Research Spinal chord neurons learn without the brain + Can math deal with consciousness?

[C C]

Spinal chord neurons learn without the brain
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1040729

EXCERPTS: Scientists have discovered the neural circuitry in the spinal cord that allows brain-independent motor learning. Published in Science on April 11, the study found two critical groups of spinal cord neurons, one necessary for new adaptive learning, and another for recalling adaptations once they have been learned. The findings could help scientists develop ways to assist motor recovery after spinal cord injury.

[...] “Not only do these results challenge the prevailing notion that motor learning and memory are solely confined to brain circuits,” says Takeoka, “but we showed that we could manipulate spinal cord motor recall, which has implications for therapies designed to improve recovery after spinal cord damage.” (MORE - details, no ads)

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Language doesn’t perfectly describe consciousness. Can math?
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24125...fable-math

INTRO: The idea that language is a clumsy, imperfect tool for capturing the depth and richness of our experiences is ancient. For centuries, a steady stream of poets, philosophers, and spiritual practitioners have pointed to this indescribability, the difficult fact that our experiences are ineffable, or larger than what words can communicate.

But as a frenzy of developments across AI, neuroscience, animal studies, psychedelics, and meditation breathe new life into consciousness research, scientists are devising new ways of, maybe, pushing our descriptions of experience beyond the limits of language. Part of the hope behind what mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner recently termed the “structural turn in consciousness science” is that where words fall short, math may prevail.

“My view is that mathematical language is a way for us to climb out of the boundaries that evolution has set for our cognitive systems,” Kleiner told Vox. “Hopefully, [mathematical] structure is like a little hack to get around some of the private nature of consciousness.”

For example, words could offer you a poem about the feeling of standing on a sidewalk when a car driving by splashes a puddle from last night’s rain directly into your face. A mathematical structure, on the other hand, could create an interactive 3D model of that experience, showing how all the different sensations — the smell of wet concrete, the maddening sound of the car fleeing the scene of its crime, the viscous drip of dirty water down your face — relate to one another.

Structural approaches could provide new and more testable predictions about consciousness. That, in turn, could make a whole new range of experimental questions about consciousness tractable, like predicting the level of consciousness in coma patients, which structural ideas like Integrated Information Theory (IIT) are already doing.

But for my money, there will always be a gap between even the best structural models of consciousness and the what-it’s-like-ness of the experiences we have. Mica Xu Ji, a former post-doctoral fellow at the Mila AI Institute and lead author of a new paper that takes a structural approach to making sense of this longstanding fact of ineffability, thinks ineffability isn’t a bug, it’s a feature that evolution baked into consciousness... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

The thought has occurred to me that maybe nerves can be conscious. We feel the warmth of the fire on the palms of our outstretched hands, and there it is--the sensation, the feel, the "what it's likeness" of consciousness, right there where the heat meets our skin. I guess a neurologist would say we only feel that sensation because the brain puts it there, transmits its happening thru the nerves of our arms and out there on the surface of our palms. Consciousness it seems is not so easily pinned down. It is never just here nor there, but ever spreading out in a panoply of sparking and tingling interactions.