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Re: Well, yahbut...

True, we know that neurochemical response times are limited by the transmission time across the synaptic gap to the order of .5 to 2mS. By comparison, the propagation of action potentials is much faster. Look again at:

http://www.innerworlds.50megs.com/consciousness.htm

"...an action potential can travel a full centimeter (a couple of orders of magnitude larger than a synaptic gap) in about 1.3 msec. The brain's electrical responses, therefore, happen orders of magnitude more quickly than do it's chemical ones (10)."

But that's just the tip of the iceberg:

"In what could turn out to be one of the most important discoveries in cognitive studies of our decade, it has been found that there are five million magnetite crystals per gram in the human brain (1). Interestingly, The meninges, (the membrane that envelops the brain), has twenty times that number. These ‘biomagnetite' crystals demonstrate two interesting features. The first is that their shapes do not occur in nature, suggesting that they were formed in the tissue, rather than being absorbed from outside. The other is that these crystals appear to be oriented so as to maximize their magnetic moment, which tends to give groups of these crystals the capacity to act as a system....This system, we speculate, is what makes the selection of which neural areas to recruit, so that States (of consciousness) can elicit the appropriate phenomenological, behavioral, and affective responses."

What does this mean in terms of feedback?

"Changes in state make changes in sensory and cognitive modalities, and they in turn, trigger changes in state. We can reasonably conclude that there is a feedback mechanism whereby each modality is connected to the others."

So we have all these different modalities connected simultaneously as a system linked by feedback loops. What is the upshot?

"Magnetic signals are propagated with much greater speeds than those of action potentials moving through neurons. Contemporary physics requires that magnetic signals be propagated at a significant fraction of the velocity of light, so that the entire brain could be exposed to a neuromagnetic signal in vanishingly small amounts of time....We might also conclude that neuromagnetic signaling is the context in which consciousness occurs."

Not known with certainty yet, so I can't claim an ironclad argument, BUT, there is no particular reason why feedback cannot operate predictably at high speeds. The GPS, for example, is a system of high-speed feedback controlling smart bombs.




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