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The meaning of consciousness (Part III): Conscious thought results as our brain goes through our conscious (language-coded) knowledge.

The following is part of Chapter III of "A Scientific Model Of The Brain": Concepts and conscious (natural-language coded) knowledge: (conscious) concepts are the stereotypes we form to use as sequences-of-actions- building blocks, so that it becomes feasible to elaborate complex plans for the achievement of our goals.  * What is the essential role played by our instinct - the unconscious levels of our brain - in the resolution of those tasks, that our conscious thought takes on?  As a matter of fact, even a highly cognitive task such as reading text is carried out with very little intervention by the conscious levels of our brain. Indeed, it is only when we are starting learning how to read, that we go about one by one consciously and conscientiously recognizing each and every letter. However, little by little, as we gain more practice, more and more we become able to identify at once strings of several letters or even entire words. In fact, as we go through a text, very oft...

The meaning of consciousness: we are conscious of something, if we can express it with words - Part II

From all of our brain's wisdom and knowledge, we are only conscious of the knowledge, that is coded in natural language. The following is part of Chapter III of "A Scientific Model Of The Brain": Concepts and conscious (natural-language coded) knowledge: (conscious) concepts are the stereotypes we form to use as sequences-of-actions- building blocks, so that it becomes feasible to elaborate complex plans for the achievement of our goals. * Of all our knowledge and wisdom, our conscious knowledge is only the small part, which we are able to spell out with words. contrary to what it intuitively seems, our knowledge about the world is not hosted by any single, central brain area, but it is spread all over the brain. Furthermore, importantly enough, only a fraction of this information is accessible to our consciousness and, therefore, constitutes the knowledge 'we' are actually aware of. Indeed, I have no doubt that you do not struggle the tiniest bit telling between ...

The meaning of consciousness: We are conscious of something, if we can express it with words.

The meaning of consciousness Part 1: Extracting the complex features which identify our conscious concepts.  Concepts and conscious (natural-language coded) knowledge: (conscious) concepts are the stereotypes we form to use as sequences-of-actions- building blocks, so that it becomes feasible to elaborate complex plans for the achievement of our goals. * Unsupervised learning is followd to learn low-level feature detectors of those patterns, which we find more frequently and most faithfully describe the environment; whereas supervised learning is followed to learn those high-level features, which are better suited to code the tasks we execute to achieve our goals. At this point we enter in the field of supervised learning. Until now, I have been discussing forms of unsupervised learning in the brain. However, generally, in order to be able to achieve some goal, some form of supervised learning will ultimately be necessary. The role of unsupervised learning is to highlight and squee...