Key Consciousness Connections Uncovered
neurosciencenews.com
neurosciencenews.com
It really shows how a lot of who we are is unconscious and happening without us being aware.
> The main thesis of the book is that we are very often not aware of our real reasons for most of our behaviours. Our behaviors are optimised for living in a social group and very often, from the point of view of natural selection, it is useful if we are not consciously aware of our real motivations. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...
My science literacy is lacking.
Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study, but any brain research pretty fascinating.
- consciousness
- sentience
- self-awareness
- sapience
(It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
I don't think this is correct.
Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way.
But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
Reality, again is a very vague word in physics. One definition is, real is that which always is, not that which is not. Material nature is subject to constant change, there is nothing in the material universe that is immovable, unchanging and eternally static and stable.
Eastern philosophy describes the reality as the 'Self', the self is eternally existing without a causation but this Self, the observer, requires an observation and hence the concept of material nature comes into place to justify the existence of the observer but the Self is mutually exclusive to the material nature. The Self is not an manifestation of the material nature, otherwise it would be ever changing, like material nature.
For science to explain consciousness, it has to drop the idea of a controlled experiment. You cannot empirically verify certain thing to be true, this is what metaphysics is for.
I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions).
It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas.
Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction.
[0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
The "self" is just a psychological construct - the actor behind our actions, which in fact is just the brain. This is just the way our brain has evolved to understand/predict an evolutionary landscape full of autonomous agents, who we need to model to predict their behavior. There's no fundamental difference between "self" (my-self) and "you" (your-self) - our brain observes some (inner or outer) entity as a causal entity, and models it.
Well, most animals have awareness, but not self-awareness.
> there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
That doesn't seem to be true at all. The idea of a self is very testable.
I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness.
Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can.
I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality.
I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.
It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else).
A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible.
How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. And since all that exists in our lives is our collection of sentient experiences of reality, this is a pretty big ethical question.
Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood.
> There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”.
Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it.
> Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient.
You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.
I don’t think so - see https://chatgpt.com/share/507ca1a4-43a3-4b30-afaf-08273ed54d...
(I just tried once)
This is of course not meant as proof or knowledge of any kind, but just that the way I’m using the words is what the “average” of how people in books and on the internet would use those words.
I don’t understand how “evolution and brain development” cause sensations to arise. What part of our biology is the part directly producing sentience experience? How would you explain why we experience anything instead of nothing? Can we replicate it in a non-biological system?
I think a cornerstone of panpsychism is that none of the concepts presently available to any physicalist explanation is sufficient or on the horizon, therefore it is necessary to entertain such ideas as a universe-spanning proto-consciousness.
I find this position to be pre-emptive, not in the spirit of scientific open mindedness, not compatible with any research program that could prove or disprove it, and completely emptyhanded in any conversation that seeks to understand consciousness in functional or structural terms as well as completely emptyhanded in even beginning to explain the combination problem.
Until it gets its act together and gets out of alpha-testing, I fault pansychism proponents for bringing a "teach the controversy" approach to a table of scientific investigation at which they are yet to have earned a seat.
However, my understanding of the double slit experiment is that the "observer" in the experiment means something more like measurer or measurability, which can be done by devices. And it shouldn't be construed as being deeply tied to consciousness in philosophically important sense.
So when I say like the double slit needs to be adapted, it would need to account for such. It would need to test for 'choice' from a particle... somehow...
Or... maybe randomness as a concept is flawed. Maybe randomness === '(some level of informed?) choice' from particles we are not privy too. not some 'hidden variable' but a dynamic ability to 'choose'?
How would we prove random is random and not a choice/decision we can't see or understand?
We might as well posit pancandleness in order to explain the candleness of candles. Without such a thing, why call a candle a candle? It would merely be just a temporary arrangement of molecules.
Likewise, a feeling of red isn't due to some mysterious redness. It is just the label we put on a particular configuration of neural activation. No need to make it mysterious until someone shows that more is required to explain it.
Well... that's the problem no one can 'show' it, but we all know the feeling of 'redness'(mysterious or not, caused by neural activations alone or not) is still fundamentally different from the knowledge that red light is shining on another object. And that's the problem.
I mean, maybe you don't experience this feeling and I'm truly talking to an automaton (hello!). But I can't honestly take these claims seriously when it's extremely obvious to me that the feeling of seeing red is fundamentally different from the pure information content that red light is shining on my face. It's a fundamental feeling of sensation that is simply inexplicable.
Why does red feel anything at all. Why is there a conscious (whatever that even is) experience of red. Wouldn't the universe work fine if it's all just automata (however intelligent). Why is there a feeling of existence at all. Is that necessary for the universe. Why? Waving these questions away as 'not mysterious' is either due to laziness or a fundamental difference in experience (which would be fascinating on its own, but I have no idea how to approach methodologicaly).
2. We don’t actually know what the internal subjective state of apparently-unconscious people are e.g. in drug-induced states
Even if all of that were different, it still is not a disproof of panpsychism.
The thing that is inscrutable to me by virtue of not having been a Kalman filter myself is what I’m referring to as “point of view.”
I don’t really know that anything or anyone at all is conscious (except for me), but it sure seems like lots of other things are, based on the way they behave.
You still haven't said what a point of view is in this context, if you can have it, and some other unspecified beings have it but you can't say upfront if a kalman filter has it.
I’ve said multiple times what a point of view is, I think you’re just too caught up in argumentation to read the text in front of you.
You agree that you have experiences, correct? Your ability to experience experiences is what it means to have a POV. The name of that characteristic is “consciousness.”
It is probably the case that some objects experience experiences (like you presumably do and I definitely do), and other objects do not.
Prove it.
So you claim. I can prompt an LLM to do the same.
How do you figure? It’s not uncommon to fall asleep, wake up, and be convinced that you never fell asleep even when people next to you tell you that you were unresponsive, snoring, talking in your sleep, etc.
I would say yes and no. I think we all feel there's something different about wakeful consciousness vs sleeping consciousness, and also, it seems that we are indeed sometimes "out cold" and that something like an "activation loop" (new term to me) might be necessary to play a role in distinguishing these various states.
Why would you say that? Why can't you say "I don't fully agree".
The Hard Problem is contrasted with the so-called Easy Problems - which are still very hard to solve, and many of them still aren't - but they are ultimately of a class of solvable problems, like neural correlates, the role of dopaminergic pathways, and so-on. These everyday neurological findings are needed to make progress toward understanding the brain, but they don't really have anything to do with consciousness.
Some definitions:
let intelligence mean the acquisition and understanding of knowledge
let self mean who you refer to when you say "I" or "me"
let consciousness mean raw sensations/happenings: *the aroma of coffee*, *the taste of chocolate*, *the sound of a drop of water*
So that leaves the mystery of raw experiences ("the aroma of coffee") which do not seem solvable in any scientific sense. You could say that a digital camera that detects faces in its viewfinder is intelligent, but it doesn't "see" the face, we know that it only unconsciously "detects" the face. So a mystery arises when we examine the human eye, because we see basically the same hardware as the camera: Lens (lens), sensor (retina), wire (optic nerve), chip (visual cortex). Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing.
I applaud all progress toward understanding the brain, and sometimes wonder why the whole of humanity are not all focused on solving problems like death and aging (by way of solving consciousness), as it seems like pretty much the most important possible thing to all of us!
Favorites on the topic: Donald Hoffman, John Searle, David Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris.
> a chaotic thalamo-cortical loop
The aroma of coffee is not explained by the words "chaotic thalamo-cortical loop" - those are words used to loosely describe which neurons activate when I experience the aroma of coffee, but they are not the aroma of coffee, and there's no proof that they are even causal to that experience. It's a logical fallacy because many correlations are not causes but effects, and some are entirely unrelated. Example:
The green stoplight correlates with cars driving, but they don't cause a car to drive. No amount of learning about stoplights will teach you about how a car moves. From far away you simply noticed that the green light is loosely correlated with the cars moving, but that's all you know. That's what is meant by the phrase correlation is not causation - "False Cause Fallacy".
LLMs have nothing to do with consciousness, that's artificial intelligence which as I defined above is not the same as having a sensation. Intelligence (and selfhood, and other psychiatry) are all happening within the conscious process, they shouldn't be conflated with it.
> There's no hard problem of consciousness
If there's no problem - meaning, it's well-understood to the point you can reproduce it - then why has nobody been successful at producing it in isolation? The answer is, we don't know what consciousness is to the point we can reproduce it.
To deny consciousness outright is to deny the first-person observation that you're having right now. Empirical science is based on observational evidence, and there is observational evidence of an experience from your perspective - the fact of your experiential existence owes a grokable explanation - even if it is caused by or correlated with neurons in brains.
Seems plausible that a detailed enough mapping of correlates one day uncovers a single thing/feature/location/architecure/pattern/whatever that is present only when qualia are, and absent in all other processes. That would at least point us in a concrete direction.
When you think deeply about the Hard Problem, it's really The Impossible Problem because there's no way to solve it within our subject:object and "self" paradigms. Yet the problem persists.
Take something like the memory of the first time I tied my shoes - maybe you can find the exact neuronal correlations to that experience I have when I think of that, but they won't be that memory, nor do they even give up the ingredients to engineer that in some alternate setting. The memory itself seems like a completely different phenomenon that the neurons (themselves, concepts in consciousness) can never explain on their own.
For instance, either new physics is involved or it isn't. Finding solid evidence for or against it does not seem impossible, and it would definitely constitute meaningful progress, at the very least by ruling some theories out.
I can accept that I have inner experiences and can suffer, but what about animals/robots/outsiders?
Will I need to take GPT-10's feelings into account, or is it completely unconscious?
How about the real real outside world? We don't know it. No one knows the thing in itself. So far, to see the world you have to be embedded in it and see something from a specific POV.
Why there is at all consciousness, idk. Why not? Consciousness seems functional... because humans can't really do anything while unconscious. So it seems to me very much part of evolution.
In materialism everything we know is machines and mechanisms: From atoms to trees to buildings. It works for explaining most things, but maybe there are some things that aren't machine-like, leaving us with no way to understand it (at least not using those concepts).
Think of it like - you can program a computer to do all kinds of things, but it will never "feel pain" because that is a totally different class of phenomenon that we have no idea how to produce - no amount of code will ever make pain or joy happen to the computer - it's not a code problem. "Feeling of pain" etc. are the primitives of our experience, these little experiences add up to make up our lives and selves, but we have no idea what they are or how to produce them. We only know adjacent physical things that happen alongside it like neurons firing - which not only doesn't even begin to explain it directly but is itself a concept of the consciousness machine we're trying to explain.