proto-consciousness field theory

[Minoosh]

No, that's what _I'm_ saying. The people who are actually researching consciousness seem to think that they have empirical evidence that it exists, but baron knows better than they.

I *knew* I shouldn't have gotten involved !

Does pinpointing where consciousness lives in the brain tell us what consciousness is? I'm pretty sure baron is defining "consciousness" as "subjective experience" which makes it kind of non-empirical by definition.

If it's deliberate, it's not on my end. I think it's quite clear that baron's talking nonsense.

I loathe the so-called "hard problem" partly because I'm not sure why it's a problem at all. Perhaps brain meat starts secreting thought just as a function of complexity. I'm perfectly willing to believe that. But, that said, I feel like baron is doing a reasonably good job of explaining himself. Or maybe I'm just finally ready to discuss the topic.

 

[ServiceSoon]

No, that's what _I'm_ saying. The people who are actually researching consciousness seem to think that they have empirical evidence that it exists, but baron knows better than they.

If it's deliberate, it's not on my end. I think it's quite clear that baron's talking nonsense.

Most people who are researching consciousness are only looking at brains for the source of this phenomena. Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and universal aspect of everything in the universe. If anybody claims to have empirical evidence for consciousness that is a result of how it has been defined by those same researchers. That doesn't exclude the possibility that non-living entities have awareness and agency.

Here are some helpful definitions I found from a nature article behind a paywall.

Protoconsciousness:
A primordial state of brain organization that is a building block for consciousness. In humans, protoconsciousness is proposed to develop as brain development proceeds in REM sleep in utero and in early life.

Based on that definition protoconsciousness is unrelated to panpsychism.

Consciousness:
Subjective awareness of the world, the body and the self, including awareness of awareness.

 

[kellyb]

I like this Scientific American article because the writer does not pretend to really understand the theory. That sounds weird, I know.

What a great article! The thing about it being well written because the author doesn't feign wisdom on the topic makes perfect sense to me, and doesn't sound weird at all.

I like the word "mysterianism", too - it, umm...resonates with me. lol

 

[kellyb]

That last bit is fascinating because it posits that at least in theory, "group think" could be literally true. It opens a lovely can of worms for philosophers to snack on. Mass hysteria, flock behavior, evangelical fervor and even the theory that in ancient times everybody heard voices in their head. (The bicameral mind theory). I once read a book involving that theory and it left me wondering, but where did the voices come from? And before that, was there even first-person concept 10,000 years ago? Then you have room for Jungian archetypes, qualia etc.

It also meshes with the evidence that our brains are made of "islands of consciousness".

https://samharris.org/reply-to-stanislas-dehaene/

Finally, another concern arises out of research on the split-brain: A small number of human beings have had some or all of the white-matter tracts connecting the right and left hemispheres of their brain surgically severed. (This is generally undertaken as a treatment for severe epilepsy, though other surgeries occasionally require that some of these fibers also be cut.) The typical result, where linguistic ability is almost entirely sequestered in the left hemisphere, yields a right hemisphere that is mute and agraphic, but (almost surely) independently conscious. Given that the search for consciousness in the brain is utterly reliant upon our being able to correlate behavioral reports with neural events, split-brain research suggests that the presence or absence of consciousness in the case of any inarticulate area of brain will always remain an open question.

In fact, given the immensity of simultaneous neural activity taking place on either side of the corpus callosum, it seems likely that even a normal brain will be functionally split to one or another degree. Two hundred million nerve fibers seem unlikely to be able to integrate the activity of the ten billion neurons in each cerebral hemisphere, each of which makes hundreds or thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of connections to its neighbors. This would suggest that islands of dissociated consciousness might exist in normal brains as well

 

[kellyb]

Does finding out where in the brain consciousness comes from tell us what consciousness is?

I don't think so, not any more than knowing that consciousness comes from the brain and not the heart, as was thought in ancient times.

 

[baron]

That lack of functional tackle-ability is convenient for people who make careers out of attending conferences and presenting papers in glamorous venues around the planet. In general, these are not the guys doing empirical research in dingy basement neurosciences lab in Cleveland or Buffalo. Fun guys, but they tend to be philosophers and theoreticians who I suspect get pretty lavish funding from wealthy New Age sorts.

You're correct, perhaps minus the insinuation that the 'hard problem' crowd are not acting in good faith. The hard problem is squarely in the domain of philosophy right now, science has nothing to say about it. This may change, of course.

Whatever "real" scientists are studying at a macro, empirical level - and that includes things much smaller than neurons - does not actually exclude the possibility that other things are going on at the quantum level. The more science-y presentations focused on why it wasn't as impossible as naysayers claim.

This is all worthwhile, as is any scientific endeavour, but i don't know of any protocol of testing or method of investigation that could address the hard problem, even in theory. That's essentially how it gets its name. As I say, this may change, as my hypothesis mandates that somewhere in all of this there must be an interface between the conscious field and everything else. I'm not suggesting consciousness is supernatural or beyond all investigation.

Not that he needs the help

Thanks for the help but resist the temptation to be drawn into it. I get taken in again and again, naively thinking that this time Belz is actually interested in debate, but I should know better. He enters these discussions without a debating position (he explicitly admits this on the previous page) simply to ridicule and abuse anybody who takes the time to engage. This combined with his incessant lies and complete lack of knowledge surrounding the topic is designed to derail the thread. I won't be responding to him any more and for the good of the thread I urge others to follow suit.

 

[baron]

I don't think so, not any more than knowing that consciousness comes from the brain and not the heart, as was thought in ancient times.

How do you know the heart does not have rudimentary consciousness? Or the gut? The gut is host to 100 million neurons and can be viewed, essentially, as a variation on a mini brain.

 

[Belz...]

Does pinpointing where consciousness lives in the brain tell us what consciousness is?

Obviously not. But how is that relevant? That's not all that science is doing right now. We've known where it is for a long time.

I'm pretty sure baron is defining "consciousness" as "subjective experience" which makes it kind of non-empirical by definition.

Baron could define consciousness as a table and it wouldn't change anything.

 

[Chanakya]

It's not just you. As best as I understand it, there is an objective measure of how interconnected a system is - but based on this definition, protons could be conscious. At least according to Wired.

The funny thing is, why call this "consciousness" at all?

That protons might be conscious is a weird idea, certainly, but if it legitimately follows from some proper theory of consciousness, then sure, why would not one at least consider it?

But in this case, I don't see where the "consciousness" part comes in at all! Take "interconnectivity", or "synergy", or "whole greater than parts", or whatever, and designate it as phi, alpha, beta, whatever letter in whatever language takes your fancy, but why call it "consciousness", instead of "interconnectivity", or "synergy", or whatever? What has any of that to do with consciousness as we understand it?

No one would have taken this kind of thing seriously, but just because they stick some jargon on to it, suddenly this becomes something people are to give serious consideration to?

(Again, I say all of this basis only that article, as opposed to a wider reading of this theory, and without myself holding a physics doctorate. Could be they've actually started on some theory that isn't outright laughable, after all surely not so many people, presumably with degrees in physics all of them, will gape on at the emperor's nude person. So my ha-ha-ha is muted and qualified.)

A huge red flag (pun intended) was when I read an article generated by an interview that my consciousness friend gave to some esoteric journal. The interview supposedly took place in a certain Mexican restaurant that featured bullfighting posters. The interviewee was supposed to be like a bullfighter, waving a red flag at a raging bull (The AI community, or "emergent property" community).

Problem is, the conversation had not occurred at the restaurant with the bullfighting posters. The writer and the author had met at a different restaurant, which does not have bullfighting posters, but they liked the metaphor. So for convenience's sake, they set the interview, fictionally, at a restaurant with a bullfighting theme.

I was aghast. I told my friend that (as a journalist) I could never do that; I had too much respect for the truth. I'm not sure he even understood what I was talking about.

Wow, just wow. Sure, one can't jump from one instance of casual dishonesty about trivial things to concluding that there has been more elaborate disingenuousness on a larger scale, but I suppose it makes such a conclusion that much more likely.

 

[Chanakya]

Finally, another concern arises out of research on the split-brain: A small number of human beings have had some or all of the white-matter tracts connecting the right and left hemispheres of their brain surgically severed. (This is generally undertaken as a treatment for severe epilepsy, though other surgeries occasionally require that some of these fibers also be cut.) The typical result, where linguistic ability is almost entirely sequestered in the left hemisphere, yields a right hemisphere that is mute and agraphic, but (almost surely) independently conscious. Given that the search for consciousness in the brain is utterly reliant upon our being able to correlate behavioral reports with neural events, split-brain research suggests that the presence or absence of consciousness in the case of any inarticulate area of brain will always remain an open question.

In fact, given the immensity of simultaneous neural activity taking place on either side of the corpus callosum, it seems likely that even a normal brain will be functionally split to one or another degree. Two hundred million nerve fibers seem unlikely to be able to integrate the activity of the ten billion neurons in each cerebral hemisphere, each of which makes hundreds or thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of connections to its neighbors. This would suggest that islands of dissociated consciousness might exist in normal brains as well

That was an interesting article!

But the first highlighted sentence does not really lead to the second one, does it? A speculation remains a speculation, right, irrespective of whether the one speculating is a physicist or a neurobiologist?

On the other hand, that Bicameral-Mind book comes to mind. (I haven't actually read the book, but I have read reviews and discussions about it.) Also split personalities -- sure, that's pathological, but how does it actually happen, this pathology?

 

[Robin]

The fact that mainstream neuroscientists are flirting with panpsychism seems to suggest to me that science is floundering more than a little on the question of consciousness.

 

[kellyb]

How do you know the heart does not have rudimentary consciousness? Or the gut? The gut is host to 100 million neurons and can be viewed, essentially, as a variation on a mini brain.

Anything's possible, and it really depends on how you think of and define "consciousness", I guess. It seems fantastically unlikely to me that my intestines "have a first person point of view" and are "self aware" in any sense at all.

 

[kellyb]

That was an interesting article!

But the first highlighted sentence does not really lead to the second one, does it? A speculation remains a speculation, right, irrespective of whether the one speculating is a physicist or a neurobiologist?

On the other hand, that Bicameral-Mind book comes to mind. (I haven't actually read the book, but I have read reviews and discussions about it.) Also split personalities -- sure, that's pathological, but how does it actually happen, this pathology?

If by "split personalities" you mean "multiple personality disorder", that probably doesn't exist, at least not as portrayed in dramatic, supposedly true story movies.

Re: the highlighted sentences, I have no idea exactly how speculative Harris was being with there. It doesn't seem outlandish to me that there might be a significant degree of independent autonomy happening within the separate hemispheres much of the time. Our brains are constantly doing all sorts of "consciousness-like" things we're completely unaware of (the sorts of things Daniel Dennett sees as virtual proof that consciousness is nothing but an illusion altogether - a claim I take great issue with, which I think baron was alluding to earlier.)

 

[kellyb]

The fact that mainstream neuroscientists are flirting with panpsychism seems to suggest to me that science is floundering more than a little on the question of consciousness.

I'm not aware of any neuroscientists who are into it...it's mostly (or entirely?) physicists, that I know of.

 

[baron]

Anything's possible, and it really depends on how you think of and define "consciousness", I guess. It seems fantastically unlikely to me that my intestines "have a first person point of view" and are "self aware" in any sense at all.

Their consciousness would be of the same agency as your brain's but billions of times weaker. I think we both agree that we shouldn't go around saying our bowels are self aware, but IMO that's only to avoid giving a false impression of the magnitude of that awareness.

It's worth mentioning too that the gut's mini-brain interfaces heavily with the actual brain by way of the vagus nerve (interestingly the vast majority of communication is from the former to the latter). This in my view creates not just concentrations of the conscious field in the brain and around the gut, but also a distortion caused by the information exchange between both those things. This could account for how gut health can affect a person's mood and even behaviour. Studies have already linked gut health to mental issues such as depression, stress and anxiety.

 

[jrhowell]

Defining consciousness as a strictly subjective phenomenon, not amenable to objective study, is a philosophical approach that can lead nowhere. A scientific approach is to study it objectively.

At the heart of it I think consciousness is awareness of our own existence and the ability to act on that knowledge is conscious behavior. If someone behaves consciously then they are conscious. It comes down to determining what behavior is indicative of consciousness and then determining the internal cause of that behavior.

If we continue to study the workings of the brain and tease out the intricacies of neural connections and determine what algorithms they implement we should be able to eventually describe the entire workings of the human brain, including consciousness.

If we do that and still fail to find the cause of some important factor of human behavior then that will indicate that something unexpected is going on and that we need to look elsewhere. But unless that happens I will continue to assume that the neural connectome is the place where the implementation of consciousness will be found.

I don't expect to live to see the answer to this question. We can sequence the genome, but are still only the the early stages of understanding how gene sequences relate to physical form and function. Compared with that we are far less advanced in understanding the brain since we haven't even worked out a way to map the connectome.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Defining consciousness as a strictly subjective phenomenon, not amenable to objective study, is a philosophical approach that can lead nowhere. A scientific approach is to study it objectively.

You think you can just declare it to be an objective phenomena?

At the heart of it I think consciousness is awareness of our own existence and the ability to act on that knowledge is conscious behavior. If someone behaves consciously then they are conscious. It comes down to determining what behavior is indicative of consciousness and then determining the internal cause of that behavior.

And what do you do if you can't find any behaviors that can't be done by non-conscious entities?

 

[Crawtator]

Would you agree that dark matter and dark energy are aether-like? Furthermore, would you agree DE & DM is espoused by the majority of cosmologists?

Absolutely. And there are objective reasons that they believe them to exist such as the gravitational effects of DM and the expansion rates of the universe as proven by multiple, independent models. What is the point of this question?

 

[jrhowell]

You think you can just declare it to be an objective phenomena?

Sure, why not? This is the science subforum after all.

And what do you do if you can't find any behaviors that can't be done by non-conscious entities?

Then I would come to believe that the distinction between conscious and non-conscious entities isn't as sharp a line as others might assume.

 

[Crawtator]

The article you cited makes a distinction between arousal (wakefulness) and awareness. Awareness is the subject in this thread. The article you linked didn't actually present any evidence of awareness. Neither subjective or objective. It said absolutely nothing about how awareness was being measured.

That is not what the article said at all.

"Consciousness is generally thought of as being comprised of two critical components - arousal and awareness."

Then later:

"Researchers had already shown that arousal is likely regulated by the brainstem - the portion of the brain that links up with the spinal cord - seeing as it regulates when we sleep and wake, and our heart rate and breathing.


Awareness has been more elusive. Researchers have long thought that it resides somewhere in the cortex - the outer layer of the brain - but no one has been able to pinpoint where.

The Harvard team identified not only the specific brainstem region linked to arousal, but also two cortex regions, that all appear to work together to form consciousness.

To figure this out, the team analysed 36 patients in hospital with brainstem lesions - 12 of them were in a coma (unconscious) and 24 were defined as being conscious.

The researchers then mapped their brainstems to figure out if there was one particular region that could explain why some patients had maintained consciousness despite their injuries, while others had become comatose.

What they found was one small area of the brainstem - known as the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum - that was significantly associated with coma. Ten out of the 12 unconscious patients had damage in this area, while just one out of the 24 conscious patients did.

That suggests that this tiny region of the brainstem is important for consciousness, but it's not the full story.


To figure out which other parts of the brain were fully connected to this region, the team looked at a brain map - or connectome - of a healthy human brain, which shows all the different connections that we know of so far in our brains (you can see a connectome in the image at the top of this story).

They identified two areas in the cortex that were linked up to the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum, and were most likely to play a role in regulating consciousness. One was in the left, ventral, anterior insula (AI), and the other was in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC).

Both of these regions have been linked by previous studies to arousal and awareness, but this is the first time they've been connected to the brainstem.

The team double-checked their work by looking at fMRI scans of 45 patients in comas or vegetative states, and showed that all of them had the network between these three regions disrupted."

This sounds, to my laymen ears, as if they are looking at objective, medical evidence for biological underpinnings of "consciousness". Now, if you are saying that awareness isn't measured at all by the study, I would point to the last paragraph and say that comas and vegetative states are a lack of awareness. If you disagree with that, then I'm not sure what else to say except that we've reached an impasse.