A New Theory of How Consciousness Evolved
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
>The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom–up influence and partly under top–down control. We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience.
Kind of makes sense to me - that the mechanism that forms a model of your body or a place map or whatever also forms a model of your mental setup of senses, memories and the like.
Sleep / dream memory formation seems like a much more reasonable argument. Sleep without activity can simply tone down brain activity. But, if activity happens during REM sleep you need a brain / body abstraction to avoid sleepwalking via sleep paralysis. At that point you have lot's of brain structures for simulating things that can be run while your awake.
Sleep as a means to conserve energy > Sleep as a means to aid learning (replay events for different types of memory formation) > Sleep as a means to simulate options > Simulating options while awake.
It might be, but we'll never know from mere snark.
However, I feel like if such p-zombies did exist, there would be far more significant differences, so I feel like some people just having intellectual difficulty with the idea is more likely.
What other significant differences would you expect?
(Also is this some kind of conciousness Calvinism?)
What do you mean by the Calvinism question? Whether the real existence of human p-zombies would parallel the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and there being only a subset of humans who are the elect chosen for paradise? If so.. yeah, maybe?
I was kind of throwing out a vague idea/similarity without really thinking it through there...
More specifically though, the Calvinist idea that the chosen people are the only ones who will ever be able to understand God. (AIUI)
As such, most scientifically-trained individuals will simply refuse to treat "qualia" as a real concept. And they've got a point! Something with little to no causal role (remember, epiphenomenalism of the kind necessary for "p-zombies" to be possible requires that consciousness has zero causal role whatsoever), something that can be "observed" in only one way and which is not even fully observable in that way (because no counterfactuals can be had)? Yes, to a well-trained mind that sounds like nonsense.
The idea that qualia are some non-physical, non-functional soul-stuff seems like nonsense to basically everyone who isn't a trained philosopher of mind, and half the people who are. P-zombies are worse, because they seem to assume epiphenomenalism, at which point you've turned "consciousness" into something that doesn't even play a causal role.
>If you do experience qualia, if there is "something that it's like" to be you
Yes, I've noted that you can take one word and replace it with its definitions or synonyms. That does nothing to explain what the word points to in specific, of course, so you still have the problem that the things I refer to as experiences, as what it's like to be me, could be sufficiently different in nature from what you personally call qualia as to not even be the same thing. We need common examples or points of comparison in order to have a clear, precise intersubjective definition of the word.
Like, if you keep talking about your "fruit", and I keep talking about my "fruit", and you mean your car but I mean my office chair, we have a severe problem with our discourse -- even if we both supposedly agree that "fruit" plainly exists.
Sight aside, who said the mind "constructs a schematic model of the body"?
And the only reason it can work without it when it comes to my own arms and legs etc, is because I get touch, air resistance, etc feedback from them.
And even then it comes to my own body, it doesn't work as good as when with vision included -- try shaving with closed eyes for an easy example.
You say it like it's some kind of preposterous claim.
"In humans, it is provided by proprioceptors in skeletal striated muscles (muscle spindles) and tendons (Golgi tendon organ) and the fibrous capsules in joints."
"A major component of proprioception is joint position sense, which is determined by measuring the accuracy of joint–angle replication. Clinical aspects of joint position sense are measured in joint position matching tests that measure a subject's ability to detect an externally imposed passive movement, or the ability to reposition a joint to a predetermined position. These involve an individual's ability to perceive the position of a joint without the aid of vision."
Meta-cognition or any other natural process might be "the same thing" as conciousness; but is nontheless a physical thing that somehow has qualia. Where that equivalence comes from is an interesting question that Dennet & co. seem determined to dodge.
Qualia are a great shorthand but they aren't even shown to exist in any real capacity other than the euphemistic way they are defined.
The fact that qualia lead to incoherent rubbish like p-zombies should be enough to place the concept solidly in the same place as most of Deepak Chopra's ramblings.
But in a discussion with poeple who have it least heard the term, saying "qualia" is a lot clearer than stumbling about with terms like "subjective reality", "bare expereince" and whatever.
But those who determined to dodge Chalmers' hard problem can always choose to say "bare expereince, I don't know what you mean!" It's still a just a dodge.
"Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality."
So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge.
Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals.
>> So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge.
It's the only logical hypothesis we can have at the moment, but it doesn't mean it's the only solution. There could be properties of matter that maybe need to be simulated at a lower level that have to be present that we're not aware of.
If the brain simulates reality, why does our experience seem so 'atomic'? Like that simulation is so small in scale that our brain can basically simulate any visual field, hear any sound, feel any combination of textures on the skin and so on. There doesn't seem to be any abstraction in the simulation itself, but rather it is created by the nerves and retina on point of 'capture' in the sensory apparatus and then the brain is able to project it to the mind.
In other words it seems like each individual neuron / nerve is 'conscious' and then any arbitrary combination of activations in those neurons can create the subjective simulation of reality. I'm not sure if that's true from a scientific perspective or what the implications are if it's true, but this bottom-up simulation is far more powerful than a top-down one where details would be lost, and simulations usually start top-down, especially since the universe came first, and then our brain came later. It's basically inconceivable to us how a signaling system is conscious versus how it is not conscious but still receives signals, like a CCD chip in a camera can have a high resolution and show an accurate image of reality.
Do you mean very detailed? Have you read about the Fovea, and saccades and so on? You might be surprised to learn that the part of our retinas that can discern detail is very small - if you hold your thumb up at arms length the detailed part of your retina is about twice the width of your thumbnail. Everything else is lower resolution. And your eye jumps around in saccades - but you don't notice the constant movement.
But it doesn't seem like that does it? Essentially what we have here is an abstraction that we are completely unaware of most of the time.
So I put it to you that our consciousness does contain abstraction, but that abstraction is not obvious to us. Because what do we have to compare against?
Of course it seems super detailed to us.
Not necessarily, although I could argue you need detailed sensory organs to have a complex mental model but that's beside the point. What I meant by atomic was approximately what I said above - that it feels like individual nerves are conscious, like a mental field, and then you can fill that field with any arbitrary activation patterns and it will register in conscious experience. A lot of it won't activate _other_ things like emotions, memories, words and associations, but those aren't necessary for it be in conscious experience still.
I'm just struggling a bit with a 'computational' model of consciousness where there is this big abstraction process in the brain, while at the same time seeming so closely connected to the world and vast in possibilities. The way it seems to me is, the brain doesn't get sensory input of a chair, and then it has a preconceived notion of the chair in the brain, and then the brain projects the chair onto consciousness, but rather, the brain can see everything, and then with a more connected neural network, we can attach the 'chair stimuli' to other neural pathways, giving the chair a deeper meaning.
I know that after we have learned the meaning of some object in the world, _then_ the brain can have an automatic response to it, and that would be an abstraction that works in the higher areas of the brain, but we could still see the thing consciously before we were scared of it.
In that scenario consciousness comes first, and then meaning is built outward by connecting neural pathways together into networks of meaning, which is how I feel the world is anyway. In that scenario you'd need some kind of module that gives consciousness to all experience, and then abstraction is built in the neocortex or something after that.
Also to address your question - you are right, we can't compare this to anything, so we are stuck in our own conceptions, so maybe this is all moot ;
It doesn't, you p-zombie ;-)!
Seriously, though: my conscious experience of the world (what I'm subjectively aware of) is continuous (in the sense of modeling the world as continuous in time and space dimensions), but it's updated by messages from my sensory cortices at discrete intervals. So it's a continuous model updated at discrete intervals, which sounds screwy and is because it amounts to the brain "retconning" my experience of reality fast enough that I don't catch it in the act, because the best abstraction over my sensory data is that the world is actually continuous at human-scale.
Which probably sounds incredibly confusing and would be a 4-page paper if I had to actually make it convincing. Goddamnit not again.
I don't care for the word simulate because it implies our minds attempt to faithfully model the physical world (which isn't to say we don't in some cases). I think if you're going to make this argument, it might be better to call it the process of inference (using a particular and individual model) about the physical world.
I can imagine that the nature of conciousness might mean they're not possible, but that doesn't make the concept incoherent.
There's no difference between behaving identically and behaving identically and experiencing it. Because if you ask a p-zombie to describe what it experiences (what you feel, etc..) and they tell you that they experience nothing, then there's indeed a difference, so their behavior is not identical, if they lie, then we can spot that with an fMRI, or eventually they somehow have extra information (so they are magical zombies, so eveything is possible).
Because you experience it? If you do..
The difference between the idea of qualia and the other properties that we granted special status to and then later refuted, is that in the latter cases we were trying to explain something external that we thought we were observing, whereas with subjective experience we are discussing a phenomenon that we (or at least some of us) directly, infallibly observe. It is not possible for me to be mistaken about whether there is something it is like to be me; it is not possible for me to be mistaken about whether what I experience is what I experience. It is possible for me to be mistaken about whether there is something it is like to be you, because I cannot directly observe your internal experience.
There's no distinction. When I see what looks like a broken pencil sitting in a glass of water, I am observing exactly what I describe. The reason the pencil looks broken is not because I should grant water some magical powers to break and reconstitute pencils, but turned out to be refracted light.
Analogously, I can observe that I do have subjective experience, but why should I assume that the reason I have subjective experience is different than all other observables? Why would it be some irreducible, unobservable quality?
You seem to be claiming that the existence of subjective experience is reason enough alone, and I don't see how that follows.
We're not talking about the reason, we're talking about the experience itself. Maybe that experience occurs as the result of physical processes, but it's still a separate thing.
Arguing that qualia don't exist because you can't observe them externally is like a blind person arguing that I can't possibly see a broken pencil because they can feel the pencil is solid.
This is what makes me wonder whether some of us are, in fact, p-zombies: only a blind person, someone who doesn't have visual experiences, could argue that visual experience doesn't exist, and similarly it seems that only someone who doesn't have subjective experience could argue that it doesn't exist. And there do appear to be people arguing that subjective experience doesn't exist. Either I'm misunderstanding them, I'm failing to see the third way, or some of us are indeed p-zombies.
To say something doesn't really exist is to say that it doesn't have metaphysical status on par with matter. If you say that consciousness really, fundamentally exists, then you're saying that it has the same status in reality as the fundamental particles of physics. We should expect to find some consciousness field and particles upon which it acts; or you would have to posit something like panpsychism which suggests that consciousness is an intrinsic property of all matter.
Consciousness not really existing implies that it's an illusion, in the same way that cars, and jobs and countries are an illusion. Certainly they "exist" in some colloquial sense, but they don't exist in a fundamental metaphysical sense.
I understood this to mean that you were doubting whether subjective experience actually exists, and I responded by arguing that it is not possible to doubt that your own subjective experience exists since you (I, at least) experience it directly, which is different than the class of now-refuted inferences that you were comparing it to in. I was not making any argument about where it comes from or what causes it.
And so it is with consciousness. We certainly have consciousness, but to then immediately assign consciousness special ontological status distinct from matter, ie. dualism at worst or panpsychism at best, is a huge leap that requires justification.
I don't know whether physicalism is true. It certainly seems like the best overall account of the universe that we currently have, but if there is a chink in physicalism's armor, consciousness might be it. Might. But, you're right, there's a huge leap between "might" and "is".
The young man happens to be mute. If he could speak, he would tell you he did it on purpose, and was glad he killed your child. But he's mute. You will never know he meant to do it.
Does his (unobservable) intent make any difference to you?
Here's a tricky one: did I ate spaghetti three years ago? You don't know and very probably you'll never know, but it's an empirical question nonetheless, and who knows, maybe tomorrow you'll think of a way to actually find out, or you'll stumble on some evidence you didn't know was there.
Only in so far as one's intent describes one's view of others. Malicious intent of the sort you describe entails danger towards others, which is observable.
The concept is used as an argument against physicalism, because it might be logically possible (concievable).
Maybe I'm just testifying about how closed my mind is, but to me the answer is a simple no, they are not [not even coherent], end of debate, go think about ethics, at least that seems hard.
Dualists are so full of abstract possibilities since Descartes that they are somehow overlooking the difference between imagination-fueled word-soup of consciousness and real problems of consciousness.
Qualia is the noise in our cognition when our brain tries to make sense of the noise in our feelings when we try to consider what's this feeling consicous thing.
It's real, and it's nothing, and it's pretty personal, because some people don't really care about it, others build entire philo departments on it :)
I don't see it as an argument against anything, it's just an interesting philosophical hypothetical made plausible by our inability to observe conciousness.
I could certainly see an argument that they're not that interesting on a more practical level (since by definition, we can never apply any conclusions made about them) but I don't understand the suggestion that they're logically incoherent.
Either couciousness is the result of physical processes or it is the result of magic. If it is the result of physical processes there is no hard problem. If it is a result of magic then just come out and say you believe I magic.
I'm not sure if a less true statement has ever been uttered. My guess is no.
Why is it the result of magic? Because you can't understand it?
Consciousness is not a physical thing. If you insist on calling everything outside of physics magic, I'm fine with that, it's just terminology.
Citation needed. You can't prove that, and the only honest answer right now is "we don't know how it works, though we have some clues."
By the way, this is not an opinion or just an idea that I like, after a lot of thinking I see it as the only worldview that makes sense, i.e. it can be "proven" (in a very loose sense of that word).
Given that peopel can experience phantom 'qualia' when their brains have direct electrical stimulation there is no evidence that counciousness comes from magic and every evidence that it comes from the staggering complexity of the brain.
Yes, based on the rest of science, that seems likely. My point is that I have no idea how that can possibly work, on a fundamental level. I have no idea what kind of physical system could exist inside the brain to cause my conscious experience to occur.
The only way I can conceive of a system to explain it is adding a new rule that says "When X pattern occurs, it experiences conciousness".
It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia.
Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings.
The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.
Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.
We could have them now if we equipped all vehicles and pedestrians using roads with simple device to broadcast position, velocity, and planned route.
And "total lack of socialization" can instead be a full blown cooperative driving network of cars that inform one another for their course.
All of the things you mentioned can (and most have) been solved even in the current bunch of self-driving cars.
A toddle stepping into the street? A modern self-driving car sensor can "see" it better than the average driver -- and it doesn't even have to involve actual vision.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against exactly. Actual current research problems with self-driving-car vision are totally different (e.g. disambiguating signals when raining or snowing etc). And nothing insurmountable about these either.
>that dude X thinks he ought to be able to go first or simply doesn't give a shit what the car thinks
Whatever he thinks, if it translates to an actual action in his car, other automatic cars can respond to it in the blink of an eye.
Explicitly programming scenarios in is not how it really works.
>How much of it have we mapped, and how well does the machine cover it?
Enough for Google cars for example to have logged over 300K miles in actual conditions with no incidents.
Also enough to have such things (besides Google's) in pilot operation in several cities the world other, for things ranging from cargo transport to mass transportation (self-driving busses).
It's not like "programming the scenario in" is some huge switch/case statement that needs to cover all possible arrangements of things on the street -- it's machine learning algorithms with several rules and invariants to check and various corrective responses when those are off, and the smartness comes from the combinations of such rules.
>machines will remain shitty drivers because they can't respond with creative judgment to a new situation.
The think is, with the appropriate machine learning algorithms they can both add experience and respond with creative judgement to new situations -- they don't have to have hardcoded responses to them from the start.
Here is an example of the car failing for precisely the sorts of reasons I describe above.
So he made the same assumption as the car did. So what else could it do, magically guess?
Self-driving cars are not infallible -- they model the same assumptions we do. But a benefit is that they can also react much faster than we do -- which won't always save the day of course: if some idiot driving against the traffic, for example, suddenly appears in front of such a car, they will still be an accident in all probability.
As have thousands of actual human drivers -- and worse.
The human driver also said that he thought the bus would do the same thing the car "brain" thought it would.
>You are being a credulous fanatic, and I am done.
Oh, the irony.
Intelligence isn't about a giant list of arbitrary if then statements though. Think of artificial neural networks. They learn behaviors from experience and reinforcement. They take actions they predict will lead to reward.
How is that fundamentally different than what humans do? I mean our brains algorithms are probably much more complex, but the principles should be the same. Shocking a neural net with negative reward, and it will strongly desire to avoid that again. How is that different than pain?
Add on a bunch of hard wired goals and behaviors more complicated than "pain" and "reward", and you have yourself a conscious being. Not fundamentally different than a human.
Because we feel the pain, why? Does neural net feel anything?
However, the evidence for materialism is that many different consciousnesses exist, and seemingly come into being and cease during the temporal process of the physical world. That would seem to suggest that the consciousnesses are functions of the physical world, rather than vice versa. (Unless you're a solipsist?)
By the way, one important argument I forgot to mention that leads to a possible way to define the "third-party" / objective consciousness (in the last point):
- Consciousness is not physical.
- Physical brain can obviously affect the state of consciousness.
- Can consciousness affect the physical brain though? I believe yes, because otherwise we would not be talking about this, I would not write here about consciousness not being physical. However, I'm less convinced about this than the above.
- The consequence is that we should be able to observe something fishy going on in the brain, for example supposedly random quantum processes not being random, which would "break" current physical laws.
- Brains with this fishy behavior are conscious. A fun theory - most likely wrong though - is that you can "tune" / connect physical systems to a consciosness by arranging them in specific way or whatever. And during evolution, the brain has learned to do that, because it was evolutionary advantageous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism
>We imagine other people have consciousness because they act like us. We could define consciousness in a non-solipsistic, objective way, but it would be a fundamentally different thing.
I think most people would say conciousness just refers to the experience of qualia, which doesn't require redefinition to allow other people to have it.
>Can consciousness affect the physical brain though? I believe yes, because otherwise we would not be talking about this
I don't think it's necessary. We could essentially be p-zombies, but with a mind along for the ride. We experience making decisions but that's just a projection of the physical brain's processes.
What about hunger and others? Your body and brain evolved to a current state which releases chemical substances to signal to other parts of body what's going on. Here cut arm is signaling with pain it's hurt and this will/may (after many layers of reduction) hamper your survival chances, thats why you have such signaling in place.
In essence, your pain feeling (and others 'high feelings like love/child etc') is no different than automatic closing your eyes because your eyelashes touched something or you moving out of warm environment because it's not comfort anymore to you or you drinking some water because you're thirsty (BTW try to trink about how that 'I'm thirsty' thought just appeared in your brain - who did it? ;) ).
The same as pain in principle, it's just a type of feeling. Physics can't not only explain them, it can't even define them, because they're subjective experiences.
> Your body and brain evolved to a current state which releases chemical substances to signal to other parts of body what's going on. Here cut arm is signaling with pain it's hurt and this will/may (after many layers of reduction) hamper your survival chances, thats why you have such signaling in place.
I'm sorry, but this is completely irrelevant. When I discuss this people always describe what happens in the human body when we feel pain and how it's evolutionary advantageous - I don't get what's the point of that.
What's happenning in the body when we feel pain is not the question. The problem is why do we feel pain when those physical processes happen. Or more specifically, why do we feel pain when the physical particles in the brain are in certain configurations.
Negative reward (that's an oxymoron lol, let's call it punishment) is an action that leads to an unpleasant feeling such as pain, fear, hunger, etc.
If you shock it, it will experience a strong desire to avoid being shocked again. If you give it other instincts like "cry when experiencing a negative reward" and "focus all your attention on the source of pain to avoid distraction", etc, it starts to look much more human like too.
We can't even define the feeling of pain, let alone decide whether a neural net feels it.
> If you shock it, it will experience a strong desire to avoid being shocked again. If you give it other instincts like "cry when experiencing a negative reward" and "focus all your attention on the source of pain to avoid distraction", etc, it starts to look much more human like too.
Why would it experience anything? Why would a computer with specific values in its registers feel pain? Would I cause real pain by setting the CPU registers and memory into a specific state?
I never claimed there was an agreed on definition. But I think this is closer to one.
>Why would a computer with specific values in its registers feel pain? Would I cause real pain by setting the CPU registers and memory into a specific state?
Yes, obviously. The neural net would register your actions as an extremely negative experience, and do everything in it's power to get you to stop. How is that different than torturing a person?
It's possible neural nets do experience pain, but we have no way of knowing that (any more than we do of knowing that other humans do).
I'm claiming the neural net does experience pain. It's not merely a reaction, like screaming "ow!" It's actually experiencing it.
Internally, the neural net would experience directing its attention at the source of the pain, a deep desire to avoid it, and everything else that humans do.
>It's possible neural nets do experience pain, but we have no way of knowing that (any more than we do of knowing that other humans do).
That's just silly. Clearly pain, like everything else, must be a real physical thing that exists and can be observed.
If it's a real process that is casually connected to us and the universe, that is. If it's not real or causally connected to us, then how can it exist or be relevant?
Actually the neural net would just adjust some weights, i.e. make some calculations. No pain and no conscious "avoiding with everything in its power" either.
Or if there is, the burden on proof is on you.
Yes and your brain does the exact same thing. If you are claiming the brain does magical non physical, non logical things, then the burden of proof is on you.
Also, the neural net evolves to meet an objective -- a purpose -- bestowed upon it by an outside power. Do you believe this is true of humans too?
Of course you should be though. At least if we are asserting the neural net was advanced enough to be sufficiently human like. Torturing simulations of humans is no different than torturing actual humans.
>Also, the neural net evolves to meet an objective -- a purpose -- bestowed upon it by an outside power. Do you believe this is true of humans too?
The neural net serves humans the same way humans serve evolution.
If there's ever a "definition", it would be something like - pain is what I feel when this neuron gets activated. Not really a definition though.
> Yes, obviously. The neural net would register your actions as an extremely negative experience, and do everything in it's power to get you to stop. How is that different than torturing a person?
You could also create an analog computer that uses the position of pieces of sand instead of a memory. Does positioning the sand in a specific way cause pain? In fact, there are pretty much infinitely many ways you could encode the memory in sand positions (or atom or molecule positions). So are there infinitely many feelings of pain and joy around us?
I would define it more like shocking a neural net with negative reward. A specific kind of learning process that learns to avoid a specific kind of situation, that's pain.
>Does positioning the sand in a specific way cause pain?
Of course not, because sand isn't a computer. The sand isn't doing any computation. It's static and unchanging.
But if you actually made a computer out of sand, and you ran it, then yes, running the computer would be causing pain.
How about pigs? Pigs are smarter than dogs on many levels, but we're largely okay with slaughtering them for food and not dogs. They haven't been bred to look cute.
Do bugs? Bugs are much simpler than mammals, but they also exhibit aversion to pain.
Have you squashed a bug before?
What I'm getting at is this: we have more empathy for those who look like us. This applies even among humans if you look at results from IATs.
I'm not being sarcastic here. Maybe there are people that don't have subjective experience, just like there are people that can hear colors.
You're assuming the conclusion that consciousness isn't just processing external stimuli with internal state to generate output signals, just a particular form of it.
Yes, that is my assumption, because that is what I observe (only in my own mind, of course – I don't know how to observe it in others). I'm not alone, many (most? all?) people are claiming to observe that.
1. It isn't a valid observation, because you don't actually observe that consciousness is not part of the process of processing external stimuli. At best, you can observe that consciousness exists.
2. It isn't a valid conclusion even if it were a valid observation. Or do you also conclude that water magically breaks pencils and reconstitutes them when they are removed [1]?
[1] http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get/I0000KUS4vG.ZoqQ/s/860...
To me, experience itself is fundamentally a separate thing from any process that might cause it to occur, and I don't know how to conceive of it any other way.
That you cannot conceive of it does not make it inconceivable. In fact, scientific theories [1] exist to explain exactly the functional purpose of consciousness.
[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
True, but I find it sufficiently difficult to conceive of that I'm not convinced anyone else can. If you claim to be able to, can you explain it to me?
To me, saying experience "is" brain processing is like saying the image on the screen at a cinema "is" projector operation. One may cause the other, but they're still separate things.
> scientific theories [1] exist to explain exactly the functional purpose of consciousness.
But that doesn't explain the mechanism for conciousness to occur, it just explains why it might exist.
It does explain the mechanism actually. The mind builds representations for predictive purposes, it builds a representation of attention because that increases predictive power in achieving goals, a representation of attention is consciousness.
Certainly it's not sufficiently detailed such that you can build one, but that's not really needed to make it conceivable.
You seem to be describing that step as "representation of attention", but I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean.
Certainly it's lacking in sufficient detail to build an artificial consciousness, but it's not lacking in empirical data and testable hypotheses. It's also a perfect example of how subjective experience could be an illusion that exists, and yet still convince us that it's in some sense fundamental.
Hmm, what if both, the physical mechanism and the subjective qualia are simply intertwined in a way, that can not be deduced any further?
Maybe it's a little like the relation between gravitational forces and curved space time. Both are basically the same thing. But if you're used to live in one system, it's hard to imagine how it feels to see things from the other perspective.
Still there may be a lot of value to the complementary theory. Much like the GTR opened up a whole new range of physical applications, a physical theory of consciousness may lead to computer systems that we will have to attribute being conscious the same way as we do with our fellow human beings - just because both will follow the same fundamental laws of consciousness.
Now it's possible neither of those things can actually exist, but the fact that I can imagine them demonstrates the distinction I'm making.
Hmm, really? How? To be honest, I can't. Honestly I think this is just a meaningless mind trick. The more I think about it, the less the notion of a p-zombie really makes sense to me. If a p-zombie existed, and I could never really tell the difference from the outside, this gives rise to many blind-alley-models of the world, for example solipsism: Maybe all others are just p-zombies and maybe I'm the only thing that really exists in the sphere of consciousness (=soul?). I can never know for sure. But if it's true, then there's not really much room for any further discussion.
So I have to assume that everything that behaves like being conscious in fact has a consciousness - even if it isn't even aware of its being conscious.
And the point isn't whether such a thing is physically possible in our universe, merely that being able to conceive of such a thing identifies the distinction we're drawing. There is a notion of experience separate from the physical process that may cause it, because for any such process, we can imagine a world where it does not actually experience anything.
Or being able to manipulate learned concepts. Like word2vec turns words into vectors that can be combined in complicated ways. E.g. words for colors will be different based on what the colors are associated with (e.g. red is associated with "danger", or green is associated with "nature", etc.)
Make this process much more complex, and intelligent, and then ask it what it "feels". It will probably give responses very similar to humans. It "feels" complicated internal experiences that it can't completely explain or understand.
It certainly wouldn't feel like it's "just combining stimuli with internal state to get output signals". Being an algorithm doesn't feel like you are an algorithm, from the inside.
Being able to mimic a human's behavior is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having subjective experience.
> Being an algorithm doesn't feel like you are an algorithm, from the inside.
How do you know that? How do you know that an algorithm "feels" anything at all, the way humans do?
I think that's not the point he tried to make. It's just that it happens that we're human and thus it's easier for us to relate to human-like experiences/feelings. An algorithm is not limited to that.
If we accept that our "feeling like something" is just an emergent phenomenon of our complex model of reality I see no logical reason why we shouldn't ascribe any sufficiently complex model of reality an inherent feeling. Due to our limited physical configuration we will never have access to all kinds of feelings. Much like we will never know how it feels like to be a bat.
I am arguing that it is. Once you move past the "giant lookup table" idea to actual algorithms that explain human behavior. In fact once you find the smallest such algorithm, it must necessarily be an exact simulation of a human brain, and all of our internal experience.
>How do you know that an algorithm "feels" anything at all, the way humans do?
It must feel exactly the same way humans do if it produces exactly the same output.
Hold on. Did you just claim that people with aphantasia (ie: possibly an inability to feed causal models from someplace (probably the neocortex? IANANS, just work with some) back to the visual cortex and get the visual cortex's "portrayal" of the conditional simulation embodied in the model) have no subjective experience?
What if someone has no "inner eye", but does have "inner ears", an "inner tongue", "inner hands" and all the rest? Or do you group all possible "inner senses" used for imagining "what something is like" into "qualia" without separating them into distinct functionalities that are in bijection with the available physical senses?
Because you might have actually said something interesting here!
I don't think so. I wasn't talking about imagination (as in: thinking of a cube and rotating it in your mind), but rather about experiencing the input from my physical eyes. It's as if there's someone inside my head that experiences and feels what I physically see. Of course, this doesn't help: the homunculus model is thoroughly debunked. [1]
> Or do you group all possible "inner senses" used for imagining "what something is like" into "qualia" without separating them into distinct functionalities that are in bijection with the available physical senses?
There are qualia like anxiety or restlessness that are not linked to physical senses, so that's a no on the bijection. I have no idea whether those "inner eyes, ears, etc." that link imagination to physical senses are related to qualia – it's so difficult to imagine myself into different minds. Besides, coming up with an objective, clear, non-recursive definition for subjective experience is way above my paygrade.
Another random thought that I just had: People with depression sometimes hurt themselves physically, because that's the only way they can still feel something (according to them). Maybe this is related to a dampened subjective experience, which allows only extreme inputs to be experienced?
No, you only imagine that. And I'm being serious: people who aren't brought up being told that consciousness is like having a little homunculus in your head simply never feel "as if" there was one.
>There are qualia like anxiety or restlessness that are not linked to physical senses, so that's a no on the bijection.
I would normally call those emotions rather than qualia. Hmmm. Would you say the "qualia-ness" of things comes from the internal perception that the "feelings" are external to the person who feels, and impinge on them?
>Another random thought that I just had: People with depression sometimes hurt themselves physically, because that's the only way they can still feel something (according to them). Maybe this is related to a dampened subjective experience, which allows only extreme inputs to be experienced?
But dampened affect (dampened emotional signaling in the brain) is already a known and seemingly somewhat understood symptom of depression.
So you're saying people brought up differently are p-zombies? Because that's the only way I can interpret that.
Feeling like there's a homonculous is fundamentally what experiencing the world is like for me, and has been since long before I was able to understand complex philosophical questions about conciousness.
No, I'm saying that people brought up differently actually identify our selves with our actual, physical bodies, and don't imagine/visualize a tiny little figurine in our head. We have a different experience of the world, not no experience.
To me it seems weirder to say, "When I get bitten by a dog, the little homunculus gets a loud alarm ringing in his little room saying, 'BITTEN BY DOG!'" than "When I get bitten by a dog, its teeth feel sharp and painful."
Interesting point, not everyone has an inner eye, see aphantasia.
Except this robot is inconceivable, because it would exceed the size of the universe. The conscious android becomes conceivable when you say its on the human scale and yet still exhibits the same behaviours.
> Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings.
This theory does explain the purpose of consciousness and qualia, as this poster explains:
Now consider that this sentence you're reading is 33 words long, so the number of permutations of such sentences is hundreds of orders of magnitude larger, on the order of 10^10000.
The visible universe is estimated to contain 10^80 particles, so even if you could encode a logic gate that could recognize a word in a single particle, it seems you're still just a tad short if you're looking to hard-code intelligent responses.
True understanding consists of building a model to generate new facts as needed, amounting to an impressive compression of facts you've already seen.
Also, you're assuming zero preprocessing and the vast majority of input meaningful input is reducible due to patterns. "The great big elephant, almost stepped on me." You separate each chunk and deal with them independently. Thus replace "The great big elephant" with Bob. "Bob, almost stepped on me." prevents N! word combinations.
You're changing the goalposts. The original post claimed to encode all language parsing and intelligent responses as a static set of if-statements; regardless of whether a sentence makes semantic sense, they must still be recognized in any combination in a fixed set of if-branches and responded to intelligently (like the question "why doesn't this sentence make sense?"). That's not feasible for the reasons I describe.
Parameterization like you describe is precisely the sort of model that an evolved intelligence would exhibit.
Further, the structure of if statements can encode abstractions not explicitly expressed.
A much more central issue is context is important. ex: "Yes." is much harder than "why doesn't sentence X make sense?"
I recognize the grandparent poster mentioned something about having enough if statements, but yea, thats not how its going to work.
But what happens when you start compressing that lookup table to an algorithm which is much smaller and produces the same output? It will almost certainly gain a complicated internal state. As you make it smaller and smaller to get to a reasonable size, it gets more like an actual human brain.
It will no longer be a static program - it will have to "learn" from experience and data. That would save a lot of hardcoded rules.
Eventually you will have the smallest possible program that produces the same output exactly. And it will probably be a perfect simulation of a human brain (if that is what you are trying to imitate.) It will produce exactly the same output as a human, and run exactly the same internal algorithm as a human. And now, how on Earth can you say it's not conscious?
So even if a robot and human had the same input-outmap mapping, one could be "coded" by "consciousness", the other by whatever humans invent as an algorithm. Maybe they will be identical, maybe they wont be. Im certainly not sure.
If it's actually "caused" by something, then that something must be a physical process which could be simulated. E.g. imagine there is some law of physics that says brains in a certain configuration will say they "feel consciousness" or whatever. That would be a real physical law we could simulate in a computer, and create a simulated brain which behaves exactly the same way.
If our behavior isn't caused by anything, if "consciousness" is casually disconnected from the world we live in, then it's irrelevant. It doesn't explain our behavior in any way, or have anything to do with us.
Actually doesn't have to exceed anything at all.
Parent described it as being able to react to every possible situation ever, but you can get the same effects by hard-coding reactions to just a few millions/billions of possible events/discussions that can happen inside a room (and with coarse definition of distinct events), and just let some person with it in a room for 1-2 hours.
Heck, people used to feel Elisa was real...
Honestly, I've always found any such construct absolutely trivial to identify. I've been able to stump every chatbot with my first question. No agent that doesn't actually understand would be able to pass a Turing test issued by a trained computer scientist, even if limited to 5 questions.
If not, how could you tell them from the "non understanding" robot?
I also think most robots would pass the "I couldn't tell its a robot" test with flying colors if they responded just like real people in the same settings as everyday conversations -- because those interactions are usually limited in scope, and you don't purposefully try to unmask those people with tricky questions.
Sure, my first question is always simple direct semantics test. Perhaps something like, what's the third word of this sentence if you start counting from the second word? Mitsuku chatbot that won the 2013 chatbot competition got this one right, but if I just slightly rephrased it to, "If I were to ask you what the third word of this sentence is if you started counting from the second word, what would you say?", it got it flat wrong despite having just answered it.
Reflective questions like this are good tests of understanding that are trivial for a person to answer, not so trivial for a system that doesn't truly understand what it's reading.
I do believe that the experience of consciousness is based in a model of consciousness in the brain. This also leads to our ability to form mental models of other beings, systems and processes which enable us to predict or form theories about their behaviour. It's this existence of a model of our mental world in the brain and our brain's interrogation and interaction with it that leads to concious experience. I don't know the details of how that works and I'm no Philosopher so maybe I'm over simplifying, but it seems to me that something along these lines is the most plausible theory.
Given this, the existence of such models in the processing system of a correspondent should be testable. You should be able to test the ability of the correspondent to form and generate models of itself, beings, processes and systems and interrogate and mutate those models. One example of such systems are games. My favourite ways to test a chat bot Turing Test style is to try and teach it a game or to introspect on itself and it's understanding and expectations of others. A correspondent that cannot form and process such models cannot be conscious, but if it can then if such models lead to consciousness, by definition it must be concious.
Maybe because we learn stuff before reacting a lot of the time. Say you want to learn some new sport, you might watch it a while to try to figure out what was going on before trying to play. It's going to be hard to figure out if you are not conscious. You could try saying a p-zombie could also be replaying the goal in its mind to figure how the goalie could have stopped it while not being conscious what it's thinking about but it kind of gets to be a bit of a stretch.
There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true.
Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is.
Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.
The most commonly agreed thing is the people agree they have first-person experiences. That this is "the basis of all science" is a fine example of how people jump from this highly value quality to any old thing - I've also heard that subjective experience refutes all materialism, shows humans aren't computers, proves the existence of God and so-forth.
You can say "that's the point of the hard problem", but that's as silly as making up a "hard problem of defining blegness". And insisting that I have "blegness" but refusing to define what I mean by that.
The problem of consciousness is a purely empirical question. That is we can examine the brain, and we can figure out how it works. We can find a set of rules that explains human behavior. In theory, we could even model human behavior so well that we can understand exactly why some people insist they have "consciousness". We could record the neurons that fire to produce that thought, and we can trace back to what structures because it.
And once such a detailed model exists, there is nothing left to explain! We would know exactly why people are saying they feel "conscious" or "blegness". There would be no need to introduce weird philosophies or supernatural beliefs.
We can't give solid definitions for anything without ultimately referencing some shared baseline of experience. So unless you're saying you don't experience qualia/conciousness, then it's as well defined as anything else is.
>We would know exactly why people are saying they feel "conscious" or "blegness".
But that still wouldn't explain the experience itself.
I don't see any evidence anyone experiences this, including myself. It's just nonsense.
>But that still wouldn't explain the experience itself.
How would it not? If you know exactly what causes people to say they "experience" there is no need to explain anything else.
That is a wildly incorrect characterization of the Hard Problem. Remember, Chalmers and most of the rest of the Hard Problemers fully admit that all the "merely" functional aspects of consciousness actually exist. They think that a p-zombie can in fact perform scientific experiments, reason about the world, figure out what time the bus will come, etc.
So in fact, first-person experience, as characterized in the Hard Problem, is not the basis of any science. Functional cognition is fully admitted to be the basis for every field of human domain knowledge, and it's also the object of study for cognitive scientists.
I.e. not Dualism.
I'd say that the hard problem of consciousness is above science, it's metaphysics, out of the scope of science. Because subjective experience is the only "thing" that exists and science is just a tool to systematically describe the subjective experience (what we perceive).
With a science-is-everything mindset, you will never "get" the hard problem of consciousness.
Just because we don't know how to specify what the problem is exactly doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist; it just means that we don't fully understand what the problem is. Denying that there's a problem to solve means we won't make any progress on it.
>The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality?
His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
"According to this theory, there is, of course, no actual mystery. Attention does have a real physical basis, but the mechanistic details of the process of attention are not included in the only relevant information to which the brain has access."
"This view, that the problem of subjective experience consists only in explaining why and how the brain concludes that it contains an apparently non-physical property, has been proposed before (Dennett, 1991). The attention schema theory goes beyond this idea in providing a specific functional use for the brain to compute that type of information. The heart of the attention schema theory is that there is an adaptive value for a brain to build the construct of awareness: it serves as a model of attention."
"A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence."
It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice?
On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
> Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes compare covert attention to a spotlight. (The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.) Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another.
very much put me in mind of an unusual book: A Life of One's Own (Marion Milner, 1934) - in particular, this:
At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought
faint patternings which can be brought to distinction
when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light
I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I
choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle
of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into
the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is.
But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can
widen or narrow it as I choose.[1]
The problem is that consciousness happens "now", but "now" has only a meaning in an inertial frame of reference, and simultaneity in physics depends on the chosen frame of reference.
To phrase it differently, you generally don't feel what you felt yesterday, or what you feel tomorrow. You only feel (or experience) what you are feeling at this very moment. But if one (mathematical) point in the brain is conscious, by the time it has communicated to another point in the brain, that "feeling" has been lost to time.
So either consciousness happens only at distinct (mathematical) points in the brain, or, somehow, consciousness can span a short non-zero time interval. You experience not just "now", but also briefly in the past and perhaps into the future.
This seems contradictory, so a better way of looking at it is needed.
The article takes "consciousness" to mean the contents of awareness, and not awareness (subjectivity) itself, so from my point of view it doesn't even begin to touch on the "hard problem".
One interesting clue is that, as you point out, subjectively "it" is always now and you are always here. Whatever "you" are, you're the origin-point in spacetime for the contents of your awareness.
This is true even when you are dreaming, which seems significant.
We know that phenomenon that are too fast or too slow cannot be perceived, and I think you're right that that indicates something important about how subjectivity functions.
A broader -- and much more speculative answer -- is that concious experience "is happening" (English tenses are not approriate for this discussion) all over the time-space. But at each point along the trajectory (history) of an intelligent being, there exists an unsually coherent, understandable description of a part of that experinece.
Our catch-all description for such descriptions is "what Mr X is experiencing now".
Well, if it doesn't? Rather, you have a statechange between two times and you don't know when the change happened any more exact than that.
The notion of the now is just a placeholder of a state, for future reference. It's an abstract idea anyhow. But thought arises from statechanges, seeing how nothing would happen if everything stayed the same.
You might find this experiment interesting [0] where a scanner can see that you've made a decision slightly before you're conscious of the fact that you've decided. Also Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang) has an interesting, if not especially scientific, post [1] looking at the brain and consciousness from something of a distributed systems (Erlang bread & butter) perspective you might find interesting. (That said, since I sometimes wake up 1-5 minutes before the alarm, I don't completely buy his explanation, but it's still an interesting read.)
[0] http://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ [1] http://joearms.github.io/2015/03/02/Waking-Up.html
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
To me it seems like the battle that Wittgenstein postulates was lost in the first place. Most philosophy is nitpicking about linguistic idiosyncracies without any real physical or metaphysical value.
Two questions:
* Are there any objections to the theory, apart from: but consciousness is magic?
* What are good resources to learn the history of the idea that complex brain activity emerges from neurons competing with each other?
The papers and work on this theory go on for years already and its due time it gains more/wider public attention, imo.
I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" just like heliocentric theories caused when they un-throned the earth-centric theories... we humans love magic, especially when we are told/we think to be magic, right?
Just look how some religion-influenced philosophers fight to obscure the simple fact that everything humans do and even "feel" (yes, also that "feeling" of the "existence of qualia" they have) can be explained with biology and evolution.
Humanists, however, already assuming all religious ideas are created only by humans, should not even be surprised.
Children are still fascinated by flying machines. Adults generally aren't as fascinated, just by having grown up with them, regardless of how well they understand them. But both groups know the machines are grounded in reality, as opposed to being "magic".
So no, I disagree. And I think it's irrelevant. The people who want to believe in science will be happy to expand their understanding (this is still theory). The people who don't will keep on believing whatever it is they believe. There are still people out there who think there's a god that raises the sun each morning and sets the moon at dawn, despite what science tells us.
http://www.nyas.org/events/Detail.aspx?cid=43d077ca-947f-4f4...
As soon as anything "prefers" any stimulus over another, I think consciousness becomes an emergent property.