Hacker News Reader

Comment by pygy_ | Hacker News Reader

That statistic comes from a book[0] that was written in 1998, and is based on little evidence. The science of consciousness has tremendously advanced in the last 14 years, and I'm not sure it is still seen as correct.

There is a preconscious reduction of bandwidth (lot's of pruning). The input is transformed, from lots of points in low dimensional spaces to fewer points in a higher dimensional one, and it is hypothesized that consciousness is isomorphic to the integration process[1] that performs that transformation.

That theory has the big advantage of being neither anthropo- nor neurocentric. It can be related to any physical system (biological or otherwise).

Stephen Hawking has been spotted at consciousness conferences recently.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory

edit: corrected and refined.

View on HN

The field may or may not have progressed dramatically. However, ironically your claim of a lack of evidence, is not evidential itself, and I suspect the dismissal is unwarranted. Tor Nørretranders[0] was expanding on the work of German engineer Karl Küpfmüller[1].

Furthermore Kupfmuller,Nørretranders are not alone in this regard:

"We can therefore conclude that the maximal information flow of the process of conscious sensory perception is about 40 bits/second -- many orders of magnitude below that taken in by receptors [nerve endings]."

-- Manfred Zimmermann. "Neurophysiology of Sensory Systems" in Robert F. Schmidt ed., Fundamentals of Sensory Physiology (1986) p.116

"... If we do not act in the way we think we do, the reason is partly to do with the bandwidth of consciousness - its ability to transmit information measured in terms of bits per second. [...] The bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits."

--John N Gray (2002) [3][4]

First prize would be evidence for a refutation of the 'consciousness operates at a low information rate' hypothesis, as opposed to conjecture or speculation.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_N%C3%B8rretranders

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_K%C3%BCpfm%C3%BCller

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Sensory-Physiology-Spring...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Straw-Dogs-Thoughts-Humans-Animals/dp/...

[4] http://books.google.com/books?id=k5PkZXJEQqoC&lpg=PA45&#...

I put the number in question because the people who made these estimations didn't have a proper grasp of what consciousness may be.

That being said, I didn't read the papers in question, and they may have a valid argument.

However, I don't understand how you can encode in 16 per second the evolution of your current experience out of all the possible states your brain may be in and go to.

There is a lot of compression due to expectations, but I still find it hard to believe that it is so low.

Edit: For serial tasks (say, reading, listening to someone speak), the 16-40 bps range makes some sense, but I don't think that visual experience can be reduced that much.

Edit 2: Take, say, music. You can encode the audible note tones on 6-7 bit. You can easily listen 4 notes chords played 4 times per second. We're already in the 100 bps ball park, and we haven't taken timbre and loudness into account.

>> That theory has the big advantage of being neither anthropo- nor neurocentric. It can be related to any physical system (biological or otherwise).

This advantage has a downside: the definition is so broad that any large, integrated system can be described as conscious. Of course, you can argue about what counts as "integration" and whether, say, Los Angeles is really a well-integrated system.

Reference: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.fr/2012/06/why-tononi-shoul...

Yes, it would mean that consciousness is pervasive in the whole universe, and, that, for example, your cells are probably conscious. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis.

The point is that the nature of the experience is isomorphic to the integration process, which is very different from system to system.

That's why IMO, for example, anthropomorphism in AI is a dead end, and the turing test is irrelevant.

I'm pretty sure that this integration process in my brain continues even when I'm unconscious. Or would this definition of unconscious preclude people ever being unconscious except when they're dead? I think that's sufficiently at odds with the everyday definition of consciousness that a new word would be called for.

> I'm pretty sure that this integration process in my brain continues even when I'm unconscious.

Nope. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19818903

If not off, at least, it is greatly reduced, and memory encoding is turned off, anyway. You can even wake up for a few minutes and not remember it.

That is, in slow wave sleep. In REM sleep, you can be conscious, and probably are systematically (dreams) even though you don't always remember it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com