Consciousness and the Laws of Physics
philpapers.org
philpapers.org
I find a more prosaic version of this question quite interesting too. If you can feel a touch/heat anywhere on or in your body its represented in the brain somehow, somewhere. For a moment (i) imagine the brain is sensitive to touch (it isn't because lack of 'pain' receptors) (ii) that the representation of a sensitive part of our body is localized in the brain rather than distributed.
What this gives us is a mapping from the entire body (that includes the brain) into itself. Now, if there is a fixed point of this mapping, that fixed point is aware of itself.
Is the brain insensitive to touch because its not biologically/physically possible for a localized region of space not to be aware of itself ?
EDIT: Downvote ! That was rather unexpected.
edit: since the other poster edited their comment, this was only responding to the infinite regression question, not their bizarre point about touch sensitivity
By definition: that space must contain a sizeable, or even complete, portion of all human knowledge that can ever be scrolled or exist in that image space.
A lot of noise too, but the complete cure for cancer (if possible), FTL (if possible), immortality: what answers absolutely cannot be represented as several variations of the pixels of a 640x480 image?
Your brain isn't sensitive to touch because it's inside your skull, so that touch information wouldn't do a whole lot for you. There's no reason in principal a brain couldn't have pressure sensitive neurons inside of itself or on its surface.
Our bone marrow is inside our bones. Trust me, it is not pleasant to touch.
It makes sense to evolve pain sensitivity in your bones because if you are doing something which is causing damage inside your bones, you had better have a signal to stop. For most of the evolutionary history of humanity, if your skull was compromised, you would be dead.
I don't see what this has to do with pain perception in the brain. I am sure you could find an example in the animal kingdom of a creature which has pain receptors in its brain if you look hard enough.
If 'events at point_a' gets consciously interpreted by participation of cells one of which, lets call it point_b, is singularly dedicated to sensing events at point_a, we have a mapping in a mathematical sense from point a to point b. We know all such point_bs form a strict subset of the body, a part of the central nervous system.
If this mapping is continuous in the mathematical sense and a contraction, then a fixed point has to exist (a location that does its own interpretation). But the fixed point seems biologically implausible, that leaves us with the alternative that there has to be dead-zones -- places where events can happen but cannot be interpreted. (Example blind spot in the eye)
The way to avoid dead-zone would be to break continuity, or contractive property of the mapping.
> I am sure you could find an example … of a creature which has pain receptors in the brain …
I think my point would be easier to state for this hypothetical creature. If interpretation of pain is done by a strict subset of its cells and there is a one to one mapping -- at least one location b that interprets pain occurring at location a exclusively (presumably that's how the creature knows the pain is at 'a'), can this creature be free of dead-zones if the mapping is continuous and contractive. Can any creature free of dead-zones exist under those conditions. You claimed 'why not'. I am saying that if the mapping is a continuous contraction then either there has to exist dead zones or there is at least one self interpreting location.
To give another example of this phenomenon, if you spread the map of your city somewhere in your city, there has to exist at least one point in the map that sits exactly above the point it is representing -- the fixed point. The way to avoid this would be to have 'tears' in the map, or to have points in your city that are not closer on the map than they are in the city (that would be an unusual map).
The gist of it is that if there is a continuous mapping from a set to itself with the property that the mapped points are closer than the original points there must exist a point that maps to itself.
Now if the pain location mapping is smooth and a contraction (not implausible because number of cells in the brain is smaller than the number of cells in the entire body), there would be a neuron in the brain that would have been self aware in the sense that its pain mapping would have mapped to itself.
Note it is possible to avoid having a fixed point for a mapping from a set itself (consider a permutation of numbers 1..n so that no number is in its own place).
It is just an intriguing notion -- is a fixed point, self aware neuron possible
Imagine this, say what everyone perceives as the color red I perceive it as what everyone else perceives as yellow. But since I have been taught the name of the colors by these people, I will end up matching the names of the colors although I am perceiving something very different.
This needs to be considered in debates on whether animals have consciousness, do they have an "I". The dominant popular belief is that they aren't. My question is, devoid of a common communication language how would you find out. Only thing we have is their observable external behavior. If that is consistent with the 'consciousness' hypothesis, then that's all we can say. In that case we have about as much evidence of presence of consciousness that a fellow human incapable of communicating with us in language as much as another animal say a dolphin. In both the cases its a hypothesis that explains externally observable behavior.
Till we find a way to listen into one's internal monologue this is pretty much all we can do.
I like Feynman's example of the 'inside of a brick' no one has seen that with an unaided human eye. Before other forms of sensing the 'inside' came along (X-ray, ultrasound, ...) it was just a hypothesis that fit observable experience. No one would have actually seen the inside of a brick. When you break it open, its no longer the 'inside'. That there is no 'inside' and that a new surface is formed by the be the act of breaking the brick could have been a plausible alternative hypothesis. Existence of an 'inside' is just a simpler hypothesis.
It's been mind boggling to me for years that this isn't the default accepted position. That most intelligent life (ie animals) are conscious just like us. Look at what dogs, cats, monkeys do. In what possible way can you say they aren't conscious but another person you can't speak with is? Based on what evidence?
The fact we try and reserve consciousness for humans is the most "epi-cycles in support of geocentrism" thing I've ever seen in science. It's silly. It's wholly unscientific, in fact it's anti-science as it actively avoids the most scientific explanation to reach a conclusion that "we're special".
Its flawed and a stain on science.
This is part of the "knowledge argument":
It is a bit like a web-page with many dom-elements on it, each having its own id. The id is like our perceptions. The id is arbitrary but what matters is that the same id always refers to the same dom-element.
I mean I don't even know what I perceive when I perceive red. I just perceive and use the id "red" for it. The thing is that in our brain there is some kind of an id associated with our experience of redness. When we experience it we say hey I recognize this experience as something familiar, so I will use the same id 'red' to describe it as I have before.
How would you know this if you've never experienced how I experience it?
> We use language and shared culture to consensually hallucinate a "shared" universe but no such thing truly exists for us.
You seem to suggest that culture is some shared fantasy superimposed on reality, but how could it be given your solipsism? How could anything be shared?
> We can perceive objects and describe them in similar ways
How would you know? Maybe I mean different things when I speak. Maybe my speech isn't speech at all and you're just construing it as such? Maybe there is no me?
> but the fact remains that we can't access the universe that the objects truly exist in (if that even exists)
How would you know without being able to "access" the universe to make that comparison? Are you a gnostic with secret knowledge (in which case, you do have access)? You've also already assumed a distinction between universe and mind, but how could you if all you have are these "representations", as you call them? The distinction would itself just be a mental "representation".
> since, for us, they have no independent existence outside of our mental representation.
If there is no reality to represent, then they aren't mental representations, are they.
> Or shortly, when you die the universe dies with you.
The universe you don't know actually exists? But if it exists, why should it die with you?
P.S. Less weed, more rigor.
Also, from what you have said it does not follow that all "mental content" is to be "located" in the brain. That you have brain correlates is not surprising, if only for the fact that without them you would need to wonder what the heck the brain is doing. But you will not find, in the materialist account, a way in which to account for abstraction in the brain. You cannot account for the concept "square" by appealing to the alone (as opposed to say the image of a particular square).
What's wrong with assuming that abstraction is a function of neural activity which is facilitated by specific neural structures and processes?
Questioning, debating and trying to refute someone else's wow moment is a wow moment!
I don't understand why more Indians and particularly Hindus are not doing this. This looks to me like a thrilling intellectual and even spiritual adventure, and one of the few things that are truly worth doing in life.
As to why Indian philosophy - this primarily stems from my Indian background. I have always wondered if the claims of Indian philosophy can be validated scientifically. For e.g., how might a Nagarjuna or Shankara have argued for their claims if they were born in the 21st century?
I suppose I don't have any deeper reasons other than sheer inquisitiveness or jijnAsA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijnasa) :-)
The Road to Reality by Penrose, perhaps.
I only recently completed an undergraduate sequence in quantum mechanics. I still have general relativity and quantum field theory left, which will take some more time to do properly. I also don't know how moral it'd be to wade into those waters without being on a first name basis with Jackson and Goldstein.
Suffice it to say that there's a lot of work to do. But time is something that I have!
Hoffman might give you a pretty good launching point for some of the scientific aspects as they relate as he apparently tries to keep up with what’s new in theoretical math and physics and how they relate to what we’re once purely metaphysical positions. (Ex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron)
Some of it is purely awesome stuff. It’s easy to get swept away by it, so if you don’t want to rock your worldview it’s best to keep the work somewhat cordoned to its own intellectual space.
If nothing else it’s a fun thought experiment and some perspective.
Good luck in your pursuit.
even better than an authentic knowledge is an authentic experience
We experience physical phenomena by proxy only - through the senses and sensors we built, followed by an interpretation by our brain; while we can observe our consciousness by just observing ourselves from "within".
I do not mean to question the paper, just pointing out that I find this fascinating.
In fact I strongly believe that consciousness is - in the end - the result of physical processes.
What I do question is that we understand what we mean by "physics". Physics is a model of the world, a model that we created based on our understanding how things ought to be, namely that all things are separate and that thus we can explain reality (and hence consciousness) by analyzing (i.e. dividing) the model more and more. Who says that that is a correct representation of the world?
Consciousness has sensors all the way down to atoms and yet we can have supremely evil people and supremely good and everything in between. Nature and nurture, we have philosophy to help us now that physics and stuck when everything divides down to the same one, we learn that killing your neighbor is like killing yourself. Some people kill their neighbor or themselves, others grow a community garden.
If you kill you neighbor you also kill your true self, all beings are of the the same consciousness, the goal is to individuate, to view the universe in new and novel ways, to teach others of the things you manage to bring back on your journey so that it manifests and propagates in this universe! We are not meant to observe we are meant to create!
That said our creations must follow the trinity of love, freedom, and truth otherwise the creations quickly devolve into implements of oppression to control the literal minds of the masses.
1. Sean is leaving CalTech at the end of next year. It's not a huge surprise, given his interests, that he is pursuing the issues in the philosophy of mind that intersect with quantum physics. Most work in this area is unadulterated quackery, and he is one of the few physicists who understands philosophy well enough to not make me cringe.
2. Most physicists implicitly engage in ontological metaphysics—that the world's fundamental construction is of objects, and not say, facts (Wittgenstein) or logical structures or relations (Carnap). Which I suppose explains why Carroll is interested in the mental aspects of ontology.
3. His conclusion is that the laws of physics explain consciousness, but not to the degree of satisfying everyone. We need to develop better philosophical models for understanding it, rather than positing new (ahem, outlandish) metaphysical theories such as panpsychism. Hard to disagree here.
4. I wonder if Carroll's future work in philosophy will cause him to revisit the many-worlds interpretation of QM, which a fair share of philosophers believe carries too much metaphysical baggage. The idea of many worlds "existing" is a philosophical idea; it's not something you learn from studying physics.
I think you also failed to include Idealism, that the world's fundamental construction is of Reason. For the uninitiated or the naive, the notion of Idealism often degenerates in their minds to Solipsism, but it is far from that.
Only if ontological questions are legitimate questions about the world and not simply practical decisions about language. I, and many others, remain unconvinced.
On one level you bring forth an argument against my points about Idealism, but your implicit assumptions in your arguments bely your reliance on many of these same points that I brought up.
I think he would argue it carries the least metaphysical baggage as the worlds exist in the equations we have, unlike things posited by other interpretations.
But I think it's a tough position, given that relational quantum mechanics also works "out of the box" and doesn't require ontological realism and a deeply speculative metaphysics.
Sean Carroll discusses this with Carlo Rovelli in two separate Mindscape episodes.
I'm both cases different observers observe different results.
IIUC the "worlds" on the many worlds interpretation is just a convenient way to talk about the relationship between an observer and the possible states it can observe after the system and the observer have been entangled. The emergence of a world branch is not something that happens at some specific moment in time. This is also why branching can be viewed as happening at superluminal speeds, because it's not a physical phenomenon, just a shortcut for us to use to discard states that are no longer accessible to us.
Whether that makes the many worlds interpretation more useful or less useful, it's a matter of context. However I have the impression that most people who oppose the view (e.g. citing how much more baggage it requires etc) fundamentally come from the mental trap of thinking that a conscious observer had a unique stream of consciousness and that anything that deviates from it would be inconceivable because "we don't experience it"
I am sympathetic to the idea that no one interpretation is 100% correct and that we shouldn't be deeply attached to any of them. Each may have its usefulness in different contexts. Independent of that, some interpretations more accurately describe the quantum world than others, surely.
I'm an avid listener to mindscape podcast and read of his books, so I'm likely "indoctrinated", as I don't really know much of these things.
But I had the distinct impression that Carrol believes that all there is is the wave function of the universe and everything else (including the many worlds) are emergent phenomena. In a way many worlds are "real" in the same way that "chairs" are real.
Citation needed: please say, exactly, to what or to whom you are referring.[0] In my experience with the study the work is precisely opposite of quackery: integrity, veracity, forthrightness.[1] My favorites are rivals Searle and Dennett, and though I believe Churchland(s) are incorrect, their work provides deep insight into brain and neurology for an excellent foundation for students of Philosophy of Mind. The point here is, even those that are incorrect (such as Descartes and other dualists) are not quacks: only through dissent do things move forward. Please give us examples of "quackery" in Philosophy of Mind. Because from where I am standing, any of them that rely on reductionism, which I expect a physicist would, are likely in error, because no matter how you slice up brain, you will never find mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophers_of_mind [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
This paper is doing the opposite. It's arguing that other papers/ideas advocating dualism are going the wrong way and purely physicalist explanations are the best path forward.
(Also, Platonism does posit an immaterial realm of the forms in which all material things participate. But this participation relation is problematic, something Aristotle pointed out in the Third Man Argument and something Plato himself knew.)
Made of math is as Aristotle noted: "All is number" — Platonic-Pythagoreanism was at the heart of classical civilization and the enlightenment.
I can only suppose that there is something about these ideas that deeply disturbs or even frightens. But I wouldn't dismiss them as gibberish.
It's all just that, a "behavior". Things that move. Signals propagate across wires. Pixels light up. All the is well understood.
Consciousness is nothing like that.
Series of complicated bio-electrical interactions? Vast numbers of connections, neurons firing together?
Even our limited attempts at neural networks are not very well understood, and that is just code running on well understood computer. A brain is way more connected and complicated than something like deep mind, even if you think of that stuff like a first order approximation. So if we cant easily do that, seems an actual brain with way more recurrence and structure is much harder.
I think there are experimental results though, we can look at an brain scan and nearly deduce what people are looking at, although don't quote me I would have to find the paper. Seems pretty physical.
Far from having an even remotely non-referential understanding of consciousness, we don't even have a non-referential understanding of the referent website as it exists in our perception--it just comes back to the same questions that a lot of physicalists seem to refuse to even acknowledge. I know that when I view this screen I see what I see as red, and I know that the material of my brain and the screen are responsible for that, but that does nothing to address what the referent red is in the first place.
How can consciousness be an emergent construct when emergent constructs are only identifiable as distinct from the sum of their parts by making use of consciousness?
We have no way of even constructing the concept that gets around this. "This brain state corresponds to these thoughts." Okay, but where/what are the thoughts? In order for something to corresponds to the thoughts, they must exist in some capacity, right? So long as consciousness exists at all, which anyone who experiences it can say with certainty that it does. If I drink a beer, I feel a certain way. Neurochemically, we understand exactly why this is happening. What we don't understand is how there are "ways to feel" in the first place.
Understanding how objects interact with one another doesn't answer the question of what those objects are; they just are. Understanding the effects of electromagnetic force doesn't answer the question of what electromagnetism is; it just is. With objects, we can actually break things down into a small number of basic components (particles) that depending on their organization make all objects. But these particles are already a thing with no reason; just an axiom we've been able to use to get a mostly logically consistent view of objects.
Consciousness, we have been totally unable to break down into anything. We can see evidence of it in others, and feel it in ourselves, and we can understand how to make it seem to go away, and also what seems to bring about certain effects in it's space (red, happy, warm, salty, etc.), but our understanding is not of those effects--it's only of how a certain material arrangement seems to bring them about.
Since complex interactions produce computations.
Therefore complex interactions produce subjective feelings.
Where's the connection?
Do you understand that the concept of information is just .. anything at all? Literally the arrangement of atoms in a rock can be considered information. The flow of water in sewer pipes can also be considered information. Not only that, but information processing.
It's not information that _we_ are interested in, but it is information none the less.
Why would consciousness only arise from the signals traveling across the brain, but not from water flowing in pipes?
> I think there are experimental results though, we can look at an brain scan and nearly deduce what people are looking at
ok this is all well understood. The brain does information processing and we can sort of tell what's happening in it.
That's not the question at all.
Why does the information feel like something? That is the question.
Too often, "emergence" is one of those "gap" explanations that tries to produce something from nothing. Yes, independent things can enter into interactions and relations that result in states of affairs that they alone could not have produced. That's obvious. You don't get a pile of oranges without a bunch of oranges. But a state of affairs of individual objects doesn't transcend being a state of affairs of individual objects as long as you maintain that they are still individual objects.
It seems surprisingly common that people don't accept this "boring" explanation, but go to search for explanations outside of the known laws of physics.
> if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death.
You can say that about flying too.
If the CPU was created in a billion year evolutionary process in which the lack of ability to flight would result in its death, the CPUs would fly.
Like, how is this relevant?
Can flight be properly explained in terms of signals flowing through a CPU? Yes or no?
if the machine has consciousness of thought and not just continuity of data, it would feel pretty bad with it's sensors (maybe even some total pain threshold metric) and might even cry or complain to a near by sentient being for help.
The problem is it may only speak to other beings of the same abstraction level, or higher and the listening being has to notice, have empathy, and the skillet to fix it.
People who have taken psychedelics may disagree but I think consciouness is tightly connected with sense of self, the ego. An organism that is conscious can have a sense of self. An organism with a sense of self may have a greater degree of flexible self preservation / flexible self promotion than a simple stimulus response network. Because we are conscious we focus on what we are feeling about our selves not just on the immediate sensory stimulus. Pyschedelics may break down the connection / integration of senses with self giving rise to the illusion of consciousness outside of the self-brain. But I would say this is an illusion.
How would such a program work? What would it do in order to produce subjective feelings?
You do understand that you can not just write a program to do some arbitrary X if that's not within the capabilities of the hardware it's running on.
For example, you cannot write a program that would make the laptop fly. You need something that's physically capable of flying that can also be controlled by software. Like a drone or something.
I did not make such a statement. I made the point that computers certainly are not. Therefore you cannot reduce consciousness to information processing. For many reasons, the most important one is that "information processing" can be used to describe the flow of water in pipes, so if you say that is sufficient to produce consciousness then you must say that the sewage system is conscious.
By the anthropic principle it is a given that consciousness arises from the function of neural cells, but that isn’t a satisfying answer because it doesn’t actually answer anything.
It seems to me consciousness is something we have to have to exist the way that we do. In order for the human animal to function, we need to understand the past, predict the future, understand the motivations of others and come up with stories about the world we use to convince others and facilitate collaboration. Human society wouldn't be possible without consciousness, and I don't see more explanation needed than the idea that we evolved this ability for our brains to talk to themselves in this certain way through the series of selective pressures which lead us to where we are today.
Other animals probably have some version of this at varying levels of complexity, and somewhere along the line you could probably draw a line and say a slug with 15 neurons probably is more of a biological machine, and doesn't have anything you could describe as consciousness or subjective experience. Maybe you even need a pretty advanced brain with a neocortex to allow for subjective experience.
I don't know why some "spooky stuff" is needed, or why some reach for consciousness to be a property which arises in individual cells. I think it's probably a very complex thing which arises from very complex structures consisting of millions or billions of neurons.
The smarter the human, the more conscious and aware they are about the surroundings, the higher their ability to create and understand abstract concepts etc.
Is this just the product of more numerous neurons? Better connected neurons? Higher density neurons in some areas of the brain? Is number of neurons correlated with IQ and in turn correlated to degree of consciousness and abstraction?
We don't know yet, but it seems better advised to start looking at the base biological components first vs "spooky stuff"
There's a lot of tricky questions here that no one can really explain. I don't think the answer need be any "spookier" than any phenomenon that's unexplained - except maybe it's just surprising we've made so little progress at all.
Consciousness is observably a property of the brain. Consciousness can be predictably altered or removed by interfering with the chemical function at the synapse, or by inflicting physical trauma on brain tissue. Honestly I don't see what is so difficult to understand here.
Do you see the difference to your analogy? Forward movement can be measured. And if you removed parts of the car you would eventually get down to the bare minimum required for forward movement because you could observe it. You cannot do this with conciousness.
> Forward movement can be measured. And if you removed parts of the car you would eventually get down to the bare minimum required for forward movement because you could observe it. You cannot do this with consciousness.
What makes you so confident of this? We actually have plenty of evidence in this direction with consciousness. We can observe that lesions in different parts of the brain have very predictable effects on consciousness. We can observe that psychedelics like LSD reduce sensory inputs to the thalamus, having very predictable effects on consciousness. Consciousness is obviously a process which responds to physical intervention, so why should we jump to the conclusion that it somehow exists outside the bounds of the physical world rather than assuming that it's just one of many physical phenomena we have yet to fully understand?
To give an example, we cannot reliably predict the movement of the economy. We can understand some of the forces guiding it, we can try to understand it in terms of certain metric, and we can take some actions to get the results we want, but ultimately we can't point to any one thing and say: "this is the economy". It's an emergent property of a vastly dynamic interconnected system of billions of independent actors, and as a result we will probably never be able to fully pin it down. But we don't assume that the economy moves as the result of some magical force controlled by the gods, we rightly know it's just something out of our grasp.
> why should we jump to the conclusion that it somehow exists outside the bounds of the physical world rather than assuming that it's just one of many physical phenomena we have yet to fully understand?
I don't believe the cause of conciousness is magic or supernatural, it'll surely be a physical phenomenon. Just not sure if it emerges via some phenomenon that we haven't discovered yet.
You can't make the word "complex" do the heavily lifting here. There is a precise structural and functional organization of that matter that makes the engine. For the case of consciousness, you can't throw neurons and emergence together to explain away the precise structural and functional integration of those components that bring out consciousness.
You have to have a continuity of explanation between the "list of parts" and the final thing.
Otherwise someone else could have just gotten away with saying "an engine is an emergent phenomenon of atoms slapped together". If we're going to lack rigor, why not just stay at the lowest zoom level of explanation after all...
> Consciousness is observably a property of the brain. Consciousness can be predictably altered or removed by interfering with the chemical function at the synapse, or by inflicting physical trauma on brain tissue. Honestly I don't see what is so difficult to understand here.
So a live brain in a vat would have consciousness? If not, what are the minimal components of the body you have to add before you can observe consciousness?
Cartesian entrapment of consciousness “upstairs” is actually younger than embodied models, and none are as simple as you make it.
> You have to have a continuity of explanation between the "list of parts" and the final thing.
That's exactly the argument I am making. I believe the most plausible explanation is that there is a precise structural and functional integration located in the brain which gives rise to consciousness. It's many many orders of magnitude more complex than an engine, we don't understand all the details and maybe we never will, but even based on the current understanding of neurobiology there is no reason to believe we have to look elsewhere for an explanation.
> So a live brain in a vat would have consciousness? If not, what are the minimal components of the body you have to add before you can observe consciousness?
There are psychoactive drugs which can effectively dampen sensory inputs to the brain, which is similar to your "brain in a vat" case, and people who have used them self-report having subjective experience while they were under.
Without sufficiently explicating what that structure may be and how it interfaces with the purported non conscious parts of the body, it is too big of a leap to claim that a locale that is not even the whole brain is essential to consciousness.
Regarding the psychoactive compounds, I am not convinced it gives the evidence you think it does. There are way too many confounds, and I don’t think dampening creates the brain in a vat condition anyway.
There are plenty of counter examples though, if you’re interested check out embodied cognition. There are cool experiments like people’s cognitive skills diminishing when they are prevented from making hand gestures.
As for "how it interfaces with the purported non conscious parts of the body", this part is incredibly obvious. Afferent nerves take information from sensory receptors into the brain, and efferent neurons transport motor signals from the brain to the muscles.
There's no mystery at all about the interface: if consciousness is a product of some sub-region of the brain, the interface is the set of synapses carrying information into and out of that region.
> it is too big of a leap to claim that a locale that is not even the whole brain is essential to consciousness.
I would argue the evidence is incredibly strong that consciousness is localized at least within the brain, if not within a more specialized subset of the brain. Basically every intervention we know about which is capable of having a profound effect on consciousness has to act on the brain. You can amputate an arm or a leg, and consciousness remains intact. However psychoactive drugs interfering with normal activity at the synapse, and trauma to the tissue of the brain causes reliable and repeatable effects on consciousness. If consciousness is indeed a property which originates outside the brain as well, why is it that we can only affect it by taking physical action at the brain itself?
As for the argument that it's not "the whole brain", there's a lot of evidence for that as well. For instance, people with various forms of brain damage can lose certain functions without losing consciousness. For instance, people with lesions in the primary visual cortex may not be able to see, but they surely retain their consciousness and subjective experience.
> ...embodied cognition. There are cool experiments like people’s cognitive skills diminishing when they are prevented from making hand gestures.
This one is very easy to explain and there's no revelation there. Basically all of psychology research has shown that if you divide someone's attention, they perform worse on cognitive tasks. If you artificially require someone to restrict their hand movement, they must spend some of their cognitive capacity thinking about their hands, so they're going to do worse at everything else relative to baseline. If this didn't happen, it would be extremely shocking.
Perfect, thanks for admitting what you don’t know. Now tell me how can you be confident that it has to be exclusively “brain” regions if you can't even point to the locale. Why can't it be brain regions + sensorimotor loop for example?
> As for "how it interfaces with the purported non conscious parts of the body", this part is incredibly obvious. Afferent nerves take information from sensory receptors into the brain, and efferent neurons transport motor signals from the brain to the muscles.
Let’s stick with the credibly obvious. You’re not describing me the interface, you’re merely talking about general pathways. I am asking you the location of the entrance of Walmart, you’re describing me the highway that takes you to the general direction. The truth is, we don't know the entrance(s).
> There's no mystery at all about the interface: if consciousness is a product of some sub-region of the brain, the interface is the set of synapses carrying information into and out of that region.
“Information”? Individual neurons can’t carry information any more than a single fiber of your Cat5 twister pairs can carry an http header. At best neurons are carrying data that eventually is made into information. Guess what is the bulk content of that data? Sensory data. And it is more a multi-directional protocol of information processing than mere transport of dead data.
Remove all of that, even if just the history of any sensory input, what is consciousness conscious of exactly? Thoughts? Are they formulated in language? Where did the brain-in-the-vat learn the language from, why did it learn it? There is more than one way your argument doesn't add up.
> You can amputate an arm or a leg, and consciousness remains intact.
You’re right. Also you can damage brain regions, and consciousness remains intact. But by that token maybe amputated arm and leg was just not critical enough to reduce consciousness, like those removed brain regions? Maybe a more severe disembodiment is required before consciousness is impeded? Therefore your example proves little.
Conversely, you can induce so much sensory pain that consciousness is overwhelmed, diminishes or is entirely lost. Phenomenon like chronic pain evidence some amount of peripheral processing. Phenomenon like blindsight point to learning without conscious awareness.
In sum, only thing we know is brain is involved in consciousness, it is a constituent of it, but we have no information as to what the exact list of constituents are, and research points in the direction of body being involved just as much.
> This one is very easy to explain and there's no revelation there ... they must spend some of their cognitive capacity thinking about their hands, so they're going to do worse at everything else relative to baseline.
This was actually controlled for in the experiment with binding feet, and the effect was sustained. (Alibali, M. W., Spencer R. C., Knox L., & Kita S. (2011) and Davoli, C. C., Brockmole J. R., & Goujon A. (2011)) There are a great many deal of papers on this topic by the way, as embodied cognition is a very active research area.
> I would argue the evidence is incredibly strong that consciousness is localized at least within the brain, if not within a more specialized subset of the brain.
Yes you keep making willful assertions of the strength and obviousness of your claims, but you fail to provide any evidence that back you up with proportional certainty. I'm sorry but you can't just handwavingly disregard any research that disconfirms your perspective and make rhetoric/sophistry do the heavylifting of your argumentation.
When did I say individual neurons cary information? I said: "the interface is the set of synapses carrying information into and out of that region." A set of neurons surely can represent and process information.
> In sum, only thing we know is brain is involved in consciousness, it is a constituent of it, but we have no information as to what the exact list of constituents are, and research points in the direction of body being involved just as much.
Just as much? Really?
Stephen hawking certainly seemed to achieve a high level of consciousness, and his body didn't do much of anything.
> This was actually controlled for in the experiment with binding feet, and the effect was sustained.
I don't find this convincing. When I am sitting down and having a conversation, I am much more likely to be in the habit of using my hands than my feet, so it's going to be more distracting to take my hands away.
If hands are really involved in consciousness, you would have to show me a study where double amputees show cognitive impairment relative to control.
But to address your other points, let me restate my argument in a simple way:
1. Consciousness is one of the most complex phenomena we are aware of, which involves information processing and the unification of a lot of high-level functions we can locate in the brain, like language, decision making, emotion, value judgements and so on.
2. The 3lb lump of jelly in your head you call a brain is the most complex organ we are aware of, and we understand in a very detailed way how it is able to process information through chemical and physical processes.
3. Experimentally, we can induce profound and repeatable effects on consciousness through chemical and physical interventions on the brain.
4. Basically we know of no other way to have said profound and repeatable effects on consciousness besides intervening with the chemical or physical action of the brain. (I know you are going to argue with me on this, but you're going to have to show me more evidence than "mild cognitive impairment).
So we don't know know, but I think it's a fairly strong bet that the brain is responsible for consciousness. What other system can you point to which would be capable of the job?
To address the "brain in a vat" question, I would return to the car example you loved so much. If we put a car in a weightless vacuum (assuming we can still provide oxygen to the engine for combustion), when we step on the gas, the car is not going anywhere, but we still understand that capable of everything required to create forward motion under normal circumstances. By the same token, I would wager that a brain is capable of "doing consciousness" - whatever that physical process is - without inputs and outputs.
And we can see that. That's essentially what dreaming is. That's essentially what a heavy dose of LSD does.
And to give you a thought experiment: what if we could simulate all the inputs and outputs to our brain-in-a-vat perfectly? What if we wired up fake synapses that acted exactly like biological ones, but they were controlled by a computer instead of responding to reality. What do you expect would be the difference between that brain and the one in your head which would deny it consciousness as you experience?
And if you think it wouldn't be conscious because it lacks a body, let's go a different way. Let's say you start with a brain in a body, and then neuron by neuron, we replace all the organic inputs and outputs with an artificial one. We're already doing it with ocular implants and advanced prosthetics. When would you reach the threshold where this brain was no longer conscious?
It seems like you want me to explain the exact mechanisms for consciousness before you will be satisfied that it's located within the brain. I can't do that. Nobody can. But we can observe that the brain - even an incomplete brain - is necessary and sufficient to produce consciousness. We can observe that physiologically it's the most likely candidate. I would say the burden of proof is vary high to assert that we should look elsewhere.
Specialization. The same reason a why during ontogenesis some cells became neurons in the first place while other ones, something else.
The only kind of evidence we have that anything is conscious is self reporting from other humans. For many vertebrates it seems plausible they have some level of consciousness based on observed behavior, but we don't really know.
I'd say the burden of proof lays squarely on the side of proving that anything besides an advanced CNS is involved in consciousness. I see no reason anyone should have to disprove the existence of consciousness anywhere outside of a fairly advanced brain.
> I see no reason anyone should have to disprove the existence of consciousness anywhere outside of a fairly advanced brain.
There's a fairly big moral reason. Unless we can know what is concious and what is not, it's only right to be on the safe side and treat all organisms as if they are concious. How advanced should the CNS be before there's an obligation to not cause pain for an organism? (should we care about chickens in cages?)
And I think pain implies conciousness. A calculator can't feel pain because it experiences nothing. To feel pain a chicken must experience something, it must be concious.
My take on the assessment of pain is that any entity with some self sustained direction (in life) will be able too suffer or feel pain when faced with sensations that signal an obstruction to that direction. If the entity is able to self correct the path after such sensory input, I claim that the entity can experience pain.
With that in mind: A calculator has no self sustained direction. And no sensory input to help with self correction either. So it naturally cannot feel pain.
A chicken has a self sustained direction. It lives (moves on its own) and at least want to continue to do so. It also has the ability to self correct when given sensory input. So it can feel pain, and you can (given the reasoning above) be cruel to chickens. Even without an assessment of whether the chicken is conscious or not.
To be conscious, to go into that as well, is in my book to be able to use reason and to be able to reflect on things. So that new sensory inputs are created and assessed based on other already experienced sensory inputs. I.e. to be able to self adjust ones path (in life) seemingly, from an external observer, without any new sensory input.
With that definition one should be able to construct experiments with chickens to decide whether they are conscious or not, or merely acting subconsciously, autonomously.
With that definition of consciousness it should also be possible to define an AI that is conscious. And given the definition of pain above, it should also be possible to inflict pain on (and be cruel to) an AI. The morality of inflicting pain on different subjects is a different story though... :-)
Cheers
> * In order for the human animal to function, we need to understand the past, predict the future,*
AlphaStar can do that (or at least simulate that). It it has seen a invisible helicopter, it remembers that. It also understand that the opponent has build an airport to make the helicopter and invested to research the invisibility feature. So other research are probably delayed. Also it expect to see more invisible helicopter in the future, so it builds detector for invisible units. Does it understand the past and the future or only simulates understanding?
> understand the motivations of others
If it sees an airport that is researching invisibility, it probably guess that the opponent wants to make invisible helicopters, and want to use the helicopters to attack it's units or buildings.
> and come up with stories about the world we use to convince others and facilitate collaboration. Human society wouldn't be possible without consciousness,
AFAIK there is no multiplayer version of this AI, but it would be interesting to see one. It will be a difficult problem to choose how much communication to allow between to AI so they can play together, but not as a four-handled player. Also, how to interact with a human teammate. But it doesn't look impossible.
Well, this sounds like what they could say a thousand years ago: "the (say) Greeks' definition of what the natural luminous celestial body is not rigorous enough, so, let's ignore it and continue believing in the sun as a god."
https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/ander...
The mathematical underpinnings of superconductivity are still in flux, but there's still every reason to believe that it's an emergent phenomenon from known physics. I don't see any obvious reason why consciousness can't be something like that.
In both examples you made we do in fact have good mathematical descriptions that allow us to describe the system and the way it works, and moreover we can infer/predict non obvious things about it. Do you know of anything similar that can be applied to human/animal behavior?
Emergent behavior can be totally opaque, even when we have perfect understanding of the elements of the system. Just because the behavior is totally inscrutable doesn't mean there's anything we are missing about the underlying mechanisms. There's no hidden principle of Turing machines that would let us predict them reliably either- their underlying mechanisms are totally understood, the behavior is still essentially unknowable.
Perhaps living systems are like that. It seems quite likely, since their underlying mechanisms are actually much more complicated than toy models like the Game of Life, that they can manifest totally opaque behavior without requiring any new physics at all.
You fell for a ruse. Your phone can use its camera to observe quantum phenomena such as shot noise just fine. Observations have nothing to do with consciousness.
Who/what says that you can? Consciousness seems to make most sense as a sliding scale than as a sudden switch.
But even if you do argue that it's optional with intelligence, the reason it would be present would simply be: is the most efficient way to implement it.
There's a mystery in these questions, and I think that's well accepted. I've heard this "emergent property" explanation before but it seems kind of a handwavey way of avoiding answering any questions. "It just appears when you have enough neurons" is probably true but how?!
Then you don't disagree with parent. You're saying that we don't know enough to fully explain consciousness, which I think everyone would agree with. Parent is just saying that our not understanding it is not because there's something outside of the known laws of physics that we're missing - we just don't know to understand how the laws of physics give rise to consciousness, but they do.
If neural networks explain consciousness (which they may or may not do), then there are still some remaining issues to explain. For example, how can it be that our universe exists, and why are the laws of physics in place? And why are they so consistent?
The consciousness problem may be unrelated to these problems about the fundamentals of science. It may well be that we can understand consciousness as a thing that exists entirely inside the laws of physics, but some people are not yet convinced. It may even be the case that the consciousness problem and the fundamental science problems are intrinsically related. Hence the interest in the combination of quantum mechanics and consciousness.
One hint that points in this direction is that neural networks are a great basis for abstraction and logic. And by some coincidence this is exactly what can be used to form theories that explain everything we observe.
What predictions, testable in principle, are made by this "emergent phenomenon" hypothesis?
- There's no underlying consciousness or conscious originator (no god, no panpsychism, no underlying conscious layer at the basis of reality, no nothing) - At some point, two or more elements (rocks, atoms, etc, that weren't conscious), aligned precisely in a given configuration and zap!, they became conscious and interactive - All consciousness then sprang from that.
So the question would be, if systems favour inertia, stasis and conservation of energy, why would there be consciousness at all and just not an endless void, or a perfectly stable (as in homeostasis) system without conscious agents, or just rocks floating in the space.
I'm not saying the idea of emergent phenomena is wrong, just that you better answer the complex questions other "supernatural" theories try to address, before declaring it some sort of obvious and correct answer.
How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from just a collection of neurons? We have no idea.
Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like explaining the creation process of black holes with the words "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us anything, and if we want to understand it deeply we can't be satisfied with such a simple non-answer.
Another example are atoms: Most of their properties are easy to predict from the properties of their constituents and from the physical laws: The mass of atom is the sum of the mass of the constituents, minus the binding energy, which we can easily predict.
But, for example, nucleon mass is emergent. Most of it is created dynamically by QCD, and we cannot easily predict it. We can, for example, not easily predict how the mass changes if we change properties of quarks or gluons. A brute-force lattice calculation is required.
Weather is a similar example. We understand the basic rules, but weather patterns are only predictable with limited success and a lot of forward simulation.
Any aspect of consciousness that is usually brought up can either be attributed to some brain function, or the aspect is a wishy washy, hand-wavy property the emergence-skeptic can’t quite define.
The insight from the study of the minds of brain-damaged people alone gives fascinating insight into the interplay of mechanical defects and their experiential effects.
Due to this, he doesn't want to accept that consciousness may just boil down to natural processes and is hoping that there is something more.
Well, it turns out there is no difference. We value immaterial things because of the immaterial information we have about them. If I spend 3 months of salary on a shiny rock (diamonds) what makes the diamond special? It clearly isn't worth that much. There are substitutes and even artificial diamonds that are flawless that are superior to natural diamonds. It's only in combination with the information about the 3 months that the diamond ring becomes valuable and only to those who have the information and value the information. If I tell my wife that I spent 1 month even though I spent 3 months she will think I am cheap. If I divorce and marry again the new wife will not care about the old ring.
There is no material world for us. We are just an information processing being and our body is just a puppet.
If information processing is all we do then it should be clear that we can create consciousness through simulation and given the right structure it is not a matter of yes or no but rather a matter of degree.
1. The laws of physics at the time scales, space scales, and energies of the human brain are "known" and we have deep reasons to believe that more will not be discovered. He spends a great deal of space explaining and arguing that the credence that physics is "complete" in this regime should be very, very high.
2. Given the current laws of physics, there is no place or room for non-physicalist explanations of consciousness (or, I suppose, for other dualist ideas like a soul) because there is no mechanism for them to effect change in the physical world.
3. Anyone who wants a non-physicalist approach to consciousness must either claim they can violate the laws of physics in our brains, or cannot affect the physical world.
My "decision" isn't real.
If it is an actual conscious choice, that was not calculatable by the exact state prior, then consciousness is fundamental.
Carroll and others have a compatibilist notion of free will which is a more subtle concept that I'm not sure I'm qualified to actually explain.
What is your conception of free will? Is it just "randomness"?
If your actions are not determined by your thoughts and desires .. then they would just be completely random. How is that "free" will?
That is unless there is some sort of actual absolute meaning to the universe, which is a very boring and treacherous line of reasoning that i won't entertain here
However he existence of an omniscient entity would completely break physics as we know it so any physicalist/rationalist approch to understanding the universe can fairly safely rule it out
Free will may exist as a result of the unknown factors of human consciousness, their actions and consequences and their relations to the physicial world.
Personally I find that thought quite pleasant, because it means that free will does exist from a human perspective, and I happen to posess one of those.
Free will, defined as autonomous decision-making partially influenced/affected by the external environment, does exist.
Now 'autonomous' = determined by the agent, i.e. the decision to have pizza today is determined by something in you, not fully determined externally, but that something is likely not your conscious experience.
In that sense, free will does not exist.
But that does *not* mean that everything you do is predictable because P!=NP. Even God, if s/he exists, does not yet know what you will do tomorrow, s/he's waiting to find out.
So: you are not free, but you are not bound to something either.
We will never be able to perfectly calculate the causal chains of the universe before they unfold, so we operate in a world of uncertain chances and maybes.
There is a strand in (an obscure corner of) Buddhism that maintains that:
- The fundamental "substance" in the Universe is awareness.
- Awareness creates the body and the sense organs.
- Awareness projects the external world through the sense organs.
In this model, there is no claim that consciousness violates "the laws of physics". It just disputes that the physical world is fundamental. And this model certainly doesn't ban consciousness from affecting the physical world (that it created).
I don't believe for a moment that this model was meant to explain things, like a scientific explanation; it's meant to present a "view" (a way of looking at experience) that is helpful to meditators. It's very much the opposite of the instinctive way of interpreting experience. In part, it's meant to disrupt pre-conceived notions about experience - so it's also meant as a challenge.
Consciousness is the "sixth sense" that allows us to experience what is going on in some specific parts of our brain with which we "observe our brain's observation activity".
(So to be clear I'm not talking about any paranormal sense. If that exists it is the 7th sense. Consciousness is the 6th)
Axioms of hard materialism:
- physical events have physical causes
- everything is a physical event
the associated tenets of science support a kind of intellectual "clean room", isolating rational thought (stories about things) from being contaminated by specks of human emotion/desire/serendipity.
Other ontologies (including my lived experience) have different core principles.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-life-and-death-spring-fro...
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10...
Right...
"Chris Langan is a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), a body that actually promotes ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID). His God is the god who created the world and his ‘proof’ is that the universe behaves like a mind, therefore this must be the mind of a god.
Langan may be reputedly the most intelligent man in the United States"
Source: https://www.quora.com/What-is-God-according-to-Chris-Langan-...
IQ is the best measure we have to compare how fast your brain stores and processes information compared to others.
But "fastest man" is well defined, because speed is well-defined.
"being fast at storing and processing information" is a candidate for a definition of intelligence, but far from the only one.
So no, it's nothing like claiming that Usain Bolt isn't the fastest man in the world.
Or maybe it is: Bolt is almost certainly not the fastest person over 100 miles, so what kind of speed / intelligence are we discussing?
"verbal comprehension, processing speed, perceptual organization, and working memory"
(nothing wrong with starting the discussion from the title or abstract, but it becomes harder to find comments related to the article).
All physics and consciousness converge to the universal one. The unified field of one.
TM is pretty easy, just come up with some nonsense sounds and repeat them over and over, this is a mantra. Eventually switch from saying you mantra out loud to saying it in your mind. Don't worry if thoughts roll in just keep your conscious on the mantra.
It seems to work for me and I don't typically enjoy meditation. It takes practice. Good luck!
Basically science and theoretical physics followed the observational science down to a place where they got stuck, the good news is throughout history, including today, spiritual people have already found and understood this truth.
Everything in our universe is built fundamentally out of the same universal field of one: mass, spirit, and consciousness!
Everything (mass and consciousness) is created out of this field, and the act of observing it can and does change it!
Godel, Wittgenstein, et al