Comment by stoniejohnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stoniejohnson | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I don't think it is accurate to think of it as the "output" of information processing, rather I think it is the actual act of diverse, yet integrated information processing.

Simply put, different parts of the brain do different things; there is some level of isolation of function, e.g. Broca's area for speech, the visual cortex for sight, etc.

Conscious experience clearly relies on several disparate parts of the brain (e.g. sight, sound, touch and smell can form a cohesive experience).

The integration of these parts is the act of consciousness, or put in another way, when the brain is highly integrated in a waking state of perception, it is conscious.

That's what the "P Zombie" thought experiment misses, imo. We are not some Rube Goldberg machine of pulleys and levers, as the analogy would lead us to believe. We are also not a series of pulleys and levers with some qualia painted on top.

We are, instead, the global process that arises when a biological agent's neural system is highly integrated with the goal of providing the organism a sense of self and direction.

It sounds pretty grandiose, but it is still fundamentally empty, much like the a system of pulleys and levers. Where do your thoughts come from? What do you actually do? Not much.

> I don't think it is accurate to think of it as the "output" of information processing

Don't put too much emphasis on my use of the word "output". I simply argue that information processing alone is not what creates/activates/whatever consciousness. I recall an episode of Star Trek in which the Enterprise computer emerges consciousness merely because it is a sufficiently complex system, but that is akin to magic to me. I reject the idea that a computer will magically become conscious simply because it's running some sufficiently complex AI model.

> The integration of these parts is the act of consciousness, or put in another way, when the brain is highly integrated in a waking state of perception, it is conscious.

This might explain the role of consciousness and why evolution favored it, but it simply doesn't explain fundamentally how consciousness emerges from neural activity in the brain.

Consciousness does not emerge; that's a trick your brain plays on you.

Really your conscious experience is quite empty/vacuous.

Let's take vision, for example. (this is based on reading a handful of papers without a background in neurophysiology, so mountain of salt etc)

Your vision isn't some continuous, perfect experience. Meaning, if you look at an old smartphone, you can really see the pixels, and you can see the jagged breakdown of the UI if you kinda squint and look close. This reveals the magic trick that it's really just a grid of pixels.

Same with your conscious experience!

Your vision, if you pay attention to the sensory content rather than what it represents, is grainy. It has constituent "pixels".

What are those? This is where I am guessing, because sure we have retinas, which would be an obvious choice, but there are also retinotopic maps in the back of your head in the visual cortex (https://elifesciences.org/articles/40224).

These create essentially a visual homunculus of your first person POV. It is entirely made up of cells, that get more dense as they get closer to mapping the fovea.

Back to my early point about vision being grainy. The point there is that vision has artifacts of it's medium. It isn't some perfect magical substance that gives a continuous, smooth qualitative experience, rather it is grainy, and likely a physical configuration of neurons.

What neurons?

Well, for vision, I think a conscious person's first person POV is identical to the retinotopic map.

When you look around, those neurons are changing.

If someone asked, in physical space, where my first person POV, made up "qualia", really is? I think you would have to point to this retinotopic map in the back of my head. There is nothing additional needed. Neurons can seem to be a 3-D a video game experience if configured in this convoluted way in a biological organism's nervous system.

TLDR: Those grainy movements of your vision? Those are neurons dancing. Your first person, visual perspective is entirely physical.

EDIT:

If they further inquired: well, okay, those neurons are identical to the first person POV that this biological organism has. But why is it appearing to them? Why aren't they a P-Zombie?

Well this neural homunculus (retinotopic map) is in the visual cortex which is connected to the parietal cortex (involved in spatial awareness and attention) and the temporal cortex (involved in object recognition and memory).

So whatever is happening, is a coordination of this visual homunculus with all the other processes corresponding to our other features/senses, with the goal of having a cohesive experience for an agent, you.

So these neurons are made up of a larger global process, and thus you can sit and look at this screen, but also hear yourself reading this sentence in your head as you vocal chords have minute movement, and then stop and think of something. This kind of ties back to my first comment, but the point I'm making here is if you phenomenologically investigate one of the most salient soups of qualia, vision, it becomes pretty clearly it is entirely physical. So the onus falls back onto you, what extra stuff is there?

I still don't see where color comes from in this global process you've described. Grainy or not, we still experience color. And color isn't something that rides in on photons, and then hops onto electrons which are sent to the visual cortex. Instead, the process of visual perception has to color in the world somehow. Mental paint is one way of putting it.

> Really your conscious experience is quite empty/vacuous.

I don't know about that. Maybe you need to elaborate more, but the fact that we are aware of our own consciousness and can practice introspection and speak of concepts like qualia suggests to me that consciousness is not completely empty/vacuous.

> Back to my early point about vision being grainy. The point there is that vision has artifacts of it's medium. It isn't some perfect magical substance that gives a continuous, smooth qualitative experience, rather it is grainy, and likely a physical configuration of neurons.

I fully agree with this statement. I'm well aware that our perception of reality is highly distorted/skewed and sensory information is heavily processed in the brain before it enters our sensory consciousness.

> ... it becomes pretty clearly it is entirely physical.

It's very plausible that the organization of neurons in the brain relates to our conscious experience. However, there are so many problems with the "physical" interpretation of consciousness. The entire brain is "physical" and very active yet only parts are conscious and others subconscious.

A fairly recent study challenges the idea of split brain consciousness, suggesting there may be something separate allowing the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate despite being separated by a corpus callosotomy.

https://neurosciencenews.com/split-brain-consciousness-6011/

A very interesting case study, twins joined at the head, their physical brains strongly connected. They can control each other's limbs, "see through each other's eyes", and even know each other's thoughts. Yet despite that, each girl still has a mind of their own. Two separate consciousness, where is the physical barrier?

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/episodes/inseparable

> So the onus falls back onto you, what extra stuff is there?

Electromagnetism? Nuclear forces? Spacetime? Quantum entanglement? Superposition? Higgs field? Wave-particle duality? Dark matter? Dark energy?

One interpretation of particles (electrons, neutrons, photons, ...) is as excitations in a quantum field.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-a-particle-20201112/

Saying consciousness is "entirely physical" is a rather meaningless statement when we don't even know what "physical" is. Nobody really knows what is the true objective nature of reality.

I agree with your points.

There was some interview where a smart dude basically said we became enamored with the scientific method and created these strict, quantitative laws/rules/measures. Now we are trying to squeeze reality into these derivations, which is backwards.

Are there fundamental phenomenon that undergird consciousness that we are entirely unaware of? Yeah probably.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com