Self Awareness, the Last Frontier. By V. S. Ramachandran | Hacker News Reader

Self Awareness, the Last Frontier. By V. S. Ramachandran

edge.org

41 pointsDaniFong35 comments

There's the seed of an idea going around that the Flow state (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) is a function of our Self Awarenss.

Here's a interesting article on the practical application of this that LifeHacker linked to some time ago -> http://www.life2point0.com/2006/06/the_little_book.html

Edit: Just found it on Scribd -> http://www.scribd.com/doc/86499/The-Little-Book-of-Flow

"(except in pathological states like folie a duex and romantic love)"

Great essay, but I just loved that side note. "Oh, by the by, love is a pathology. Now, back the the article."

Pathological has a secondary meaning of "highly abnormal." Also, brain scans have shown activation patterns of people in love to be very similar to those with OCD and other mental illnesses. See this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why...

When the mystery of consciousness is "solved", will it be capable of being explained in English? Or can it only be solved at some level of math and physics?

I want to say a bit of both, but I can't imagine how far away we are. The mind carries one of the most advanced file storage and retrieval systems, and on top of that, it's not like one activity happens only in one place. The mind works with several other parts in conjunction with most common tasks (blood flow increases in many parts of the brain when you look at a picture, triggering a lot of different things to happen at once). Just knowing that blood flow increases is only a measure of the energy used, it doesn't even tell us what's happening at the lowest level.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm always very interested in this sort of stuff. I've been given a few book recommendations which I hope to take time to get around to, just swamped with work and have a few books on my list already.

Definitely in English, and also in bio-chemistry. Math and physics only as much as chemistry is applied physics and physics applied math.

I feel that math will probably show it's head in studying neuronal networking; after all, we're going to want to model it someday.

I asked about this on HN a short while ago, and most people try to address consciousness as it not really existing because it's created by your mind. I hated that psychology and neurology could explain how dopamine makes you feel happy, but beyond that, there were only chemicals, axons, dendrites, and synapses. It's like saying sodium ion channels fluctuate to carry an electrical signal, but in the big picture, it's difficult to understand how exactly that allows me to think about "reality" different from others (assuming others do).

The resounding answer I got, although unsatisfactory in my mind, was that our brain is either very complex or very simple. Neurons are vastly capable of amazing things, or we're just creating this all up as we go and we've even defined this concept of reality based on a bunch of data that was given to us and which we for the most part accept without thinking much about it.

Then again, how do I even know you exist. For all I know, my brain is making this all up, and everything that exists is nothing but a figment of my imagination (solipsism). And then I encounter another person who says the same thing (I'm telling you, I exist too, and I was wondering the same about you), and that's supposed to be where we hit an infinite loop and crash. Our operating systems seem to be a notch above the market's.

"For all I know, my brain is making this all up,"

If you're going that far, why not take another step: for all you know, the entire context that convinced you that you have a 'brain' is something your mind made up, too. Ultimately, there is nothing that you can't be wrong about.

One of the great dangers of brain research today is that as we find the "explanation" for things, we will conclude they are just illusions and not real.

Well, the thing is, we're pretty sure at this point then that everything is "an illusion", by this standard. Religious experience, love, red, pain, it's all just an illusion brought on by neurons firing in certain patterns, right? Moving into the computer realm, the text box I am typing this into is an illusion brought on by clever programming, as is the browser. It's not an isolated series of claims of illusoriness, you need to consider the whole of them at once, including not just the politically popular ones (religion), but everything that argument makes sense for (red, mathematics, scary).

I submit to you that this view, while popular, is silly. How can everything be an illusion? That stretches the meaning of "illusion" beyond sensibility. I propose to you that the "illusion" is in fact the real thing, and what you considered reality was in fact an illusion brought on by your ignorance of how things truly work. Finding a neural explanation for an experience does not make it illusory, it merely brings it into the fold of things you partially understand, displacing your previous ignorant ideas about what is "real".

Failing to take this view is, IMHO, extraordinarily dangerous to yourself.

This text box is not an illusion. It is a text box in every way that matters. I send it keystrokes, it puts up text, you read it later. What more do you want? Red is not an illusion. It impinges upon my eyes, I see it and process in certain characteristic manners, all of which are every bit as real as anything else.

Higher levels of organization are not "illusions" merely because they are not atomic. My car is made of nuts and bolts and fabric and metal, and it is those things, profoundly, but it is also a car. My brain and self is made of neurons and glia and blood flow and individual firings, but it is also my self, nevertheless. My text box is no less real for being built twenty layers deep on various more atomic APIs.

To apply this directly to a contentious point, establishing the neural location of religious experiences does prove or disprove them any more than establishing the neural locations of "pain" proves pain isn't real. To disprove a worldview, you need to use logic of the form "Given your worldview, this fact about the world conflicts", and "I found your religious experiences in the brain" doesn't fit that mould. Christians, Muslims, and other religions with creator gods will claim that the creator god put the circuits there because they tap something real. Hindus may not claim a creator god put it there (I know less about Hinduism), but they will still claim it is there because it taps something real. And so on, for many religions.

I'm not saying this disproves the atheistic, Darwinistic view of religion the "I found the neurons" discovery engenders for such people. I'm saying it doesn't disprove most religions to any greater extent, either; it's basically null evidence on that front.

(And heck, while I'm making controversial statements, may I also add that IMHO this viewpoint very nicely harmonizes the traditionally disparate "Western" and "Eastern" views of the world, and that they not only need not be at loggerheads but actually fuse into something quite nice.)

I like this. Even though the way you perceive it is an illusion, something's there outside the illusion. And the way we perceive things has such good internal consistency (usually) that it has to be a pretty good approximation of what's really out there. Plus, everything has to be perceived one way or another - what would it even mean to "see things as they really are" when it comes to matter, light, etc?

and that's supposed to be where we hit an infinite loop and crash.

Since the other person is a figment of your imagination their claim to be conscious is no different - a figment of your imagination. There's no need to crash, it's all your subjective reality.

(or, really, my subjective reality).

Why can't scientists conclude that there is nothing interesting that we can discover about qualia? Subjective experience can't be tested scientifically.

Nothing interesting? How can we be so sure?

Qualia can at least be found out about, if perhaps not so scientifically. Recreational drugs can be taken to play with perception. Qualia can be made to change fairly reproducibly. Maybe you can't find out much about some other person's experience, but it's something.

I think the qualia problem asks why subjective experience exists and whether people experience the world in the same way subjectively. So this has little to do with recreational drugs and perception.

My point is that one can know something about the content of one's own subjective experience, and how it changes. Knowing about someone else's subject experience is a much taller order. So far people seem to learn about it by assuming that others are much like themselves, and then asking them details to get a better picture by successive approximation. It seems we're stuck with examining responses to qualia, at least for now.

One can also do some fairly objective studies of subjective experience. See for example, Robert Ornstein's book On the Experiencce of Time http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Time-Robert-E-Ornstein/dp/0...

So this has little to do with recreational drugs and perception.

I disagree with that. I suggest you take some psychadelics and try to explain your experience to someone who's never taken them. Words fail to convey this properly. It's as hard as explaining the colour red, I think.

Not just those drugs that many deem recreational. I know my perceptions change rather dramatically when I'm hungry vs. satiated, tired vs. rested, happy vs. sad, listening to music vs. listening to waves, in love vs. alone, etc., etc. etc.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. - William Blake

That's right; our perception is constantly changing. Thank's for the poem. It brought a smile to the New Year. :-)

I don't know anything about qualia, but it sounds like the sum of the interactions that a concept can have in your brain. So while the colorblind alien might know what wavelength of light corresponds to red, would qualia be the effect that "redness" has on my brain? All of the feelings and implications from hot, stop, blood, sunburn, lifeguard, etc?

And there we are, religious experience (loss of selfishness and making one with the environment) is hyperactivity of neuron circuits.

And at the opposite end, we have autism, with no empathy towards others since their "circuits" are inoperative

Fascinating. I wonder what are the implications for AI research.

It may be not so hard after all to create artificial conscious mind, in fact in may be even easier than getting right the "intelligence" part.

This is a great article, and it reminds of all the other recent advances in our understanding of the brain, like this one: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080305/full/news.2008.650.ht...

I sincerely hope our understanding of the brain is at the start of geometric growth.

Interesting article, but unfortunately lacks references.

I wanted to find out more about kinetic muftis but according to Google Ramachandran is the only one to use that pairing of words. After that I realized that many claims were being made with few details and no references.

This was a beautiful line: "I have long known that prayer was a placebo; but upon learning recently of a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo, I immediately started praying."

Wow that was a lot of interesting stuff. One thing that stuck in my mind is: "a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo"

A former alcoholic once told me that when he stopped drinking the sight of a wine bottle was enough to make him drunk.

A placebo works even when you know it's a placebo.

Otherwise it would be a drug that works even when you don't take it...

Good article. Except for the "qualia" asides. Really there is no such thing as qualia. There is nothing to explain, there is no "explandum", so to speak. There is no such thing as "redness", there is only the fact that a human subject will use the word "red" to refer to an electromagnetic pulse of wavelength 600nm. The subject will say "red" to relate the wavelength, that is, we can predict the subject will say "red" if asked for the "color" of a pulse shone at the subject of wavelength 600nm. There is simply nothing to explain in qualia, it does not exist.

To steal from Dennett, one might as well ask about gremlins that appear in the cylinders of a combustion engine. We can explain the fact that wheels move in a combustion engine via the action of the cylinders, or, we can say it is the action of the cylinders plus the gremlins. Thinking of qualia as something that needs explaining is like thinking that your car's movement is predicated upon the gremlins produced in its cylinders. The gremlins do not exist, neither does redness, nor any other type of qualia. Period.

This sounds interesting. Where can I learn more?

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...

That is an amazon link to Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", where he deals with consciousness, qualia, and so forth. Dennet's personal website is at: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm

By the way, I myself am not a philosopher, I am a QA engineer, so it is not like I have a "stake" in this whole topic, but I just like Dennett's approach to it, which is more sane than some others.

We're not trying to explain how wheels move in a combustion engine. A functioning brain is not predicated upon qualia, which is why it's so mysterious. (See: zombies.)

I think the problem is that qualia don't have any place in existing models of our world. And yet we experience them (at least, I do). That's bizarre, and suggests our models aren't quite right.

There are no gremlins, but there is combustion happening in the cylinders. Dennett's Consciousness Explained is like your above explanation of internal combustion engines. Your explanation mentions combustion but is missing details about how the resulting pressure and forces are channeled. His explanation is missing essential details as well.

There are no gremlins. There are laws of physics. There are facts of molecular biology. We don't know all of these things yet. I think it's premature to declare that "there's nothing to explain" until we know more about the brain.

I suspect we're like Galileo if he were confronted with an internal combustion engine. He might be able to deduce that it's all just physical phenomena, but he wouldn't even know all of the physical laws a team of engineers would use to design the thing.

And yet, the "red" that appears in my consciousness differs, when I look at an object with my left eye, from that produced by my right eye.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com