Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
This is especially troubling when you consider that meta-consciousness sells easily to the general public as "the hard problem" (our thorough use of it seemingly being a large part of what makes humans different, after all), while it's likely that it's more of an engineering problem after you've figured out base consciousness.
If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. Implementing recursive phenomenal access seems like an undergraduate research project after that. Yet it's most often the very thing we spend all our time focusing on. Frustrating. We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.
When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers for the sake of attaching their names to a publication, then it will see some progress.
Our bodies are largely autonomous with cells communicating via a variety of methods either pumping in/out chemicals to the cell itself or the immune system placing protein markers for other parts of the body (immune cells) to deal with bearing in mind that every cell in the body has a complete copy of the DNA.
One thing I have learnt about the body, is there is alot of redundancy built in for it's survival, every cell has a complete copy of the DNA which can be altered leading to cells not functioning properly, and there are a variety of means in which the consciousness can be alerted to problems which need addressing like hormone's or nerve messages.
Simply dropping 500Mg of niacin (the non flush variety) on an empty stomach demonstrates how quickly the prostaglandlins can be stimulated into action in many different parts of the body, not just the skin but internal organs like the lungs & liver. How aware you your consciousness is about these changes and effects is perhaps also an indicator of your consciousness, just like some people are more aware of their food cravings.
When considering food craving's & how pregnant women can suddenly start craving things like coal when they perhaps have never eaten it before also indicates some sort of memory that may have been passed on by their parents, or maybe there is some other subconscious mechanism which perhaps through the nose enables the body to identify a substance which contains chemicals which the body needs.
The fact our taste and enjoyment of food and drink is altered simply by light also indicates our consciousness is easily swayed over the logic or remembered/imagined experience.
Ultimately its hard to define what consciousness is exactly because when considering the blood brain barrier and how hard it is for some chemicals to reach the brain but not other's, is our consciousness largely just a collection of learned experiences where nature has utilised cholesterol into a storage medium and consciousness itself is just a memory of chemical & electrical responses in a variety of cells which certain feedback mechanisms like nerves, immune system cells and hormones the brain is able to remember and influence its behaviour as a result?
I doubt people involved in philosophy of the mind will ever be useful here. If one keeps up to date on neuroscience, they'll see a lot of progress being made, but none of it is coming from the "philosophy of the mind" people. Not only that, but the "philosophy of the mind" people don't even seem to be aware of much of what's happening in neuroscience.
There seems to be a certain "God of the gaps" aspect to how philosophy approaches science, where people pretend that philosophy is fundamental approach to a field which is working on a particularly large and difficult problem. So you see that philosophers often approach things like the human mind and quantum theory quite different from how they approach chemistry or non-mind physiology.
Which basically makes religion something like the original "science of philosophy"?
I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings being inaccessible to introspection.)
But our consciousness goes beyond simple self-awareness: having a theory of mind is a step beyond (and is realizing that others have a theory of mind a step beyond that?) Our own experience of our own consciousness is several steps removed from what a worm might experience.
> We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.
Yes; I think the words we use are definitely an issue, perhaps because we don't remember what it was like to be an aware, but not self-aware, infant. To some people, anything that responds to external stimuli is conscious, while to others on the other extreme, consciousness entails being able to verbalize it. This might be the only case where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is actually correct - that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.
In short, I think the author of the article made heavy weather of the issue by conflating consciousness with simple awareness, and not recognizing that meta-consciousness, and perhaps even an awareness of meta-consciousness, is an essential part of what distinguishes what is commonly meant by consciousness from mere awareness.
In case I haven't made myself clear, I don't think the hard problem of consciousness has been solved by invoking meta-consciousness; on the contrary, I think that is where the difficulty is most apparent.
That [and this] whole space [of considerations, here] appears to be fraught with circularities like this:
Step 1. Draw a distinction between consciousness and meta-consciousness.
Step 2. "From what vantage point, and with what 'machinery' do we make a distinction?"
Step 3. Go back to Step 1.
> .. that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.
I think I agree, otherwise I'm tempted to think that we would have already arrived, trivially, at some clearer kind of agreement about it.
It just crossed my mind that perhaps 'our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language' and '[consciousness'] workings being inaccessible to introspection' are the same thing.
I like to think about it that way, but it makes the problem feel intractable.
The problem is that we want to describe consciousness as "that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as 'that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as ´that thing that allows an organism to describe consciousness as [...]´'"
I wish I had something more substantive to add, but I have really come to think of this as a fundamental limit to thinking.
It's sort of analogous to starting with a set of axioms, then trying to derive explanations for these axioms from them.
This sounds defeatist, but I have yet to read a good argument for why trying to explain the "hard problem" is anything else than that. I guess you could see this in a sort of mystical light and build something spiritual around it, too...
The problem of looking at human consciousness is similar to someone that knows little about computer processors pulling apart an I7 and trying to figure meaningful things about what is going on inside. Without knowing the history of processor design, there will be huge information gaps on why some parts work the way they do.
That said, I believe consciousness is just world modeling, which explains the recursion problem you run into, a good model can simulate itself (nested Turing machines). As creatures evolved the ones that didn't just react, but could predict properly had better survival outcomes. Predictive models competed with each other and the 'best' ones survived, until after millions of years one branch of these models became complex enough to self reference itself.
I don't think the analogy is adequate. A processor is an object - it "objects" to all of us. It appears to have an existence independent of the thing that recognizes it as such. When we embark on an empirical investigation of something, we make a distinction between the scientific observer and the scientific object. We come to an agreement about the boundaries of the object. This does not appear to be the case if you want to call consciousness "that special [condition, or process, or property, or pattern, etc.] of being a scientific observer" (which we would ideally want because it seems to encapsulate all those special things that distinguish human beings from other organisms with nervous systems).
In that domain, we cannot make a distinction between subject and object. In order to even speak intelligibly about things, we must all draw the boundary of the thing we're talking about - but we are in the peculiar position of being the very act of drawing the boundary.
Even a worm has goals to attain - food and reproduction. In order to attain those goals, it needs to have perceptions and to rank those by the estimated return value. That is what it's like to be a worm.
What? No.
> If there is a difference in how they evolve, there is a something to be like it because it has to have some kind of perception and action selection mechanism. What it's like to be a worm is the perception stream evaluated by the value function of the worm.
Assuming that by "evolve" you mean "evolve as a dynamical system", then yes.
The rest of this discussion is hard to follow because it has apparently been edited, but you can't draw a line between applying your argument to animate things, but not inanimate ones, simply by choosing one word over another.
You are taking the teleological analogy literally again. It was Darwin's biggest insight that this is precisely not how evolution works.
Adding the word 'internal' doesn't help either. You could just as well say that a thermostat has an internal goal of staying warm.
This is moot anyway. Like Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, you have crafted a definition of consciousness that suits you perfectly, but which doesn't match what everyone else means.
The fact that your brain's executive network are unaware of the workings of "autonomous" activities does not indicate that those activities lack consciousness. You are also unaware of my consciousness but I assure you that it exists.
I'm lost. To me it means those activities lack consciousness. It's also the opinion stated in Jaynes' book, which was mentioned by user breckinloggins.
It's not the same as me being unaware of your consciousness. Your consciousness is foreign to me. It's always impossible for me to perceive it. My own consciousness is internal and I can perceive it. You may argue there are some activities of my own consciousness that I cannot perceive -- it's debatable, but we can discuss it -- but arguing about your consciousness from my perspective does not apply.
Understand that I'm defining consciousness as the property of having awareness, not as the human mind. The human mind is what it is like to be a cerebral cortex with our given structure. Think of consciousness as being like a computer screen, and the mind as a picture displayed on that screen. That screen could display a very different image, but that wouldn't change what the screen itself is.
But this a crucial distinction when talking about consciousness, it's not arbitrary. Consciousness requires a subject to be conscious.
Splitting awareness from the human mind seems weird to me. It's not very useful to consider, say, my liver to be conscious. Even worse, there's no way to prove or disprove the assertion that it is conscious; it's even less falsifiable than talking about other people's consciousness!
The whole point of Jaynes' book is that consciousness is not required for most activities. He argues that not only are your body organs not conscious, but also that most activities you engage in every day aren't conscious either.
What do you mean?
I don't understand what you mean by "the evolution of everything else in the universe", either. Consciousness isn't required for the evolution of living beings. Or do you mean something else?
I'm drawing a distinction between humans, who seem to have the ability to make choices, with the prevailing scientific world view, that everything is the result of mindless causal forces.
I suppose you could hold the epiphenominalist view that consciousness is a side effect with no causal agency, but then you have to explain why things that hinder survival/reproduction feel bad, and things that aid it feel good. If consciousness was truly an epiphenomenon there is no reason why there should be any concordance between survival value of events and their phenomenal character.
In any case, it seems this is a diversion from the main argument: if you aren't aware of a process, then it's not a conscious process on your part by definition.
It also presupposes that you are a worm. It's a (logically) absurd and (practically) pointless question. How could anyone/anything possibly know what it's like to be a worm without actually having the experience of being one? Answer: They couldn't/can't.
The question also has no relevance to consciousness. We know what it's like to be conscious humans because we are conscious humans and we do have human experiences.
I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".
Unlike Pluto - this isn't just a debate about labels.
I also think a great deal of the things the scientific explanations omit are things which are expressely stated as the things science does not pursue. I mean that science is inherently dedicated to finding the things which are true regardless of the personal experience of the observer and which would be true without a human observer. So when you want to look at the human observer itself, and at something which is intimately and inextricably linked to the exact biological and historical state of a human animal... you've just left the field. Not that it makes the study any 'less', you just need different tools and there are different pitfalls. We still have all the same cognitive flaws due to our own brain structure, so we do have to try to be rigorous about it.
Consider the possibility that consciousness isn't a distinctly human phenomenon, as there is no reason to believe that is the case. In fact, there is no logical reason why it would even be a distinctly biological phenomenon. It appears to me that consciousness isn't so much out of the purview of science as it is intractable to its methods, and thus unattractive as an area of study despite its fundamental character.
But in a very small molecule/atom, let's pick a single helium atom, you don't have a good definition of temperature. You can define the temperature of a gas of Helium using the average kinetic energy of the atoms, but you must consider that the whole gas is not moving.
If you put a balloon with Helium in a car, and the car moves at 100mph, the Helium is not hotter, it is moving. So if you can only see a single atom of Helium, you can't be sure if it's moving because it's hot or all the gas is moving. So you don't have a good definition of temperature. [2]
For a molecule with a few atoms (let's say 5 or 10) it's more difficult to be sure if there is a good definition of temperature or not, so I prefer to ignore the intermediate case.
[1] My first idea of a big molecules was DNA, because it's big and well known. But DNA is usually surrounded by water, lots of water, and ions and auxiliary proteins, and a lot of stuff. It's very difficult to isolate a true molecule of DNA alone.
An easy example of a big molecule is bakelite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite that is the plastic of the old phones. Your old phone case was a gigantic single molecule, and the tube case was another. So they clearly had a temperature.
[2] At low temperatures you can assume that a Helium atom is a ball without internal structure. If you increase the temperature of the gas enough (200000K?), the electrons in each Helium atom start to jump between levels and you have some interesting internal structure and may try to define a temperature. But it's still too few parts and too short lived to make me comfortable to define the temperature of a single atom.
I suppose it comes down to whether you define temperature as "what thermometers measure" or the average potentially transmissible energy of an ensemble. I prefer the latter definition for its clarity, but like the idea of kolmogorov complexity, it is sometimes unwieldy in practice.
The temperature is proportional to the energy of the system only for ideal monoatomic gases. (Ideal diatomic gases, are slightly more complicated.)
So a "hot" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving in random directions has a different temperature than a "fast" Helium balloon where all the particles are moving roughly in the same direction. It doesn't matter how difficult is to define it. (Probably you can use an infrared thermometer pointed in the direction perpendicular to the movement to get the correct temperature.)
In the fast balloon you can theoretically split the energy in A: kinetic energy of the center of mass and B: internal thermal energy, so the total energy is A+B. With some device you can extract all the kinetic energy as something useful. (for example, make the balloon hit some lever connected to an electric generator, you will need something more smarter to get the 100% of A but it's theoretically possible.) So you can extract the 100% of A
If the hot balloon with the same energy you have only A+B of internal thermal energy. If you use some device you can never extract the energy, you can never extract more than a part of B as something useful like electricity, because of the second law of thermodynamics. It the ambient temperature is T_amb and the initial temperature of the balloon is T_bal, you can get at most B * (1 - T_amb / T_bal) as something usefull like electricity and waste at least B * (T_amb / T_bal) in a heat sink.
So, to get back to the original point, your position is that a single particle in isolation can't have a temperature because its entropy (or rather the change thereof) is 0, so the equation breaks.
The logical reason why it would possibly be a distinctly biological phenomenon is that we have not observed any non-biological system which has the property. Also, every examination of how consciousness works illuminates solely how it works in a biological system.
It is completely possible that consciousness is imply a necessary property which emerges once any complex system and its interactions reaches a certain sort of complexity. However, that might be meaningless. I mean, we might be totally incapable of recognizing other conscious entities as conscious. If a machine were made to be conscious, not as an emulation of a human, but as a machine - how would you tell? Asking it questions would be pretty pointless. There is no reason for it to develop language or even guess that there might be another conscious entity in the universe for billions of years. It would be quite a ridiculous leap for the machine to suppose that, in fact. It wouldn't have multiple individual machines against which it could develop a Theory of Mind (referring to the psychological way we model other people (or things or animals) being conscious and thinking inside our own heads, children develop it around age 3 I believe). It would presume the sensible thing, that it is the only conscious entity in the universe, and go about exploring the universe. It would see the microphone or video input as just weird useless noise as it traversed and explored its ACTUAL work, that of bits and bytes and networks and switches. You could watch its execution... and it would be exactly as useful to you as watching the flashes of electrical activity and a readout of the activity of neurotransmitters at each neural gap as far as determining whether it was conscious. And that'd be for one we might reasonably presume to operate on our own timescale and close to us in space. Could the Sun be conscious? Quite possibly. I'll grant it as something we can't rule out.
I would figure that this isn't the problem of consciousness, but it is the problem of why we don't "see" a "ghostly world of equations, theories and data".
I think what the current philosophic theory of consciousness lacks is a focus on the game itself. The agent is but a part of the environment, and the game is much more than the agent. The whole environment-agent-game system is what creates consciousness and also explains the purpose of consciousness (to maximize goals for agents).
Analyzing consciousness outside its game is meaningless (such as p-zombies) - the game is the fundamental meaning creator, defining the space of consciousness. The Chinese room is not part of a game, it is not embodied in the world, and has no goals to attain, that is why it is not conscious, it is just a data processing system.
On the other part, a bacteria can be conscious on a chemical, electric and foto level even if it can only process data with its gene regulatory network (which is like a small chemical neural net). A bacteria has clear goals (gaining nutrients, replication) thus its consciousness is useful for something - all consciousness needs to have a clear goal otherwise it would not exist in the first place - something rarely emphasized in consciousness articles.
This sounds a bit naive.
Quite a few people on either side of the physicalism - dualism debate seem to be more keen on declaring victory and cutting off further discussion than they are in getting to the bottom of the issue.
BTW, on Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument, I have always been in the 'the system as a whole would be conscious' camp.
But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do both? There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).
No it's not! It's a computational theory of motivated action.
The hard problem is not a matter of semantics, but yes indeed some confusion may be just semantic. I'm not sure if that plain truth is all you meant to say though.
We think. We think about thinking. We think about thinking about thinking.
Agreed - trouble is, though, whenever you start to enforce this particular aspect of the discussion, you end up either being accused of starting a cult, or following one...
Can you expand on this? I am reading this book at the moment, but I don't quite follow your criticism. He doesn't seem to me to be talking about phenomena related to "consciousness of consciousness", but rather about how consciousness arises as a functional process, and as a consequence of our linguistic heritage (though I haven't finished the book yet, and I find it all quite confusing, so I'm not really sure).
For reference, I found the entry for "Consciousness, defined" in the index, and the paragraph on the referenced page that most closely corresponds to a definition seems to be this:
> Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioral processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision.
1. consciousness as "awareness" or "experiencing existence" 2. consciousness as "mind" or what we experience that doesn't seem to correspond to the outside world.
The former is certainly not a result of language, and that is what is referred to as consciousness in Buddhist/Hindu philosophy. The latter is definitely influenced by language and seems to be what many modern scientists are referring to when they talk about consciousness. The conflation of the two definitions does a great disservice to understanding what consciousness "is".
I recommend reading Jaynes' book (assuming you haven't already) before you draw any firm conclusions on the role of language.
I really don't think I can do him justice, but his thesis seems to be that humans were, until relatively recently (4000 years ago, perhaps?), non-conscious - they would not have "experienced existence".
He goes on to discuss consciousness as a product of metaphor, and thus with decidedly linguistic origins. That is terrible summary, though, so I recommend reading the book and forming your own view - I have found it quite enjoyable so far.
As an aside, he starts the book with a list of things that consciousness is not, from his perspective:
* Consciousness Not a Copy of Experience
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Concepts
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Learning
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Thinking
* Consciousness Not Necessary for Reason
Well, the problem is to give some definition of "what it is like to be X" we can cleanly separate from the "mere" sensorimotor statistics of X.
It's a concept but it has no destination.
I don't think it's presented as the hard problem it's just hard to think about something which isn't as if it is.
Within the "metaconsiousness" definition provided int he article, I think it very likely that the distinction is more of an illusion than anything else.
attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought
Say we're learning to operate a car... You are very "aware" of steering and pedals and gears. After a while, you start just thinking in terms of forward, this way, stop, faster. The mechanics start to be handled "subconsiously"^ as you go along. Awareness/attention then gets drawn back if something goes wrong, say your gear sticks. A lot of learning seems to be like this. Aware & consious actions repeated until it becomes subconsious. I think this process is gradual. More importantly, the observable outputs are very hard to stack neatly into two piles.
On top of that we have the problem of fooling ourselves. If I asked you "why did you change lanes?" you will probably give me an answer, but a lot of expirements suggest that answer is made up after the fact.
I think it's more likely that metaconsiousness is made of the same stuff as subconsiousness. It's just the type of consiousness that we notice (tautology?) and consider to be us.
TLDR, I agree that the more important breakthroughs will probably be at the worm consiousness level, but that is itself a theory of consiousness.
^As mentioned below, it's a problem using, defining and speculating about these terms simultaneously. I'm doing it anyway, but yeah...
I think this trend is bound up inextricably with our efforts to distinguish ourselves from "lesser" animals. A monkey may be able to reason intelligently, but it cannot communicate to us whether it is aware of itself doing so. We therefore lack evidence of meta-consciousness in animals and tend to attach out-sized significance to it as a potential mark of human superiority. Even though absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness seems to derive from the same mental equipment pre-human hominids developed for handling social interactions. The ability to model and predict the mental states of other hominids provided a survival advantage. Once sufficiently developed, this ability can be applied to itself, so that the hominid is modeling its own thought processes and mental states.
To me, this doesn't seem like some sort of deeper, insoluble mystery, but rather the symptom of an unsatisfactorily detailed model of that mental equipment. I think the problem loses its peculiar appeal when we can identify with a reasonable degree of certainty that what we experience as consciousness corresponds to specific neural pathways and configurations. Right now, the philosophical arguments are too abstract to be convincing and the science is too immature to discourage all the useless theorizing.
Furthermore, as also pointed out by others above, all discussions about consiousness tend to conflate what appear to me to be distinct phenomenon. The first could be described as a persistence of thought or "low-level" consiousness, which is likely explained by the evolution of a working memory. The second could be described as self awareness, which is likely a small, nearly-inevitable leap from "low-level" consiousness. The third could be described as meta-consiousness, whos origin is likely explained by your social evolution hypotheses.
We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much.
What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness?
At this point it mostly just seems like we define ourselves to have this "conscious" property and then circularly use that as a distinguishing characteristic of humans.
How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?
For one, I certainly judge you, Mr. Internet Person Monktastic1, as being conscious. And I can somewhat unpack that judgement into relatively empirical observations that can be cross-compared with someone else. This feels really similar to my judgement of you as possesing the trait "human".
On a meta-discussion level, the rhetoric I usually encounter reminds me a lot of the Plato-Diogenes debate on the essence of "human". Can we really reduce the intuitive notion of consciousness to "featherless biped thougts" or some such?
For those reasons, I suspect that the intuitive notion of "consciousness" is more a (fuzzy) collection expectations we have on lower level traits. Like, since you are able to engage in this conversation, I judge you as human and therefore this leads me to expect that you also have a functioning pancreas. On the surface though, language ability and pancreas possession don't have any obvious reason to be linked.
Taking a bird's-eye view, I do hope that this discussion continues until the questions become sharp and precise enough to be called science instead of philosophy.
If I close my eyes and ask myself "doesn't something seem to be happening?" (setting aside, for a moment, whether anything is actually happening -- since that requires a whole slew of interpretations), the answer is an unequivocal "yes." That (to me) is consciousness. There is a particular certainty (whether right or wrong) that applies only to that question.
Whether you have a functioning pancreas is something that, in principle, we each have access to. Whether or not "something seems to be happening" for you is inaccessible to me, even in principle. At least, as far as I can see.
Other questions about human consciousness can be formulated in terms of observables.
Then they wonder why they can't agree on a common theory, quibble endlessly about the adequacy of their various subjective definitions, and most if not all of their arguments are based on 'intuition-pumping'.
I realize that this just shifts the discussion to "What, exactly is 'our existing models of the world'?", but I think that question can have much more traction, especially to an engineer, than the current state of the language over on the philosophy side.
It also implies that there is a spectrum: the complexity of the model(s), the speed at which we can re-engineer them, our ability to hold multiple models in mind at once, and the degree of abstract indirection we're able to employ are all variable. I'd suggest that future work with questions such as "What defines a sentient being?" proceed along those lines, and using these definitions would be much more valuable than trying to stratify consciousnesses into various semantic tiers that still remain quite abstract.
The problem with starting at human consciousness is our consciousness is to advanced to easily grasp. We can not only internally model our real world very well and make predictions years in advance, we can make up completely coherent 'fake' worlds. The problem with animal consciousness is we have no means of a coherent model of what is occurring in their minds.
There is currently no way. We don't even know if all humans possess it and what animals do. Maybe people who deny its existence just don't have it.
> How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?
It's not modern vs old, it is more scientific vs religious.
I agree that most articles about consciousness feel like word games though.
I don't think the circularity is there, because while there do not seem to be other animals today with the same sort of consciousness as humans, we can reasonably assume that some of our now-extinct ancestors had various levels of consciousness, whatever it is.
We are indeed groping around here like 18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat. I don't think that makes it pointless, but we should be suspicious of the claims of either physicalists or dualists who think that they have proven the other side is wrong (though my instincts are with the physicalists.)
>18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat
All that mucking about with the problems of phlogiston could have been a necessary step towards thermodynamics. Similarly, speculations about consciousness could turn out to be a necessary step towards AGI (or vice-versa).
You can't, that's just the issue and that's what gives rise to behaviorism, solipsism, etc. etc.
Sure, you could arbitrarily decided that some brain state Y recorded by instruments xzw in the field of neuroscience is a state of 'consciousness' but this is hardly a step up from heuristic methods we've used since the dawn of time, namely duck typing--if the thing looks like its conscious, and acts like its conscious, it is probably conscious.
Consciousness is one of those problems that becomes more problematic once you harp on it but only presents itself as a problem in practice in very rare cases.
Sure you could argue the issue will gain in relevancy as AI + machine learning becomes more sophisticated--but at this point there's still very much an uncanny valley that enables us to easily differentiate between biological and purely computational/mechanical systems.
When it comes to consciousness I think we do well to remember Wittgenstein's advice on doubting--that a doubt is really only worthwhile when it's useful in some fashion. To doubt just for the sake of it, or just because we can is usually not productive and leads us nowhere. Doubts are useful insofar as they are precise and rub up against propositions we hold true with some degree of firmness (actually to be able to doubt at all requires we hold some confident assertions, e.g. one of them in the case of studying consciousness: "no matter what the study says, I'm confident at the very least, that I am conscious").
Do you judge me as a conscious being? If so, then you came to that conclusion by making some empirical observations.
What are those observations?
I'm not trying to explain consciousness here, I'm just trying to identify it.
There's actually an interesting analog with intelligent design. In both cases (evolution, the brain) it's clear that what's happening is that the emergent properties from incredibly complex systems is creating surprisingly complex results (surprisingly complex to the average observer). In both cases this bothers people because it means that humans aren't anything particularly special (just matter that happens to go through certain processes), and because it's hard for them to grasp the scale and complexity of the systems involved. So an invisible non-material explanation is theorized instead which sets humanity above the "mere" material world.
On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a "conscious action" or an "unconscious motivation". This is a very Freudian concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind. The philosophical consciousness is much more holistic, but also very vague. You wouldn't think a tree has an Ego, but it might have some sort of existential awareness.
It's cool to see the philosophy of consciousness intersect with neuroscience, since outsiders like me tend to think of these fields as at-odds.
Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could.
This is a good primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27...
Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...
Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat.
Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem? The cells that make us vomit? The bacterial colonies in our sinuses?
I just think the answer to all of these questions when all is said and done will be yes. And we'll be sad how much life we killed because we didn't think it was conscious enough.
And maybe if we're lucky when we die we get to watch our consciousness grow to include all things. Maybe that's why we have circuits in our brain that seem to respond that way to mushrooms.
Maybe there's a genetic advantage to harboring the illusion that you are a separate consciousness, but it's just there to make you want to struggle to hold up your tiny corner of a collective consciousness.
It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.
So yes. Math is also a material manifestation. Life is a material manifestation. Thought is a material manifestation. The problem is with you trying to separate yourself from matter, but the very thing you're using to create that separation is thought. It is the very thing you're trying to get away from, and so you cannot exist separate from thought by using thought. It is a futile and empty game.
Especially not when they can be independently rediscovered without having any trace of them stored anywhere.
About rediscovering, you can simply argue that ideas are matter properties so an intelligent being can recognize them.
I would think the objective reality in your explanation would be what your sensory organs are reacting to, not what you perceive.
The concept of "reality", of a physical universe, of a "you", of order and pattern, of an persistent objective reality outside of you, do not exist per se, but as simulation and models in your mind that you accrued throughout your life.
To be more specific, there is an underlying reality that is neither "objective" nor "subjective", but from which both of these realities emerge once a conscious being appears in it. We cannot directly know the true nature of this underlying reality, as it cannot be directly experienced. What we call objective reality is really the experience of the simulation in our mind synthesized from sensory data, as well as our model of this simulation (science), and not the underlying "true" reality.
From my understanding of the term, the "real" reality would be the same as the objective realm per definition;
What do you mean when you say "objective" as in "... the subjective or the objective realms"? Some sort of shared definition? If so, wouldn't this also be subjective to a certain degree?
I might just be post-hoc rationalizing my own interpretations here, but doesn't our subjective experiences of reality being based on our sensory organs' interpretation of stimuli from what is presumably the objective reality make fewer assumptions than a concept involving interconnected or "symbiotic" realities?
If matter is all there is, that means either you deny the existence of consciousness (which is an untenable position), or you believe that it arises out of nothing (which requires a "magical" mechanism).
There's nothing really spiritual about it. There's nothing really special about it. It's the value that you ascribe to it, through the knowledge that you have which makes it "special".
I don't know what it is. I'm open to multiple possibilities. Either way, you don't know.
Let's just get to the point:
If EVERYTHING in the universe, everything in reality is "matter"... then what does "matter" mean anymore?
It may as well be magic. Harry Potter material. No difference. Because this "matter" exists in nothing.
You are in a building, in a city, in a country, in a continent, on planet Earth, in solar system, itself floating in a galaxy, itself floating in the "universe" ... itself floating in ... what?
Nothing.
At which point you call it matter, I could call it "consciousness" (in the author Bernardo Kastrup's meaning then, as a underlying field to everything), some may call it "god". We can also just call it magic. Poof! Here we are.
PS: Also see
The mental Universe
http://deanradin.com/evidence/Henry2005Nature.pdf
The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism https://www.instapaper.com/read/811142201
Trying to ask 'when does a baby become conscious' is like trying to say 'when does a baby become tall'.
I still think consciousness is a real thing, and we definitely don't know what causes it, and maybe it is possible to find out. But I think the answer (if there is one) will come from AI - definitely not philosophers and probably not biologists.
We might have to wait until brain simulation becomes a reality, which I expect to happen eventually (assuming we don't manage to pull the plug on civilization).
The article asks this question:
> Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?
Implicitly saying that "experience" and "consciousness" should be defined such that I experienced and was conscious of those sensations even though I was not aware of them. Thus, using the terminology of the article, I am currently conscious of a ton of things all at once:
The feeling of my feet on the floor, my butt in the seat, my tongue in my mouth, the sound of my typing, and of the rattling behind me, and of the rumbling of the train, the vibrations of the train, the propioceptive feeling of the positions of my limbs, the slight but distinctive smell of mass transit.
Is this right? Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?
I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)
And is able to describe that thing, even if just to itself.
Have you ever experienced in a dream, being able to do some wondrous thing - write music, feel a wall from a distance, whatever. In the dream you feel that ability. But when you wake up, while you remember dreaming about it, you can not actually make yourself re-experience it. (For example: Describe the song you wrote.)
That's what the author claims is the difference between conscious and not conscious. (If I understood him correctly.)
If you have conscious thought, you can cause your mind to experience any sensation you have already had. A non-conscious being can not do that, they can only experience what they experience right this moment.
Selecting from that stream, is that the over consciousness?
And what chooses which stream to pay attention to?
It's recursive and mind bending.
Given how discredited dualism is it is amazing how far people will go to deny hey are dualists whilst spouting all the arguements and beliefs of dualists.
Yes, that is where the magic is.
>For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth.
This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.
If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
I'm not looking to continue this discussion, but I'm glad you're thinking about this.
I used to support abortion, but more and more I'm sliding towards being maybe against it, because (some of) the anti-abortion side arguments are logical too. No matter how you draw the line based on some argument, you can use the same logic to kill adults. That includes viability, lack of pain, etc.
On the other hand, our technology is at the level where you can turn any cell in your body into sperm:
https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sp...
So if you're against abortion based on the "viability", every time you scratch your nose, you commit genocide.
It's a hard question.
- Conscious breathing: I follow a chosen breathing pattern with no immediate awareness of the breathing process.
- Meta-conscious breathing: I choose to be fully aware and in control of multiple aspects of breathing. I control my diaphragm and lips directly, I listen to and feel air passing, I consider how the position of my body affects breathing, etc. I also may choose an appropriate breathing pattern: deeper for hiking, more rhythmic for aerobic exercise, or slow for contemplation. After I have chosen a new pattern, that new pattern soon becomes conscious rather than meta-conscious; although the special breathing continues, I am no longer immediately aware of my new behavior. A change in activity reverts my conscious breathing behavior back to normal without any meta-conscious choice.
- Unconscious breathing: What I do when I sleep. It's clearly different from conscious breathing because I may snore, and many people even suffer from sleep apnea, which means they momentarily stop breathing while sleeping. Neither snoring nor sleep apnea are part of the experience of breathing consciously, so unconscious breathing must be very different somehow.
Am I using the terms correctly?
Curiously, many activities like speaking, eating, and swimming interrupt normal breathing yet do not necessarily invoke any meta-conscious decision making. If I had to think about when to breathe every time I wanted to speak, my meta-conscious mind would be overloaded with that task alone and I would forget what I wanted to say.
The difference being that while you're awake you can consciously affect and correct your breathing (your "meta-conscious breathing"). When you're asleep, your body has to rely on it's other unconscious mechanisms to do that.
It is simply a brief period of intent, focused replay/study of the experience that just occurred, while it is very fresh in the mind/short-term memory. One is closely reviewing what happened, looking at the experience from different angles, replaying it, etc. This could all happen in the span of a second or less.
It is a matter of focus and proximity. It isn't a special layer of consciousness. It may seem qualitatively different, as the mental model of the experience is so deep & rich in the moments immediately during and after, if one is focusing closely. But I don't see the argument for this becoming some sort of "meta-consciousness".
In short, the concepts of "consciousness" and "being conscious of [something]" are related, but they aren't the exact same thing.
Sounds about similar.
Any theory about consciousness that does not include learning is at best incomplete, but more likely just wrong.
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Our brains create models of the world. They are constantly predicting, making choices. And on surprise, looking back to see where it went wrong. On reward, reinforcing the behavior leading up to it.
In a way, our brains are observers of our environment, our bodies, and itself.
I'll try to give an example:
Think of a complex modern art painting. It's much more difficult to perceive the colors used in the painting, as the boundaries between different parts and components of the painting are far less meaningful or distinguishable, compared to most objects we encounter.
When you look around your kitchen, the sensations of color are nearly instantaneously associated with rich semantic information about the various objects. E.g. that red object is the "top" of the "peanut butter" "jar" that "I" "bought" "last week" (this is the tip of the semantic iceberg). This makes it easy to hold onto that perception -- it is able to quickly take root in a rich semantic soil that the brain has been developing over our entire lives.
This doesn't happen with a messy, semantically-limited perception like looking at a modern art painting. Sure, we can focus very hard to isolate the different streaks and blurs and blobs of color, but it is noticeably more difficult.
With an infant, as their semantic soil is very shallow compared to an adults (or even a young child), I imagine that their perception of the world is perhaps more like a modern art painting. Slowly, the colorful blurs and blob and smells and sounds take on meaning as the infant learns about the world and builds up an understanding of the complex patterns in life.
Nearly. This is why the main thrust of meditation is about becoming aware of ever-subtler processes, both on- and off-cushion. When there's enough awareness to distinguish between the arising of bare perception and the associations it triggers (for example), it becomes clear why we identified consciousness with association, and why it doesn't quite capture what we were originally curious about. Something interesting remains. As more and more functions (modeling, associating, remembering, attending, etc.) get distilled away, you'd think the mystery gets smaller and smaller. But experientially speaking, I think it only gets bigger.
> This is why the main thrust of meditation is about becoming aware of ever-subtler processes.
Indeed. It's an incredible method to find insight.
> When there's enough awareness to distinguish between the arising of bare perception and the associations it triggers...
I would argue that the concept of bare perception, absent of any sort of understanding (the understanding could be quite minimal, as with an infant, dog, or even an ant), is a non-sequitur.
It's like asking for mass without of gravity. The consciousness _is_ the understanding of each instantaneous moment.
This is why meditation can only take us so far, as it is impossible to become an ant or an infant, to completely abandon all accumulated understanding. But by reducing our assumptions and constructed frameworks of meaning as much as possible, interesting things may happen.
> it becomes clear why we identified consciousness with association, and why it doesn't quite capture what we were originally curious about. Something interesting remains.
This is the crux. Without being able to totally abandon your associations and understanding, how do you know for certain some aspect of consciousness lies beyond them?
That seems to me something no human could ever experience, and that if they could, they would no longer function nor possess any awareness at all.
> It's like asking for mass without of gravity. The consciousness _is_ the understanding of each instantaneous moment.
Of course, if someone were to somehow spend time conscious without association, they wouldn't be able to convince anyone they did so. Maybe it's impossible, maybe it's possible, but it's not very amenable to debate.
So I'm trying to stick to more empirically testable claims. In particular, here I'm hypothesizing that the reason we believe consciousness is equivalent to its various functions is that we don't have enough precision of awareness to distinguish them. The experiment is simple (though not easy): become increasingly aware of the subtle processes, and plot your belief over time. My own result (and that of many who have done the experiment) is that I've clarified two aspects of my experience ("the sheer fact of experience" and "the particular forms it takes") in such a way that I no longer identify them. YMMV, but I think it's a wonderful exercise!
Relatedly, I'm curious what you think of the idea that you can only know that you are conscious, whereas it is impossible (even in principle) to know whether another being is.
Thanks as always for the chat.
Of course at some point along our development of machine intelligence that may change. At some point in the past all life was reactionary, then as it evolved that changed. My take on it is the first consciousness in life occurred when creatures started making predictions on when they would eat something or get eaten and act before it occurred.
AI makes predictions and acts on them.
The thought that someone who seems on the outside very similar to me could be completely missing the "inner experience of self" that I (think I) have certainly feels wrong-- it's deeply uncomfortable and rather frightening. Furthermore, espousing such an idea opens the door to those who would attempt to use it to discriminate (likely by applying existing bias with a flimsy illusion of accuracy).
This one doesn't have much use to me beyond tangential thought experiments. It can be cited to justify terrible things in the hands of bigots, and I suspect it's fairly easily invalidated for all practical purposes.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon the speed is 25m/s, so in a minute you the signal could travel 1500m ~= 1mile.