How working memory could give rise to consciousness
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
An interesting read is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow that explains cognitive systems, 1 is subconscious and fast and the other is conscious and slow
Consciousness is the envelope. Conscious is a category of awareness.
My brutally downvoted comment implied this, with more conjecture of the envelope. Enable “show dead” if you didn’t catch it!
To me, consciousness is not generally that you can be aware (conscious) of things around you and can react to them, lots of things can do that.
Consciousness is a shorthand for saying that something is conscious of itself, or conscious of its own consciousness. It is the meta-ability to observe its own perceptions and thoughts. And a sense of self, a sense that the observer is the same over time.
But frankly, it’s a terrible concept and my definition is plenty flawed too. In practice it is more of a moving goalpost to denote the specialness and superiority of humans over all. That thing we can’t quite put a finger on that makes us different. It is a secular euphemism for the soul. It is not very scientific.
And that is quite problematic because the privileges we ascribe to those on the wrong side of the line fall off a cliff. We rely on that line as a foundation for so much of our morals. We have seen the catastrophes that happen when a group has a different idea about the line.
I don’t have a solution to propose, it’s hard.
Which is kind of strange because folks who achieve insight examining their own perceptions and thoughts seem to dissolve the barrier between self and not-self.
Meta-cognition is a common skill a lot of highly intelligent people possess but of course if you don't have it you can still be highly intelligent, just not as aware.
Consciousness is too overloaded by conflicting definitions.
We could at least imagine the possibility of something coming across as conscious in every way without having a subjective experience of self.
Even a fully deterministic view of consciousness can be compatible with a possible split between entities that act-as-if but without a subjective experience, and those with.
The problem is that there is no reasonable way to prove a subjective experience - we're stuck self reporting. We can't even prove other humans have subjective experience.
It is also not clear that it matters of such entities can act identically.
The difference between conscious and subconscious is deliberation and speed.
The subconscious relies on shortcuts, the conscious takes more effort, at least when talking about cognition that seems to be the case.
"This can be a difficult idea to swallow. Imagine you’re looking out at a countryside scene. You see rolling hills, the vibrant sunshine and a herd of cows. You hear the birds, smell the fresh cut grass and feel the wind on your skin. Surely you are conscious of this whole scene all at once. But we know that working memory has a capacity that is far too tiny to fit all of this information in at one time. If consciousness arises from working memory, then how can I be conscious of all this stuff at once?
Indeed, some philosophers and scientists have argued in just this way, saying that consciousness overflows the capacity of working memory. If this is true, it would be a problem for those who think that consciousness arises from working memory."
https://theconversation.com/consciousness-how-working-memory...
To solve a Rubrik’s cube, you need to engage your working memory.So, we can’t define or measure it, but we can create it?
How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?
Of course, understanding the mechanism is helpful if you want control, reliability, and precision over the phenomena, but creation can definitely happen before we can explain it.
Through engineering.
This isn't new by any stretch of the imagination. Throughout our entire history as a species, we've been building things long, long before we had the tools to understand them. We built bridges and massive cathedrals before we invented geometry. We built and optimized steam engines for a century before we developed the language of fluid dynamics to understand why those designs were optimal.
Engineering very frequently is far ahead of the science needed to explain it.
As far as consciousness goes, personally I think it's an emergent property that will arise on its own when conditions are right. It will take a lot of experimentation to establish the right conditions, and then generations of study to figure out why those conditions were ideal for consciousness to emerge.
Because realistically we can't learn about consciousness with a sample size of one (us). We need to study other consciousnesses to understand the why and hows.
I look forward to more precise definitions.
Without it we can't walk, eat, reproduce, or do anything. I like to think cost viability reasons explain consciousness. I know people prefer metaphysical or quantum magic explanations, I prefer a prosaic one - cost. It's a mechanism to keep our costs offset by gains. Cost can also explain unity - we die as one organism, not each organ on its own.
Of course, you can be like Daniel Denett and bite the definition bullet - he was talking about 'free-will', not consciounsess and that a chess program has the necessary properties.
But, it makes more sense to take conscious experience as more fundamental, what we are directly aware of, and try to explain everything else with that as the base.
Eg.
1. The brain "does cognition".
Cognition <> consciousness.
2. Some philosophical theories have consciousness pre-figuring complex arrangements like the brain.
ie. The brain is not necessarily a pre-requisite for consciousness.
I'm not saying brains are the only way to produce consciousness, just that the evidence shows that they are the way animals do here on Earth.
It is extremely unlikely that there is something else involved.
> There is certainly much of physics remaining to be discovered, but in the specific regime covering the particles and forces that make up human beings and their environments, we have good reason to think that all of the ingredients and their dynamics are understood to extremely high precision (Carroll 2021a). Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.
https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33.pdf
(author is now Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins)
On some views, the brain may be a particularly complex organisation, localisation, or exemplar of consciousness, rather than its ultimate origin. That would include any brains here on earth.
It is extremely unlikely that there is something else involved.
Well, that's clearly a view to be expected of a hardcore physicalist like Carroll but the quoted text seems somewhat circular as it insists on a framework that seems not to really get to grips with the Hard Problem.
This kind of intellectual arrogance and blindness is exactly how people believed that the earth is the center of the universe, and that only human beings have souls. There is nothing new to be learned from their dogmatic opinions.
What's not clear is what causes it and how to evaluate whether someone/something else "has" it.
animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction
Consider physics as an analogy.
The level of detail dictates the right physics to use. Aerospace engineering can use continuous formulae to predict what’ll happen. But when you deal in a few atoms as in chip design, quantum effects dominate. Sub-atomic particles (quarks et al) are different again.
This makes deriving a universal physics elusive.
So it likely is with consciousness and how the brain achieves what it achieves.
Consciousness is a process that runs concurrently with the main process and follows it, hence we know about our thought. In this analogy, WM and consciousness have little relation.
Consciousness is merely the awareness of existence, while attention is the process that works with the working memory.
To me, consciousness is a log file that is partially in working memory and has logged the current state of the system.
What we perceive as "present" is just our latest memory.
Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable.
The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with.
When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress.
You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.)
[citation needed]
Only if they can't provide a reliable citation.
Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing.
I’m also curious how you define consciousness.
This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try.
If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.
In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively
There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition
In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective.
It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous.
EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations.
Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains.
I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain.
The panpsychist answer is (unfortunately) the only one that even remotely passes the sniff test.
Someone else posted a decent link to the relationship of “holographic” memory and consciousness. I do not speak with that as my source though it is a relevant idea.
A) Just because there is thinking it does not follow that there is an "I" doing it.
B) Perceiving something does not in and of itself prove that either the thing or the perciever are "real". Some things are real without being perceived, and some things are perceived that aren't real.
C) Even if we grant the reality of the "I", What is the thing that is perceiving the "I" which is doing the thinking? We cant trust something that may be a faulty instrument to report on its own actions.So we can't actually be sure that we are thinking and not just falsly remembering that we once thought. See rootkits for an example. If we're starting from first principles (as Descartes intended) we immediately fail because we require an outside observer.
D)Etc.
Basically every major philosopher since Desacrtes has already had a go at this one. I'm sure there are better arguments against it out there already. These are just the few that spring to mind.
Really, its just the place where Descartes gave up, not a universal truth of some sort.
I argued “experience therefore consciousness.”
No “I” nor “think” nor “am”
To use your language, perceiving something does in fact necessarily imply there is perception happening.
You’re jumping to Descartes (who was wrong), I am pointing to Nagel (who is correct but not in a way that’s very helpful answering the corollary questions of consciousness)
You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you. I know it exists in the case of me. It’s probably reasonable for each of us to assume it exists in the case of each other.
Just because I "know" something, that doesn't make it true. Or to use the "experience therefore consciousness" version:
Experiencing something doesn't imply that either the subject or object are objectively real. Humans regularly experience unreality (books, games, movies, hallucinations), and the assumption that you exist because you feel that you do is no more valid than the assumption that Mickey Mouse is real because you feel that you have seen him.
To restate more directly, there can be no "objective" reality without others to validate it. Otherwise its only "subjective" reality.
It's been a long time, but I think Hegel really misses the mark. (You mean Hegel rather than Nagel, right?) I think he argued against doubting your own perception, but anyone who has ever taken LSD, or met a mentally ill person, can tell you that there are miles between perception and reality. The way we percieve the self is unlikely to be any more reliable than the way we percieve Mickey Mouse.
Your knowledge of consciousness existing within you is inherently subjective. And yet it's the truest thing any one of us can possibly know (per your point, a simple molecule ingested by mouth can distort nearly everything except the fact of consciousness). No matter how distorted the external/internal data that populates consciousness, the backdrop of consciousness is certainly there.
And no, I mean Nagel, not Hegel.