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Comment by stupidcar | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that consciousness seems a lot less mysterious if you consider it as a feedback loop within the neocortex. We know that the brain takes raw sensory input and turns it, via a neural hierarchy of increasing abstraction, into a high-level, integrated model. We also know that there is a lot of additional neural connectivity, both across different sections of the neocortex, and from higher levels back to lower ones.

If you consider this diffuse connectivity not just as a regulation method, but as another form of sensory input, then it stands to reason that the brain would form an additional self-referential hierarchy of abstraction and pattern recognition based on its own internal state, and that this "sense", a literal self-awareness, would be very much like what we experience as consciousness.

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Self-awareness isn't the fundamental issue with consciousness. It's the colors, sounds, tastes, feels, etc. Why are those a problem? Because the physical world isn't colored, doesn't taste like anything, doesn't feel like anything, etc.

So somehow, a physical system - the brain, creates or is correlated with those conscious sensations. Explaining this in terms of physics, function, computation, math, etc is hard because those fields lack any such sensations. An equation doesn't feel heat or see red, nor do atoms bumping around in the void. So from whence do those conscious sensations come from? Do they spontaneously emerge somehow from the complexity of a nervous system? Is the right sort of flow of electricity result in the smell of a rose? Is it the right algorithm that implements consciousness, if you just arrange the bits just right?

The best I've been able to come up with is that what we think of as "color" or "sound" (and similar) are in fact our brain's model of those aspects of the physical world. Of course you're not experiencing the physical world directly, but your brain does have a representation of the world based on its sensory inputs.

You might be interested by the Sensorimotor Contingencies theory of O'Regan. Here's a summary [0]. I find it really convincing. He also wrote a book if you want to go deeper in the subject (the final draft version is available on his website [1]).

0: http://www.whatfeelingislike.net/tiki-index.php?page=The+Sen... 1: http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/

I think I disagree. The hard part is understanding why we have a sense of "self" one that can independently perceive it's place among the solar system and beyond.

The "colors, sounds, tastes, feels, etc" that you refer to can be seen as sensors that perceive narrow views of the various spectrums created by the energy bouncing around in the physical universe.

Examples:

- Hot vs. cold for a human is entirely different that hot vs. cold for a star.

- Color, from our perspective, is the spectrum of light that we need to utilize to effectively interact with our environment (different animals need and perceive different spectrums of light).

- Sound is a vibration that propagates as a [..] mechanical wave of pressure and displacement, through a transmission medium such as air or water. (taken from wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound)

My argument is that they do emerge, though not spontaneously. They are the emergent result of the neural abstraction hierarchy that the brain forms based on the sensory input it receives, and its own sense of that sensation. The "feel" of something is therefore a meta-sensation, a sense of what a sense is like, in comparison with another, within a neural abstraction that models the brain itself.

Like you said, colors, tastes, sounds, etc. aren't "real". They themselves are emergent phenomenon. A colour is arrangement of electromagnetic radiation, a sound is an arrangement of air molecules. And radiation and matter are themselves the emergent result of the interaction of even simpler forces. Often, the nature of the emergent phenomenon seems inexplicably complex in comparison with the basic interactions that give rise to it.

If you examine intelligent life, you can see that it sits at the top of a pyramid of emergent complexity, reaching down through biology, chemistry and physics into quantum physics. It would be very strange indeed if, at the very top of this pyramid, there was another complex phenomenon that somehow did not arise from the interaction of simpler parts beneath it.

Self referential loops in the brain may indeed be the mechanism for our sense of self awareness but to go on and say this makes consciousness any less mysterious is a non-sequitur.

How would any combination of neurons and interconnections between the neurons (feedback loops or not) explain the emergence of a subjective first person experience i.e. consciousness

This might be a confusion of words and not reality. If you define consciousness as self awareness then we are talking about two different things.

What do you imagine as the difference between consciousness and self-awareness?

My point is exactly that a subjective first-person experience is self awareness. The root of all conscious experience is an awareness of own awareness, a sense of our own senses, the difference between them, etc. I would challenge anyone to come up with a definition of conscious experience that does not, ultimately, boil down to a form of self-referential sensory input.

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