Consciousness: The Fun Part. :)

[Dancing David]

I think he just coined the term.

I like the idea that we are the theater, there is no one watching the screen. Reminds me of Metzinger's Plato's Cave of the mind analogy where he says that there is no one there to leave/escape the cave, the cave is empty.

Exactly, the 'empty house' of buddhism.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Just out of curiosity, if science is not the correct avenue of inquiry for understanding consciousness what do you suspect would be a better method? :-X

I think a multi-disciplinary and holistic approach is required. That involves a greater awareness of philosophical and subjective aspects which are not part of normal science.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

AMM

I think that part of the problem here is seperating the reasonable goal of being as scientific and objective as possible in our approach to finding answers to these sorts of questions, from the idealogically/religiously-motivated desire to reject anything which sounds religious or "woo". For those on the atheistic side of the debate, these two things are continually conflated - on the surface there is a claim to want to be scientific but underneath there is also anti-religious agenda which is the result of hundreds of years of conflict between science and organised religion in the Western world.

As soon as you say "let us assume there is a fully materialistic, fully scientific solution to the problem of consciousness" you have made an unsafe assumption about metaphysics which has been justified by a claimed wish to be scientific. If it is the case that this unsafe assumption is incorrect, as is believed by anyone who thinks the Hard Problem is in fact an Impossible Problem, then what we have is a metaphysical error being justified in the name of science, and that is both philosophically and scientifically unacceptable. Unfortunately, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the admitting the problem even exists implies to some people a victory for religion and a defeat for science. I'm not sure it is actually either of those things. It certainly isn't a defeat for science to accept that a certain type of problem is essentially non-scientific and not in need of a scientific answer, and it doesn't lead to any sort of automatic victory for religion because the path to that victory is blocked by atheists like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Sartre. However, you have to get beyond the fear factor and "this just sounds too much like woo to me" before it is possible to understand that science is not being threatened and religion not being handed a blank cheque.

Geoff

 

[Maia]

Well, I should have known this was going to happen... anyway...I tried...

Originally Posted by AkuManiMani
Just out of curiosity, if science is not the correct avenue of inquiry for understanding consciousness what do you suspect would be a better method? :-X

Consciousness is clearly residing in our brains. Other than that, I don't know. Maybe a giant flying waffle is actually storing all of our thoughts, with one little square reserved for each individual person. In the afterlife, some will get maple syrup.

What's the best avenue of inquiry for trying to understand consciousness? Now, that's a better question than this back-and-forth endless weird dualism vs. reductionism thing. I really don't see Dennett et. al. looking at it from the perspective I would, which is pathologies in neuropsychiatry. In other words, let's see where something measurably went wrong, both in terms of traumatic experiences and neurological results. How does the brain of this person differ from a control brain? How do their measurable responses to treatment differ from others? What are the implications? This is one way to get some truly empirical answers to questions about consciousness.

 

[Dancing David]

Hi Maia,

As far as multiple drafts theopry, i would have to read up on Dennet's hypothesis.

There are a couple of issues to address:
Cartesian theater: the processes are the events, there may well be other parts of the brain that interacts with the parts that make perceptions. But the self does notw ander around the brain, it is the brain.

As to the multiple drafts, the brain seems to have many things going on at many times, one of the benefits of taking Zoloft for me is that I now have at most two trains of verbal cognition at any given time, in the past i would experience as many as three to five trains of thought at teh same time. So to me it seems likely that there are many parts of the brain that are communicating with each other all the time.

For various reasons I have also had some disassociation in my life, the most severe of which seems to be associated with robotic compulsions (my term).

 

[westprog]

As soon as you say "let us assume there is a fully materialistic, fully scientific solution to the problem of consciousness" you have made an unsafe assumption about metaphysics which has been justified by a claimed wish to be scientific.

That's a perfectly scientific stance to take until you claim that it is necessarily true. A scientist should always look for materialistic scientific solutions, even if they can't be found. Indeed, even if he doesn't believe that they can or will be found.

 

[Maia]

That's a perfectly scientific stance to take until you claim that it is necessarily true. A scientist should always look for materialistic scientific solutions, even if they can't be found. Indeed, even if he doesn't believe that they can or will be found.

I certainly don't have a problem with that. But one thing I don't understand is why nobody seems to have done this from the POV of neural/psychiatric pathology. That's one way where we could really use the scientific method to try to learn more about consciousness, because there's a subject group and control group. As DD notes, you can start out with a subject who has trouble with something like frontal lobe executive control and then measure the changes after medication. And I do have to wonder if neglecting this POV in the philosophical debate has something to do with the fact that it doesn't start out with the premise that we have to choose between materialism and dualism.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

That's a perfectly scientific stance to take until you claim that it is necessarily true. A scientist should always look for materialistic scientific solutions, even if they can't be found. Indeed, even if he doesn't believe that they can or will be found.

Well, that depends on how you define science...

 

[AkuManiMani]

I think a multi-disciplinary and holistic approach is required. That involves a greater awareness of philosophical and subjective aspects which are not part of normal science.

So basically, you think the problem isn't so much science, per se, but the philosophical approach of current science, right?

AMM

I think that part of the problem here is seperating the reasonable goal of being as scientific and objective as possible in our approach to finding answers to these sorts of questions, from the idealogically/religiously-motivated desire to reject anything which sounds religious or "woo". For those on the atheistic side of the debate, these two things are continually conflated - on the surface there is a claim to want to be scientific but underneath there is also anti-religious agenda which is the result of hundreds of years of conflict between science and organised religion in the Western world.

As soon as you say "let us assume there is a fully materialistic, fully scientific solution to the problem of consciousness" you have made an unsafe assumption about metaphysics which has been justified by a claimed wish to be scientific. If it is the case that this unsafe assumption is incorrect, as is believed by anyone who thinks the Hard Problem is in fact an Impossible Problem, then what we have is a metaphysical error being justified in the name of science, and that is both philosophically and scientifically unacceptable. Unfortunately, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the admitting the problem even exists implies to some people a victory for religion and a defeat for science. I'm not sure it is actually either of those things. It certainly isn't a defeat for science to accept that a certain type of problem is essentially non-scientific and not in need of a scientific answer, and it doesn't lead to any sort of automatic victory for religion because the path to that victory is blocked by atheists like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Sartre. However, you have to get beyond the fear factor and "this just sounds too much like woo to me" before it is possible to understand that science is not being threatened and religion not being handed a blank cheque.

Geoff

According to the dictionary definition of science it's the systematic acquisition and organization of knowledge. In other words, science deals with acquiring facts about the world and understanding how those facts relate to one another. It isn't about subjective evaluation or the pursuit of spiritual/moral truth but getting down to objective facts.

I think I can understand your misgivings about whether consciousness is an appropriate subject matter for science because consciousness is inherently subjective. Even so, I still think science can still be useful to gain objective knowledge -about- the subjective since it is undeniably a facet of the world. After all, we're here talking about it

 

[AkuManiMani]

Well, I should have known this was going to happen... anyway...I tried...

Just out of curiosity, if science is not the correct avenue of inquiry for understanding consciousness what do you suspect would be a better method? :-X

Consciousness is clearly residing in our brains. Other than that, I don't know. Maybe a giant flying waffle is actually storing all of our thoughts, with one little square reserved for each individual person. In the afterlife, some will get maple syrup.

Teehehe. Silly, you

What's the best avenue of inquiry for trying to understand consciousness? Now, that's a better question than this back-and-forth endless weird dualism vs. reductionism thing. I really don't see Dennett et. al. looking at it from the perspective I would, which is pathologies in neuropsychiatry. In other words, let's see where something measurably went wrong, both in terms of traumatic experiences and neurological results. How does the brain of this person differ from a control brain? How do their measurable responses to treatment differ from others? What are the implications? This is one way to get some truly empirical answers to questions about consciousness.

I'm not sure, but it seems like UE is saying that in order to fully understand consciousness we're going to tackle the problem from the philosophical and scientific perspective. That just my guess, but its probably best to let UE speak for himself

 

[AkuManiMani]

Hi Maia,

As far as multiple drafts theopry, i would have to read up on Dennet's hypothesis.

There are a couple of issues to address:
Cartesian theater: the processes are the events, there may well be other parts of the brain that interacts with the parts that make perceptions. But the self does notw ander around the brain, it is the brain.

As to the multiple drafts, the brain seems to have many things going on at many times, one of the benefits of taking Zoloft for me is that I now have at most two trains of verbal cognition at any given time, in the past i would experience as many as three to five trains of thought at teh same time. So to me it seems likely that there are many parts of the brain that are communicating with each other all the time.

For various reasons I have also had some disassociation in my life, the most severe of which seems to be associated with robotic compulsions (my term).

You can actually carrying on two verbal trains of thought at the same time? Thats actually kind cool

 

[Cynic]

You can actually carrying on two verbal trains of thought at the same time? Thats actually kind cool

It's actually not very cool at all, very distracting and ultimately frustrating. I can't speak for Dancing David of course, but for myself, it's like being in a room with three chatty people, a TV, and a radio while trying to do a crossword puzzle. I just want to scream "shut up!" so you can concentrate, only there's no one to scream it to. That's somewhat of an exaggeration, but it's a little like that, i.e., not pleasant or useful at all. If you've even gotten overtired and stressed and had a repeatitive song stuck in your head, you can probably relate a little bit.

 

[Cimerian]

This whole concept of consciousness is used, even in science, with a sort of esoteric connotation. Operational definition of consciousness in neuroscience is basically the ability to report a given stimulus. To do that you need a living, awake brain.

 

[Dancing David]

It's actually not very cool at all, very distracting and ultimately frustrating. I can't speak for Dancing David of course, but for myself, it's like being in a room with three chatty people, a TV, and a radio while trying to do a crossword puzzle. I just want to scream "shut up!" so you can concentrate, only there's no one to scream it to. That's somewhat of an exaggeration, but it's a little like that, i.e., not pleasant or useful at all. If you've even gotten overtired and stressed and had a repeatitive song stuck in your head, you can probably relate a little bit.

It makes for less concentration and greater distraction that is for sure, never mind the soundtrach that is always playing. You get used to it, most of the time I had to to three trains of thought but they often fragmented each other, probably part of why I use visual patterns in my thinking, it makes for coherence. But now, I usually think just one thing at a time.

It sure makes reading easier.

 

[Cynic]

The question of a materialistic explanation of consciousness is not like this at all. Firstly, there is no existing scientific evidence to support the claim "consciousness is entirely explainable in terms of brain activity".

...snip....

Of course the brain is a physical structure. The problem is that if we stick strictly to physics, all we have is a brain and whatever it is doing. We don't have any "consciousness" or "sentience", and that's why it throws up unique problems for science.

(Bolding mine.)

First off, I'm sorry I invoked intelligent design. In a setting like this, that's almost tantamount to Godwin-ing the thread and I should have known better.

The essence of my problem with your stance is this:

What is consciousness?

You don't know the answer to that anymore than anyone else does, but here you are declaring that sticking strictly with physics, we don't have it. At the risk of Godwin-ing the thread again, isn't this a lot like saying science can't prove the existance of a god when the problem isn't with science, but the fact that said god has no coherent definition to prove?

I submit that in the absence of any genuine understanding of what consciousness is, but knowing that it is very clearly tied to the biological structure known as the brain, what we ought to be doing is reverse engineering the brain and what we end up with is what consciousness is.

This is how science is done. If you want to know how circulation works, you look at the circulatory system, see what's doing, how everything ties together and how it's regulated. Even something as "simple" as the circulatory system isn't entirely understood yet in vivo. Why, with an organ that is easily much, much more complicated and vastly more difficult to study would we toss up our hands and declare that it can't be the whole story?

I'm not at all clear how quantum mechanics helps, but naturally I wouldn't rule it out as part of the mechanisms. Even chlorphil operates on quantum principles, because efficient is efficient, and evolution is blind to process. That doesn't make leaves conscious.

But the bottom line is, unless we first know exactly what consciousness is and what all of its requirements are, declaring that the physical brain can't be the sole source of it is premature. I agree that problems can and should be solved from many different assumptions and starting points, which is why I began defending Maia's proposal for this thread in the first place. But in terms of which approach is more justified, I cannot help but see this one, assuming the brain is all that is required, is clearly the most parsimonious.

 

[Maia]

I'm not sure, but it seems like UE is saying that in order to fully understand consciousness we're going to tackle the problem from the philosophical and scientific perspective. That just my guess, but its probably best to let UE speak for himself

I really don't have a problem with this, but I do think that there's so much to be learned by looking at the question of consciousness from an angle where empirical research can truly be done. My question about any scientific theory of consciousness is: can you do a double-blind study on the arguments supporting it? Well, when it comes to anything Dennett is talking about, I have to say that I think you really can't. You can't come up with a subject group and a control group, each of which has distinct and measurable neurological, experiential, and psychological differences. I just feel that the foundation for a scientific theory of consciousness has really not been laid down to the degree that it should be. People have been too likely to start out in one camp or the other and then proceed from there without ever looking back to see if their arguments were well grounded to begin with.

DD, I never would have thought that an SSRI (Zoloft) would cause improved executive functioning. But, different strokes for different folks.

 

[Cynic]

DD, I never would have thought that an SSRI (Zoloft) would cause improved executive functioning. But, different strokes for different folks.

My own experience, both before and after Zoloft, is similar. It does seem to keep the hyper-distracted janglies away. I haven't been on it for a while, but lately I've been thinking I should give it another try.

 

[Maia]

My own experience, both before and after Zoloft, is similar. It does seem to keep the hyper-distracted janglies away. I haven't been on it for a while, but lately I've been thinking I should give it another try.

Ah.,..... Per this post, it's a point that could have some relevance to consciousness. (We would make good case studies!) I hated hated HATED the one SSRI I tried. ICK!!! I was a complete nervous wreck on it. Amphetamines put me to sleep instantly, and I would doze all day on the couch, unable to get anything done. Then I found Ritalin, and it's been so wonderful.

Next, I moved on to Topamax. It's a direct serotonin agonist, which makes it radically different from all of the antidepressants (serontonin/norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors.) They keep the same amount of neurotransmitters floating around longer; an agonist works directly on the receptor itself. There are very few serotonin agonists which are legal meds. Most are in the psychomimetic class (LSD, DMT, ketamine, etc.) T is also a very iffy drug and has a lot of bad side effects for a substantial number of people who take it, so it's a third or fourth line med, as it should be. However, it's been a miracle for me and for many others with temporal lobe epilepsy.

The point is that these are drugs which affect consciousness in different ways (especially Topamax), and that people have widely varying ranges of responses to them. A lot of the time, different responses are based on God only knows what, but in cases where a neurological problem is known (such as TLE) it may be possible to begin formulating a hypothesis about what's going on and maybe about how it relates to consciousness in general. We'd have the variable (the drug), a subject group (people with TLE), a control group, controlled circumstances, standardized scaling instruments, qualitative interviews and tools, etc. Otherwise, it just seems that people are always working backwards when it comes to theories of consciousness; let's come up with the grand philosophical idea first and then worry about the proof later.

 

[Cynic]

Ah.,..... Per this post, it's a point that could have some relevance to consciousness. (We would make good case studies!) I hated hated HATED the one SSRI I tried. ICK!!! I was a complete nervous wreck on it.

That goes away, eventually. The wax on, wax off stages (starting and getting away from) are a lot like I've been feeling lately, which is odd since I haven't touched any in nearly two years. I think I've been having trouble balancing caffeine and sugar lately, maybe, which is odd since I've never had that issue before.

But absolutely, this is all evidence for the biological basis of consciousness. If who we are and how we act and how we perceive things is so easily maniulated and thrown off by chemical imbalance and physical trauma, it seems absurd to start anywhere else. It's tempting to say that well, of course there's a difference between all that and the fact of consciousness, but is there? You can manipulate states of consciousness with drugs and ball bats just as easily. Modifications to the structure of the brain can have interesting and predictable effects. Ultimately, I think it's the structure of the brain itself, understanding the patterns of change there, that will help best elucidate the nature of consciousness.

 

[Maia]

That goes away, eventually.

Well, hopefully it did for you, but for me it never did and was NOT worth staying on. I would shoot myself in the foot ANY day before ever ever taking it again.

But absolutely, this is all evidence for the biological basis of consciousness. If who we are and how we act and how we perceive things is so easily maniulated and thrown off by chemical imbalance and physical trauma, it seems absurd to start anywhere else. It's tempting to say that well, of course there's a difference between all that and the fact of consciousness, but is there? You can manipulate states of consciousness with drugs and ball bats just as easily. Modifications to the structure of the brain can have interesting and predictable effects. Ultimately, I think it's the structure of the brain itself, understanding the patterns of change there, that will help best elucidate the nature of consciousness.

I do think it's more complicated than that-- for one thing, the mechanism of these drugs is really not known. Even the prescribing info for the amphetamines has to say that, and they've been used for over seventy years. The serotonin hypothesis of depression was thoroughly debunked over thirty years ago; all we really know is that it's how the SSRI's work, but not why they work. An article was posted on www.cnn.com today about new research into the effects of PTSD on children's brains (the hypothalamus is consistently smaller). This isn't news at all, but previously, the work's been done only on adults. Nobody knows exactly what this means, but the findings are very consistent.

Ultimately, we really don't know how all of these pieces of inforamtion might relate to the question of whether consciousness resides only in the brain. But it's a question that can't be answered, and a lot of others can. I am officially an ignostic about the entire thing. (Cool new word!)