Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics
nautil.us
nautil.us
You can't study consciousness directly in a lab but it's pretty easy to "merge" with others under the right conditions.
For example, here's an old experiment with "mutual hypnosis": two people hypnotizing each other at the same time.
"Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106
Anything which causes entrainment between two dynamic systems is essentially combining them into one dynamic system. E.g. something as simple as deliberately breathing in sync with each other can begin to develop consciousness merging.
Like much of Tart's other work "studying" the paranormal[1], this is pseudoscience. There is no good evidence for hypnosis.
> There is no good evidence for hypnosis.
That's just ridiculous.
Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. There are some pretty prosaic definitions that are clearly and repeatably demonstrable. There are also, at the other end of the spectrum, some pretty extraordinary claims for "what it is" and "what it can do". The former is riduculous, and for the latter, skepticism seems to be prudent, pending further articulation.
Well, yeah.
The best book on hypnosis I know of opens with one of the co-authors stating that "there's no such thing as hypnosis" and the other stating "everything is hypnosis".
> The former is ridiculous ...
The "clearly and repeatably demonstrable" definitions are ridiculous?
Yes, that's from "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder.
And, yeah, for my money, Heller's "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?" is the other best book on the subject. Well met.
Consciousness not being transient is kind of terrifying. It's like a mental version of 'The Prestige'. Every night when you lose consciousness, or maybe every time you lose or change a train of thought, 'you' essentially dies, and is cloned/re-imaged by your memories at some other location in the brain.
The author presents this as an avenue for confronting the likelihood that even a perfect understanding/modeling of the physical characteristics of a brain is unlikely to reveal anything about consciousness or subjective experience itself.
Seems plausible to me. Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it.
The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience was hard to swallow at first, but then I thought about my cat. It's safe to say that a cat's consciousness is more primitive than a typical human's. You can also say that cats (at least once you get to know them) are a lot more predictable than people and have a smaller set of possible behaviors and reactions. If my cat sees a bug on the wall, she's going to do her weird hiss-snarl thing at it just about 100% of the time, and there's 0% chance she's going to roll up a newspaper and swat it.
If the consciousness of a particular entity can be ranked in comparison to that of other entities — like I would rank my consciousness as "higher" than my cat's — and if entities with "lower consciousnesses" have fewer possible behaviors or reactions to stimuli (like my cat compared to me, or a broccoli plant in my garden compared to my cat), then it's easy to imagine that something as elementary as an electron could be conscious in some way and still obey what appear to be totally deterministic rules. (Electron may have been a bad example since we can't really observe them like we can cats, but the point stands.) Another way to state it would be that as consciousness rises, so does free will (or, at least, scope of behavior).
I'm also reminded of:
John 1:1-3 (NKJV) — "In the beginning was the Word[0], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos
Of course, consciousness potentially being "the hardware of reality" doesn't necessarily mean God exists. But it fits.
Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver. Absent that, not so much. We're great at intuiting about ballistics in a gravitational field and atmosphere, less so about WTF is happening in wavefunction collapse.
> The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience
What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of? If sense-organs and brains are somehow hard-epiphenomenal, not really required to experience the universe, why did organisms bother to evolve them?
That's in large part because that particular term is a hand-wave assertion firmly in the realm of the Copenhagen interpretation. i.e. "It just happens, and we'll call it this." The term presupposes there is a differences between a quantum realm and a classical realm, rather than quantum rules pertaining continuously (like the Many Worlds interpretation supplies).
I think the notions expressed in the article don't really resolve anything except to emphasize there is much we don't understand.
I get your point, but I was just making an observation: historically, when we encounter something that doesn't seem to make sense (like the weird orbits of the planets around the Earth) there tends to be something we haven't thought of yet that makes sense (the Sun is actually in the center). I'd say that's been the case more often than not, hence reality "tends to" make sense (in the end).
There are things we can't explain in cosmology and quantum physics, but they generally still make sense enough that we can name them and make calculations that take them for granted. Being able to explain something just means putting a name on it and describing what causes it using other things you've put a name on and described using other things you've put a name on .... Things can still make sense in terms of being consistent even if we can't explain them (in terms of other things).
> What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of?
I think you're begging the question. The easy answer to all of this is that consciousness isn't actually a thing, but grant me that we're conscious beings with subjective experiences ("I think therefore I am"). What the article's talking about is the idea that you can tear apart your sense organs and your brain molecule by molecule and you'll never find the place where all that tissue interfaces with your consciousness. There's no physical vessel where your eye organs finally plug into your experience of vision.
The materialist view is that consciousness must therefore be something that emerges out of the complex interactions of the neurons and whatnot in your brain, because the atoms that make up your brain are the only thing there, so what else could it be? The article proposes the possibility we've got it backwards, that consciousness is what's real, and the matter we observe is some kind of consequence of the consciousness-es that exist in everything and interact and combine to create different kinds of consciousness-es that have different experiences. I think that's what he means by panpsychism. Something like that. Hey, it's a brand new idea to me, too.
The idea might be that you have a brain because you're a consciousness that thinks, you have ears because you're a consciousness that responds to perturbations in the air, and so on. So what you experience as sound is an interaction between your consciousness and the consciousness of the air vibrating against your eardrums ... and if you damage your eardrums you no longer experience sound because ... the part of your consciousness that experiences sound is linked to the part of the material world that looks like your eardrum?
That's a little woo-woo even for me, but compared to that it's not completely out there to speculate that an electron "experiences" gravity and electromagnetic forces and responds accordingly because that's the type of consciousness it has, or rather the type of consciousness that responds in that way to those forces looks like (or manifests as) an electron. Unclear whether forces are conscious, too, in this model, but I'd guess so.
Conceptually, as an interesting inversion, it kind of reminds me of Dawkins' "selfish genes," or at least the pop-sci misunderstanding of it, where you think of the genes as having motives. I'm not thinking about it too hard, but it seems like it would be tough to harmonize panpsychism with genetics.
If you were to ask me whether I think neuroscience currently has any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness, I would say that I don't think they do.
But it's still related to neuroscience.
I don't see how this contributes any insights into the issue. How is that "world" any different from a real world experience, relevant to this issue?
I mean, nothing in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride explains "why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it" either.
Yeah, exactly. There's no way to tell if neuroscience is just the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride through which something else is getting pulled through on boats. Is there any evidence one way or the other? What would evidence look like? I think it is beyond the reach of science because there is no experiment you could ever do that would illuminate it.
Something that can only be resolved by discussing the options and choosing which one feels the most reasonable is philosophy, and not science.
Either there exists some effective computation that would produce behavior similar to the behavior of conscious being, and could be performed in VR world too, or computation would require exponential resources, or (in the most unlikely case) such computation would not exist, and it would be possible to show why it cannot exist.
Neuroscience and Physics can help to find the rules for that computation. And Philosophy can have fun talking about what lies beyond unknown.
If by hard problem of consciousness you mean that kind of question, then it is definitely up to philosophy because no one else is even asking it.
Everyone answers the question about P-Zombies every day, by deciding the people they meet are conscious, based only on their behaviour.
The more interesting question is whether it is possible to get human like behaviour from a program running on classical computer.
Regardless, not everything fits into neat little boxes.
I would personally be more interested in the views of a neuroscientist on the matter, but then again I'd expect them to be likely to dismiss it as not being a problem at all. I'd also be interested in the views of someone who works with AI and the like.
Personally I think the problem will be "solved" as soon as we have sufficiently advanced conversational assistants and we just start assuming they are conscious because they seem like they are. I think having that sort of thing in our daily lives will dramatically change people's intuitive perspective on the issue.
Some neuroscientists having an interesting take on the election does not imply that elections are a neurological topic. Philosophy is open to contributions from amateurs.
"Professionalization tends to result in establishing acceptable qualifications, one or more professional associations to recommend best practice and to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs (that is, professional certification). It is also likely to create "occupational closure", closing the profession to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified."
Especially not by being declared not-a-real-problem by the problem itself.
Seems a bit self-serving. Surely the physicists could make a claim that all fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.
In fact, the soundness of the scientific method itself is a philosophical argument, as it cannot be scientifically demonstrable without assuming the conclusion.
That's conjecture. Some philosophies of mathematics in fact disagrees with this claim, which is exactly my point. This debate we're having cannot be settled by any sort of scientific or mathematical argument, it's a purely philosophical debate about the meaning of scientific and mathematical arguments and what should or should not qualify.
Philosophy is extremely broad, in most areas there hasn't been a dominant successful way to do it. In Natural Philosophy however, one way took over entirely, it's named Science, and Physics is just the name for the use of Science for a particular type of question in Natural Philosophy.
Philosophy in other areas didn't have this. For the question "Why do we die?" there are a bunch of approaches and none of them is especially satisfactory. Different philosophers each take their own approach. But for the questions in Natural Philosophy like "What is the Sun made of?" Science turned out to be very, very good at providing satisfactory answers and other methods largely fell away. Whilst good answers to "Why do we die?" feel nice, answers to questions like "How can I preserve this meat in order to eat it a week from now without getting sick?" had very practical consequences that were hard to argue with. Science took over the whole world.
But it's just a way to answer questions within one (important) corner of philosophy. Science doesn't have any answers for "Why do we die?" or "What is good?" which aren't questions of Natural Philosophy.
Historically, all branches of knowledge were branches of philosophy. There is a reason why PhD stands for "philosophiae doctor" ( aka "Doctor of Philosophy" ).
> Surely the physicists could make a claim that all fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.
Certainly not since physics deals with the empirical natural world. Physics doesn't delve into morality, virtue, essence, good, evil, etc. There is the physical world and the metaphysical one.
In modern times, the empirical branch of philosophy ( hard sciences ) have cut out their own special niche, but fundamentally, they are still a specialized branch of philosophy.
I gotta say, i agree with the grandparent. Metaphysics is philosophy. It is not physics. It is not cognitive science. At best the questions posed by metaphysics provide inspiration for physics and cogsci, but they are fundamentally not part of those fields.
The problem of physics is that it’s not clear what the structure of reality is. It is not known in the slightest but it seems unlikely it has a connection to metacognition.
Article connects these with a lame “software running on unknown hardware” analogy and works to suggest the universe could run on consciousness, or something incoherent like that.
tldr article looks like it’s pretty much trash popsci; why is it even here? Kill it with fire ;)
The problem is you could build a system that satisfies each of those states and we still couldn't prove if it had qualia or not. That is literally 'the hard problem'.
Most Abrahamic religious teach that everybody has a "spirit" inside their body, and these spirits are somehow responsible for the experience of consciousness and controlling the body like a hand inside a glove. This is further reinforced by heavenly visitors in religious texts (i.e. Jesus talking to prophets before 0 B.C. in the Bible would indicate that a body-less spirit is indeed conscious).
Proving that consciousness is a totally explainable phenomenon given our current understanding of physics would essentially prove that (at least the Abrahamic) God doesn't exist (i.e. if we could create conscious machines on-demand).
On the other hand, proving that consciousness is the result of some previously undiscovered form/interaction of matter could provide evidence of the existence of "spirits" (i.e. if said "ethereal" matter exists in brain before, but not after, death)
Also, what about this verse?
"For the word of God is living and operative and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, and able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart."