emotions?
We have made major progress on a number of major questions - certainly on the learning and memory front, and on the interconnectedness of reason and emotion. Researchers have studied the idea that emotion and feelings - the ones we actually call gut feelings, the feelings of uneasiness or that something is wrong - help bias us in ways that allow us to do the kinds of calculations we normally call pure reason.
The main point is that in situations requiring a certain amount of analysis, you need not just frontal cortex but input from the limbic structures that are cued, in turn, from the viscera, the skin, and so forth. That is very revealing about the way we actually work.
It shows us that for really heavy intelligence stuff - determining what, in the general sense, is relevant and what isn’t - you’ve got to have the emotions involved. It may mean that there is something right about the strategy that people invoke when they say it’s important to be in touch with your feelings. Say you come into a room and you sense something is not right. I certainly wouldn’t say that it is a completely reliable clue, but it’s something worth relying on for telling you to look closer, to look harder.
Is that part of what we mean by being conscious?
Some people have the idea that before you study consciousness, you need a nice, precise, clean definition of what consciousness is. I want to resist that. Clean, nice, precise definitions are what you get after you’ve done the science and you’ve got a nice theory. Before you have a good theory, often what you have to do is go with good examples, with phenomena where you’ve got quite a lot of agreement.
Interview.4: Unification of Mind and Brain
plutonic) (charonic