When you split the brain, do you split the person?
aeon.co
aeon.co
Consciousness is not a 'thing', it is a property. Thus far we know of only one sort of system that can hold the property (human beings in our environment) although we do gain some information from observing humans of different configurations (such as seeing that people with total facial paralysis experience significant emotional dulling and substantial changes to their subjective personal experience over time) that hints at what things are important for different aspects. So far as we have evidence for, there is no reason to think that you might be able to, for instance, simulate solely a brain and have anything akin to consciousness. Just removing patterned sensory input from a typical person via sensory deprivation quickly results in their consciousness dissolving. So how a brain without a body and without an environment to perceive might ever have a hope of consciousness I've no idea.
But if consciousness is only a property that doesn't influence the actual physics, then how are we even able to talk about consciousness? Why would it occur to physical beings that something like consciousness exists?
We conscious beings can talk about consciousness because we can never understand how consciousness arises from the actual physics, and can't talk about that. By not being able to comprehend how physics and conscious minds interact, our minds can talk about each separately. Perhaps the same principle extends to various components of physics, such as General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics -- maybe our consciousnesses are incapable of conceiving of the math that unites them. After all, Mathematics is simply only a product of our conscious minds.
Do you have any basis for this statement?
What about people born with out sight or hearing or both. Do those individuals not have a conscious?
What do you mean by "dualism"? Substance dualism, property dualism, predicate dualism, hylemorphic dualism, etc?
Also, you speak as if dualism and some form of materialism or physicalism (there are many) are the only options available to us. What about idealism? Or neutral monism?
Consciousness is an incredible thing. Reducing it to a mere property is akin to pretending it doesn’t exist at all.
Say you had more than one RNN trained for the same task (say, generating text). How would you couple them?
You could just, character by character, have each RNN generate its output on its own, and then take a majority vote or do some weighted average to combine the output, but otherwise let each RNN operate independently. But wouldn't it be strange for those RNNs whose output was not ultimately selected to continue processing along the same lines, uncorrected by what was actually selected?
Another possibility is to include a "ultimately selected" input to each RNN so they can be privy to the group's decisions. Yes, your internal state said that "e" should be selected, but the group selected "r"- what will you do now?
Yet another possibility would be to perform "retroactive justification". Let us say that one RNN (with an internal state S) selected "e", but the group selected "r". Under retroactive justification, the state used for the next character is a state (maybe the one closest to S) that would have instead produced "r" as output.
Split brains are coupled by their shared access to the body and act within the same environment. How do the hemispheres use that coupling?
The same way a population, consisting of many people, creates just one state? The state is not the people and the people are not the state, yet both exist.
Exactly... a non-mystery. But a great example of "the whole being greater than the sum of its parts".
Also, tangentially, New York's sewers aren't that complex compared to even a rat's brain.
>Let me rephrase. No one here said that complexity is consciousness. In particular, AnIdiotOnTheNet, who you replied to, did not say that complexity is consciousness.
Not directly. If not complexity, is it a kind of computation or something physical that makes neurons produce consciousness? Those positoins are more tough to support.
> Also, tangentially, New York's sewers aren't that complex compared to even a rat's brain.
What is the magic measure and what is magic threshold using that measure?
What about a future city's sewer system that is complex enough?
If humans didn't have egos, identities and a sense of "I" and were merely sensory machines, then maybe there could be an equivalence.
That is, if ego and identity are the same thing as consciousness. I'm not sure they are. Frankly, it's a mystery to me, as I think it is to everyone, except for perhaps a few enlightened Buddhist monks.
If you dispute this claim then all you need to do is provide an empirical definition of consciousness that applies to humans but not states. I will note that defining "consciousness" as something like "the human experience" is vacuous and doesn't count.
However, if you are saying that the inability to construct a model of consciousness that does not apply equally well to states and people is a failure of empiricism, I think you have started with the conclusion and are looking for justification.
A state does not exist in any physical form. It is entirely a fiction, existing only in the minds of humans. Such existence it does have is not independent of the problem of consciousness so this is not the most helpful comparison.
They can communicate physically though. Each half of the brain can access the eyes and control various parts of the body, they could make the body do things that they could see/hear in order to act as a basic messaging channel. The conscious part of the brain could be completely oblivious to these subtle physical channels.
"The Master and his Emissary : the divided brain and the making of the western world"
ps: put short, the book explains how pop psychology belief that left is maths and right is arts (you get the idea), was wrong, and yet.. there is a physiologically noticable difference as well as observable differences in how each hemispheres processes reality. In short, each hemisphere attends to the world with a different kind of attention, left is narrow and focused for what we commonly see as intellectual acvitivites, left deals with a map of the world. Right hemispheres takes the world as one whole, it's broad attention required to survive in our environment, but it's also necessary for empathy, etc. The book then tries to show how the over relianceo n our left hemisphere in today's world has roots in the last few centuries, and that perhaps it is not in our best interest. BOTH hemispheres are always needed, but we are increasingly acting in the world from the left hemisphere (hence the book title "the master and his emissary").
Not sure I understand that.
What they appear to have established is that, if you sever the direct connection between the two brain halves, functions that required the direct communication between the two halves is impaired.
I mean, it's interesting to note what those functions are and the severity of the impairment. But there doesn't appear to be any effect on consciousness at all; at least not in the article's description of the effects. Am I missing something?
"There is evidence that the twins can see through each other's eyes due to brain conjoining."
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201...
That's when I found how useful a 'perhaps' can be. LOL.
Do you really know what's there in the entire universe?