What is consciousness ? I mean, what is the movie playing in your head everyday since you were aware of it after you were born? The movie not only deliver you the most real visual, audial excitation which you might have experienced when watching a 3D movie, but also gives you all physical sensation that feels like you are in a virtual reality simulator. What is the movie, aside from its multiple sensory stimulations and never-ending story, in which you experienced emotions, desires, and spirituality, and the only protagonist in the story is ‘you’ ?
Consciousness in the description above can be concisely summarized as ‘the collection of all subjective feelings induced by our experience.’ One may see it absurd and impractical to try to deal with subjective feelings in terms of physicalism because for hundreds of years the two main streams of etymology are idealism and physicalism, which are thought to be incompatible to each other. Despite the success of science, or its under-lied belief in physicalism, it has not provide yet a convincing explanation for the mechanism of our subjective experience. The term subjective explains itself: what happens in mind. How can we measure something that happened in our mind objectively after all?
However, the enormous success of scientific methods and its flourishing achievements make physicalism a universal belief. The most faithful believers of physicalism- scientist - have virtually become prophets of modern era. For any devotee to physicalism, who believes mechanical universe and dismiss super-nature phenomenon, what can be harder to accept than a truth that our minds are not part of this universe ?
Indeed, neuroscientists have discovered many valuable facts about our brains- how areas of brains correlate to difference mental processes- but they simply have no clue which area is in charge of our subjective feelings. Some scientists thus suggest our mental processes are not only a result from the teamwork of each functional brain areas, but also a quintessential ‘emergent phenomenon’ plays behind the scene.
Emergent phenomenon is basically a belief that cortical neural network is neither centralized nor localized as brain scientists observed on EEG or fMRI. Cortical neural network works as a decentralized, integrated whole where every ensemble of interactions of nodes and connections represents a specific mental state.
Then, how come this two seemingly contradictory views, either of which is supported by considerable evidences, can be fused into a unifying, self-rounded theory of brain ? Some scientists lay their hope in the complex system. Complex systems, which is neither centralized nor decentralized, exhibit hierarchical structures. The hierarchy is not built block by block on account of genetic blue map, but self-organized. The neural network is organized via its agents performing certain simple rules, instead of being dictated or supervised by an external higher being. The most famous rule of such is Hebbien Rule, usually described as ‘fire together, wire together.’
When I was organizing my thoughts about ‘what is consciousness ?’ It was clear to me that most of my inspirations should be credited to Jeff Hawkins and his philosophical but realistic booklet on Intelligence. His book delineate why intelligence is making prediction and how the cortical neuron might have achieved that. He proposed a group of simultaneously fired neuron may stand for one basic element of our world, and an ensemble of similar elements will be categorized into a superior concept, which will be represented by another group of neuron in a higher layer of neocortex. For example, our ears first receive a vibration of waves when we listen to a speech. The vibration is then transformed to an electric signal of sound, which to bottom layer of cortex may sounds like alphabet. When it adaptation to the certain combination of alphabets, which always occur consecutively, it recognizes the combination, the word, with a group of sync-fired neuron. Likewise, it recognizes patterns of combinations of words in to sentence in next layer. Finally, the meaning of the speech is captured through this hierarchical information processing system. Most tasks are well-learned patterns, are trivially predicted in lower layers of cortex, so it never cross our mind. Namely, only fresh, novel stimulation will finally enter the highest layer of neocortex, where our awareness functioned. Hawkins’s theory is fascinating because it consists with our experiences and easy to understand. It can be easily tested by simply recall you did not really think about the pronunciation of words when you are reading this article. Sometimes you did not even noticed misspellings or grammar error because you subconsciously predicted what the word means. However, we are aware of the spelling of words, and have difficulties understand sentences some times when we are listening to unfamiliar foreign languages. Allow me call the theory above ‘Intelligence theory.’
I think Jeff Hawkins has explained how intelligence works pretty clearly, given how ignorant we are to it previously. He also mentioned he has not figured everything out about consciousness, since it absolutely has something to do with cerebellum, thalamus, and hippocampus, etc. The picture of consciousness is incomplete without a complete understanding of emotions, animal instincts, and their interactions with intelligence. Jeff Hawkins just explained the new brain (neocortex ) , leaving the old brain undiscussed.
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中圖：真實的照片，該團隊用特殊的溶劑使果蠅外殼透明化，並用螢光蛋白質追蹤出果蠅大腦的某條神經路徑，可以看到感官受器的訊息傳道中樞時只有一條路線，因此視覺影像必定被轉換成某種編碼，而不是一整個完整圖像的切割。
什麼是網格計算？網格計算是通過網際網路連結大量異構計算機（個人電腦、超級電腦、各式各樣的計算機）的未用資源（
接下來就是後天、外在環境的工作了。神經系統製造了過剩的觸突，使得神經之間必須相互競爭，就像動物進化或是自由市場一樣，只留下最適任的突觸。突觸的有用程度是由電位差評定的，高度活躍的突觸會接收較多的電脈衝，也放出較多的神經傳導物質，對其他的突觸的引誘訊號也較強。較小的突觸在沒有使用的情況下會慢慢退化。其實，幼童直到青春期這個過程每天大約有兩百億個腦神經細胞在死亡，代表這段時間是我們感受性、想像力、創造力、語言、推理形塑的關鍵時期。這樣的重整化、精簡化使得思考更有效率。因此，我們可以說們的智力就存在於這些強化後的神經的結構。