The Grand Illusion: Why consciousness exists only when you look for it (2002)
susanblackmore.co.uk
susanblackmore.co.uk
"Instead of asking how neural impulses turn into conscious experiences, we must ask how the grand illusion gets constructed."
I really don't see what the difference is. How are we to interpret the notion that, say, the color Orange is really just a "trick"? Some sleight of mind perhaps?
What point was the author trying to make?
That might not seem important today, now we know what colour is in terms of physics and the only remaining unknown might be how we internally perceive it, but the nature of colour was a real question at one time, and trying to understand it ended up improving our knowledge of physics.
Trying to understand consciousness, however pointless you might think the difference between an actual consciousness and one constructed on the fly is, could very well lead to interesting discoveries as well, eventually. It's also interesting to know in itself.
> It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a skeptic.
Instinctively, I find it absurd that the human brain should work similarly to how human-created computer systems work, and that these analogies should be tossed out, but maybe it actually does make a kind of sense? Is there a convergent evolution occurring whereby we will eventually come to understand human consciousness because the more we improve our computer systems, the closer we come to approximating the fundamental "thinking powers" of the human brain?
so it makes perfect sense that you'd use these anologies.
http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Graziano_JCN_2014.pdf "Speculations on the Evolution of Awareness" - Michael Graziano
"selective signal enhancement" is an interesting concept.
http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.ht...
http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano
I feel quite lazy now.
Yeah, he's certainly contributed a lot to consciousness research. http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/MG_Vita.pdf
I've done a lot of thinking and discussing around brain-transfers and what it requires, I'm really interested in reading his papers around that topic, and some of the others.
Who is it then, who is succumbing to this illusion?
You hadn't noticed it before, but now that you have, you know that the clock has struck four times already, and you can go on counting
Does that really happen? I am never able to do that, each time the church's clock strikes and I want to know what time it is, I can never be sure if I have missed one or two strikes at the beginning, and I often do miss one (and there is no mean to determine how many could have been missed). I thought that was the same for everyone, and the reason why it strikes again two minutes after the first time, so you can be ready to count.
Other than that, the article is pretty much how I had been thinking of consciousness already.
In modern words, what we call "consciousness" is mere a set of processes, which could be switched on and off.)
So, as I look at my screen, I can acknowledge its existence and repeat stuff I've learned about about atoms, elements, etc. But, when I truly start to question how this physical world is held together and what proof we have that it even exists beyond, say, a simulation, then I fail.
There is some fundamental level at which I'm not "certain" of anything. So, how can I begin to ask questions about how I perceive those things?
I think, therefore I am
Quite possibly its arrogance, or jadedness. But I've come to develop my own opinions about issues like that, through other means of acquiring knowledge than science, which I feel is grossly inadequate to address such issues. And no, I'm not talking about secular/clinic types of mindfulness.
Probably that makes me a weirdo in circles like HN, but oh well.
For example, when trying to reason about a somewhat complex system, I am often trying to "multi-task" or "juggle" multiple things. Sometimes I will get caught on one thing, possibly draw some conclusion, and then remember, "oh yeah, that won't work because of X." I don't think it makes sense to discard the concept that X has entered, exited and re-entered my conscious thought process.
Another example - if I catch a whiff of an old girlfriend's perfume, or hear a song strongly connected to a time from my past, I am instantly thinking of those things in a way that I wasn't the moment before. But those memories have continuously existed in my head in some form, or I wouldn't be able to recall them. Over time they have mutated, morphed, and mixed with other experiences - I don't think it's like neatly organized and addressed computer memory - but there is some unbroken chain that lives "below the surface" most of the time. Again I don't see the value in discarding this concept.
But I think the more salient point of the article, and what I believe d-equivalence is referring to with the "interpretation of consciousness," is the concept of unreliability. Due to the ever-churning and "living" nature of our memories - combined with the fact that the brain is merely an evolved tool with certain properties useful for keeping humans alive (as opposed to an impartial processor/arbiter of "true experience") - our perspective on our own thought processes is unreliable. Most of the experiments described in the article seemed to me like standard "tricks of the mind." It edits, it rewrites history on the fly, it fills in the gaps, because it has learned to anticipate, to identify things it has seen before. The being that can create a mental model that correctly anticipates what happens next has the advantage. Our brains have been honed to do so as a matter of survival, going so far as to creatively make things up and eagerly overfit, and we've developed ways of catching it in the act.
I have thought recently that consciousness, or any phenomenon that includes the awareness of the passage of time, is an illusion of memory. Imagine that you have only an instantaneous existence. Over time you move from one instance to another, changing state each time. In essence you are a state machine.
At any given instant, your new state depends on your current state and new inputs (not only are you a state machine, but you are a regular expression!). Unlike a state machine with a fixed set of states and an infinite tape, you have a near infinite set of possible states and a finite tape. The way the state is constructed, it is possible to reason about the likely path you took to reach your current state. Of course, states you were in only a few iterations ago are easy to deduce while states that you were in a long time ago are much harder to deduce because there are many possible paths.
Finally, let's imagine that you can partition your state. In other words, you can take a small part of your state (call it a sub-state) and you can deduce past sub-states that you would have had to pass through in order to reach this sub-state.
With this in place, "awareness" could merely be the act of enumeration past possible sub-states. So you can "concentrate" on a sub-state and at any given instant deduce the sub-states that have lead to this position.
Because your interface with reality would be the review of these possible past sub-states, it would appear from your point of view that there was a flow of occurrences that led to your current state. But all of the information you are processing is internal and so your awareness would be dependent upon the instantaneous state only.
You could get very silly and imagine that if your movement between states was idempotent, that you could even execute the state machine out of order and it would still produce the same awareness of order and hence flow of time.
If this were to be the case (and I have no real reason to believe that it is -- it's just an entertaining thought), I don't think it would be as discrete as I describe it. If you consider a neural network, it has a similar kind of state and a similar kind of "memory". Training the neural network creates outputs from inputs based on what had previously been input. One might imagine a kind of network that could walk backwards through "memorised" patterns by feeding the outputs back into inputs, but I don't think any such thing exists (and possibly it can't exist). Aside: I know about convoluted networks, but I don't think they produce the effect I am describing.
Like I said, it's an interesting mental exercise, but not necessarily anything like what really happens.
PLUS PSYCHOLOGY HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH NEUROLOGY AT SOME POINT
BTW, your keyboard seems to be broken.
Consciousness is similar to other loaded/ambiguous words in the English language like "spirituality." Everybody has a different perception of what it is, and nobody can really define it. Lots of female hipsters still like to toss the word "spirituality" around while never really knowing what the hell it means.
"Consciousness" on the other hand has a more scholarly philosophical flavor. If you want to get into a meaningless pseudo-scientific discussion with no logical end (and beginning), "consciousness" is the perfect word to guarantee things will go nowhere. Like this article, for example.
Male hipsters too, btw.
Articles grounded in science are a better fit.
A notion exists in a word form when it has some definition, even if it cannot be articulated well. Here by "definition" I mean something like "the ability to categorize examples even if fuzzily", i.e. saying that "a rock is not conscious while a human is" already indicates the existence of a definition. Note that this doesn't require that you be able to describe the category in a nice precise sentence.
Through dialogue, critique, experiments, we can gradually construct a specific sense for the word that a group of people can work on. Take "energy" for instance. The word existed before physicists defined it precisely, and even the definition within that domain evolved when quantum mechanics came around. Furthermore, the usage of the word isn't limited to contexts in physics only.
Is it worthless to ponder "what might a physics definition of consciousness be?".
But definitely utterly worthless to ponder "Is consciousness an illusion?" without knowing the definition of consciousness.
Here's a ludicrous question: "Is spirituality a fruit?" Whatever feeling you get when reading that phrase, it's the same feeling I get when reading the title of this article.
we have a shared understanding of consciousness which is separate from 'just' life (ie.apes are conscious but plants are not) but also separate from merely categorisation (ie.we think there are fundamental differences between conscious and not conscious). like when a syndrome becomes a disease.. we are looking for some thing we can point to and say this why we have this set of symptoms.
but this article is suggesting is that possibly there actually is no difference between conscious and not conscious, and that perhaps we are looking for the wrong thing. that is, they are suggesting that consciousness is not a thing, but an emergent illusion / experience.
What you shouldn't do is a have a word that people think is specific, when it's actually vague and and a hundred different people will give you a hundred different definitions.
It's like calling food 'organic'. You need to specify a definition before we can discuss anything meaningful about it. It doesn't have to be a perfect definition. You don't need to fully understand it. But you need to specify what you're talking about.
There might be something fundamental preventing a definition to emerge. E.g., clearly, consciousness would have to define itself. But that would make the definition-making process self-referential. Just look at the history of mathematics in the 19th and early 20th century and you'll see what sort of unpleasant things happen when self-referentiality rears its ugly head.
"The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."