Pepperell, Robert. “How a trippy 1980s video effect might help to explain consciousness,” Interalia Magazine, October 2019.
https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/robert-pepperell-how-a-trippy-1980s-video-effect-might-help-to-explain-consciousness/
READING NOTES
- “Brains process energy, not information.”
- “Kinetic energy is a difference due to change or motion, and potential energy is a difference due to position or tension.”
- “actualised differences[…] do actual work and cause real effects in the world, as distinct from abstract differences (like that between 1 and 0)”
- “What is special about the conscious brain, I propose, is that some of those pathways and energy flows are turned upon themselves, much like the signal from the camera in the case of video feedback. This causes a self-referential cascade of actualised differences to blossom with astronomical complexity, and it is this that we experience as consciousness. Video feedback, then, may be the nearest we have to visualising what conscious processing in the brain is like.”
- “recent theories suggest that compounds including propofol[anaesthetic] interfere with the brain’s ability to sustain complex feedback loops in certain brain areas.”
- ” “reentrant” signals[…] are recursive feedback loops of neural activity that bind distant brain regions into a coherent functioning whole.” (gerald edelman)”
- “The primary function of the brain is to manage the complex flows of energy that we rely on to thrive and survive”
Related
robert pepperell – expand on flow (mary mcintyre)
Pepperell, R., Burleigh, A. & Ruta, N. (in press). Art and the Geometry of Visual Space, in Space-time Geometries in the Brain and Movement in the Arts, in the series “Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis” eds. T. Flash, A. Berthoz & A. Sarti, Berlin: Springer.
Pepperell, R. (2018). ‘Art, energy and the brain’. In Christensen, J. & Gomila, A. (eds.) The Arts and the Brain: Psychology and Physiology beyond Pleasure, Progress in Brain Research. Volume 237. London: Elsevier.
Pepperell, R. (2016). Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory, in Memory in the Twenty-first Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanitiesand Sciences, Sebastian Groes (ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 330-33.
Pepperell, R. (2015). Egocentric perspective: Depicting the body from its own point of view, Leonardo 48(5), pp. 424-429.