Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[westprog]

Well, it is a bit of a bummer compared to the hypothesis that really, we are eternal souls (or something like that) temporarily residing in a physical body.

Who's been arguing that? Oh, right...

 

[westprog]

I think these concepts are definable, but we have to be willing to break them down into simpler components.

They might well break down into something simpler, but I've a feeling that sooner or later a brick wall will be hit.

 

[westprog]

I had to turn to wiki to know what the ship of Theseus was.

How sad is that?

I can think of sadder things. This is a forum for amateurs. Now we all know a bit more. Except for the people who already knew. They should be sad, because they're no smarter than when they started.

I had to look it up too, but I knew it as "Grandfather's axe".

 

[Maia]

Hi, Maia.

I am a behaviorist. I would hazard a guess that you have never actually met one, nor read anything written by one after Watson.

Yes.

You might like to know that you are wrong. So wrong. Very wrong. "Wrong enough to consider legal action against your professors" wrong. Fortunately, behaviorists have not had to build upon your perceptions, but upon their own research, so your ignorance has not been fatal to our science. If I could suggest, perhaps, Todd & Morris' (1992--a bit dated, but 50 or so years ahead of the behaviorism you are aware of) "Case studies in the great power of steady misrepresentation", in American Psychologist, which I hope can be read in Nashville. I also suggest an online tutorial I have linked on this forum before, which focuses on the differences between methodological behaviorism (that which you have been exposed to) and radical behaviorism (that which people actually did for decades after Watson left Johns Hopkins with Rosie...)

Behaviorism knows that the real world is messy. The operant chamber is behaviorism's equivalent to chemistry's test tube--an oversimplified subset of the real world. Behaviorism has explored, in operant chambers and in the real world (from B-MOD with individuals to ABA with classrooms, to community interventions, to Behavioral Economics), the effects of the environment on our behavior, and has found simple, profound, and practical applications. Behaviorism has changed lives. I sincerely and honestly hope you find out some day.

Mm-hm... yes, well, whatever. I don't like it. I don't use it. I work with people in the trenches, and it's not a set of therapeutic techniques I use. You can do what you want, and I'll do what I want. How's that?

There is a reason that CBT is evidence-based. That reason is behaviorism.

No, this is not unequivocal truth. And I have taken my time. I have designed therapeutic interventions. Other people are not idiots because of the simple fact that they do not agree with you. (They may be idiots for *other* reasons... but not because of that.) I will be happy to send you all of the literature that *I* have. I know the history very well. Do you? While we're on the subject, do you know the limitations not only of behaviorism, but also of CBT itself? Do you know who Pierre Janet is? Are you familiar with the works of Onno van der Hart and Ellert Nijerhuis? How about the theories of structural dissociation of personality? How about neurological changes in post-traumatic stress disorder? Do you know that there is no evidence-based intervention for PTSD, and that any treatment for it based on behaviorism or CBT is a complete and resounding failure in clinical practice?Do you know anything about the research that I know? What would happen if someone challenged you to think outside of your box?

Sometimes, I just get tired of the party line around here. Whenever I stray too far outside of it, I seem to get in trouble-- well, too bad. I'm not rude, I'm not nasty, I'm not sarcastic, I don't even BEGIN to get as bad in these areas as a lot of other people get, but sometimes I just lose my patience with it.

 

[Iconoclast08]

Do you know that there is no evidence-based intervention for PTSD, and that any treatment for it based on behaviorism or CBT is a complete and resounding failure in clinical practice?

False.

I'm not sure what you've been reading, but I would suggest sticking to peer-reviewed journals and book chapters written by scientist-practitioners and clinical researchers who are more cognizant of RCTs and details on updated evidence-based interventions. Exposure therapy is currently the best bet against PTSD. You don't have to turn too many pages into any recent issue of Behaviour Research and Therapy, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Journal of Traumatic Stress, Psychiatric Annals, etc., to find relevant articles.

To get started...

http://www.ucsfcme.com/2007/MPS08003/10-CBT-Foa.pdf

And some stuff from the 1990s...

Keane (1998). Psychological and behavioral treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. In P. Nathan & J. Gorman (Eds.), A guide to treatments that work (pp. 398-407). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foa et al. (1999). The expert consensus guideline series: Treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 60, 2-76.

Foa et al. (1991). Treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder in rape victims: A comparison between CBT and counseling. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59, 715-723.

Sometimes, I just get tired of the party line around here. Whenever I stray too far outside of it, I seem to get in trouble-- well, too bad. I'm not rude, I'm not nasty, I'm not sarcastic, I don't even BEGIN to get as bad in these areas as a lot of other people get, but sometimes I just lose my patience with it.

Well, in this case, I think the "party line" is correct and is aligned with best evidence, at least what we have so far. That's not to say that it is the best that we ever will have or that CBT doesn't have shortcomings. But until something better comes along, what should we do?

In this case, I don't see your "straying" as necessarily just getting in trouble for thinking outside the box. It strikes me more as simply presenting an inaccurate picture of contemporary behaviorist interventions and not being aware of updated empirical studies.

Also, on a different point, many of those ivory tower academic types that you alluded to in an earlier post toiled for many, many years in the trenches tailoring treatments to people struggling with extremely difficult-to-treat psychopathology (I'm doing that part right now, actually, and I totally empathize with you-- it ain't easy!!). But those stodgy academicians have also done us a service by helping us think critically and rigorously about the most effective components of treatments, skills that do not necessarily arise spontaneously from merely working with patients in treatment settings.

 

[Iconoclast08]

The previous link to the Powerpoint presentation provides a nice summary of main points you can find in the literature.

If you want a sample of something more recent and dealing with a more severe population, here's an abstract from a 2008 study conducted at Dartmouth Medical School and Psychiatric Research Center by Kim Mueser et al. (RCT of CBT for PTSD in Severe Mental Illness in J. of Consulting and Clinical Psychology):

"A cognitive– behavioral therapy (CBT) program for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was developed to address its high prevalence in persons with severe mental illness receiving treatment at community mental health centers. CBT was compared with treatment as usual (TAU) in a randomized controlled trial with 108 clients with PTSD and either major mood disorder (85%) or schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (15%), of whom 25% also had borderline personality disorder. Eighty-one percent of clients assigned to CBT participated in the program. Intent-to-treat analyses showed that CBT clients improved significantly more than did clients in TAU at blinded posttreatment and 3- and 6-month follow-up assessments in PTSD symptoms, other symptoms, perceived health, negative trauma-related beliefs, knowledge about PTSD, and case manager working alliance. The effects of CBT on PTSD were strongest in clients with severe PTSD. Homework completion in CBT predicted greater reductions in symptoms. Changes in trauma-related beliefs in CBT mediated improvements in PTSD. The findings suggest that clients with severe mental illness and PTSD can benefit from CBT, despite severe symptoms, suicidal thinking, psychosis, and vulnerability to hospitalizations."

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

This is pretty close to how I’ve perceived their stance. Here’s Patricia Churchland discussing about it in very general outlines (9 min.): P. Churchland on eliminative materialism

Great link. I was happy to see her bring out the very theme I am trying to get at with this thread -- most mental functions, as they were previously defined, actually refer to multiple different functions under one name. I think most people already know this about memory, but it is also true of attention and awareness.

Before we can do the neuroscience we need good definitions of the various aspects of attention and awareness, so the psychologists can examine them in detail. Then, and only then, can the neuroscience be worked out. She briefly mentioned attention systems, of which we know of two clearly -- frontal (working memory type) attention and directed attention housed in the parietal lobes.

That is how we isolate all the messy bits and clean up some of the mess handed to us by the misguided philosophical tradition that Plato sent on a 2500 year goose chase.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

[derail]"How big of a nazi was Heidegger, anyway?" has been a lively topic in philosophy going back at least to Farias' book in the 80's.

Yeah. I understand that he was a small, fat man, so kind of big in one way, kind of not in another. Ambiguous, he was, in terms of size.

Sort of a small-fat-being-nazi-while-rector-at-Freiburg-and-not-renouncing-his-affiliation type of dude.

When he wasn't confusing people with odd German tenses on the way to language. Or engaged in strange copulatory acts with errant gypsies on their way to Johannesburg during the snow storm of '44.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Sometimes, I just get tired of the party line around here. Whenever I stray too far outside of it, I seem to get in trouble-- well, too bad. I'm not rude, I'm not nasty, I'm not sarcastic, I don't even BEGIN to get as bad in these areas as a lot of other people get, but sometimes I just lose my patience with it.

I think all get tired of party lines at times, so I'm with you there. You have a lot to contribute to this and many other topics, so please don't let any recent developments sway you away from the conversation. But that's why it's a conversation. None of us have all the answers; truth emerges from interchange.

Bottom line -- I like you. Don't run away, please.

 

[Iconoclast08]

Before we can do the neuroscience we need good definitions of the various aspects of attention and awareness, so the psychologists can examine them in detail.

It's certainly helpful if we do. From what I've read, cognitive psych has a decent way of conceptualizing attention with relevant neural correlates. Selective attention is viewed as made up of an alerting system (sensitivity to stimuli; locus coeruleus and R lateral frontal cortex; deficient in ADHD patients and the elderly), an orienting system (selecting info from input; temporal parietal junction; schizophrenics and autistic patients have lots of trouble here), and an executive system that monitors thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to maintain attention on stimuli (DLPFC and ACC; organic brain damage and Alzheimer's disease compromise this more integrative functioning). Pretty cool stuff.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

It's certainly helpful if we do. From what I've read, cognitive psych has a decent way of conceptualizing attention with relevant neural correlates. Selective attention is viewed as made up of an alerting system (sensitivity to stimuli; locus coeruleus and R lateral frontal cortex; deficient in ADHD patients and the elderly), an orienting system (selecting info from input; temporal parietal junction; schizophrenics and autistic patients have lots of trouble here), and an executive system that monitors thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to maintain attention on stimuli (DLPFC and ACC; organic brain damage and Alzheimer's disease compromise this more integrative functioning). Pretty cool stuff.

Yes, very cool stuff.



If we have finished with the derail, and if anyone is still interested, may we return to the issue of "what is awareness?"

Several issues have arisen -- so why not start somewhere near the bottom? Let's go back to paramecia -- if they respond to something in their environment, then what word can we use to speak of their ability to respond in the first place except 'awareness' of the stimulus?

I'm fully aware that this is not how we use the word in discussion of consciousness, but that isn't the point yet. If what a paramecium does constitutes a form of awareness, then what we discuss with consciousness is, as Kelly mentioned, some form of awareness of awareness.

But what is this primitive form of 'awareness'? It seems to me to be attention to stimulus (which includes intentionality -- and the reason I keep bringing up intentionality is to satisfy the philosophical crowd who seem to think that intentionality is vitally important and hopefully demonstrate just how trivial the concept is since it's just something built into the nature of being an individual interacting with the environment) and ability to respond. Is there anything else there?

Awareness of awareness appears a little more complex, of course, with not only attention to attending but also emotional and motivational states thrown into the mix as well as our other common mental functions -- like retrieval of memory, etc.

 

[Iconoclast08]

If we have finished with the derail, and if anyone is still interested, may we return to the issue of "what is awareness?"

Actually, I was addressing a piece of the first post of the thread, namely...

"We will obviously need to define attention, but what else is a necessary component of awareness? Is awareness always awareness of something? Need we include intentionality to the notion of awareness?"
So I was not aware that I was derailing; I was more trying to offer up how cognitive psych has tackled the attention piece (with neural correlates).

Also, regarding the derail with the CBT/behaviorism stuff, I feel that it is important to step in and correct blatantly false assertions that, when perpetuated, can be damaging. This forum seems an appropriate place to do so, and it's actually difficult to come across a thread where it doesn't happen at least once or twice. I enjoy that people here have the fortitude and courage to do so.

Several issues have arisen -- so why not start somewhere near the bottom? Let's go back to paramecia -- if they respond to something in their environment, then what word can we use to speak of their ability to respond in the first place except 'awareness' of the stimulus?

Perhaps we could also discuss the possibility of an "illusion" of awareness. Paramecia show what's called a "photophobic step-down response" when they swim from a well lit area into a darker area... in other words, they avoid it and go back toward the light. Different photoreceptor systems have been studied that are connected with the "step-up" (move toward) versus "step-down" (move away) responses. At the light/dark border, swimming velocity and direction change (phototaxis) due to reversal of ciliary beats. Light stimulation of photoreceptor systems causes depolarization, which affects ciliary beat frequency. So we could parsimoniously say that the response is a photochemical reactivity pertaining to membrane hyperpolarization (light regions) or depolarization (dark regions) affecting ciliary beats and thus directional shifts. So do we want to package all that up and say, "it's aware?" Sure, if we razor the definition down to photochemical response to stimuli, but what else should we (or need we) tack on?

Also, paramecia shift direction (by changing flagellar beats) when they collide with a solid object-- reverse direction, then go forward again. But they do it clumsily and in a way that is not at all sophisticated (that is, they don't behave as if they "perceive" the object as a whole and then just go around the thing). Rather, they continue colliding with it until they fortuitously are able to get around it by an iterative, chemical-driven, seemingly mechanical process of reversed and forward motions of flagella. Is this "awareness?"

So we marvel at this and say, "Wow! It's aware of the object!" or is "paying attention to where it is going and is trying to get around that object!"

So we could say that these responses are driven by a complex functional contiguity and synchrony of chemical reactions regulating locomotive reactions in response to stimuli, but that's too unwieldy. But should we substitute "awareness" for this? Maybe Dennett is correct at this level to just say "little tiny robots."

Also, are plants "aware" because they grow toward light? Somehow, I don't think so.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99441.htm

But what is this primitive form of 'awareness'? It seems to me to be attention to stimulus (which includes intentionality -- and the reason I keep bringing up intentionality is to satisfy the philosophical crowd who seem to think that intentionality is vitally important and hopefully demonstrate just how trivial the concept is since it's just something built into the nature of being an individual interacting with the environment) and ability to respond. Is there anything else there?

Or the illusion of intentionality? Paramecia appear to have a dumb (not to detract from the marvel of nature, of course), in-built photochemical algorithm for staying in lit regions.

By the way, there's that darned derail word again. Attention.

Awareness of awareness appears a little more complex, of course, with not only attention to attending but also emotional and motivational states thrown into the mix as well as our other common mental functions -- like retrieval of memory, etc.

Meta-awareness, absolutely. Lots more complex. Cerebral cortex probably has something to do with it.

I'm not a stubborn reductionist, I swear!

 

[AkuManiMani]

Sometimes, I just get tired of the party line around here. Whenever I stray too far outside of it, I seem to get in trouble-- well, too bad. I'm not rude, I'm not nasty, I'm not sarcastic, I don't even BEGIN to get as bad in these areas as a lot of other people get, but sometimes I just lose my patience with it.

Is alright. After hanging around JREF long enough you'll learn who the real skeptics are and who are the ideologues just playing at being skeptics.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Actually, I was addressing a piece of the first post of the thread, namely...

"We will obviously need to define attention, but what else is a necessary component of awareness? Is awareness always awareness of something? Need we include intentionality to the notion of awareness?"
So I was not aware that I was derailing; I was more trying to offer up how cognitive psych has tackled the attention piece (with neural correlates).

Guess I should have been more specific in that statement, but I didn't want to name names. I wasn't referring to you at all when I mentioned the derail. I think you have contributed quite a bit to the real meat of the thread already.

Also, regarding the derail with the CBT/behaviorism stuff, I feel that it is important to step in and correct blatantly false assertions that, when perpetuated, can be damaging. This forum seems an appropriate place to do so, and it's actually difficult to come across a thread where it doesn't happen at least once or twice. I enjoy that people here have the fortitude and courage to do so.

I agree completely, which is why I contributed to the correction.

Perhaps we could also discuss the possibility of an "illusion" of awareness. Paramecia show what's called a "photophobic step-down response" when they swim from a well lit area into a darker area... in other words, they avoid it and go back toward the light. Different photoreceptor systems have been studied that are connected with the "step-up" (move toward) versus "step-down" (move away) responses. At the light/dark border, swimming velocity and direction change (phototaxis) due to reversal of ciliary beats. Light stimulation of photoreceptor systems causes depolarization, which affects ciliary beat frequency. So we could parsimoniously say that the response is a photochemical reactivity pertaining to membrane hyperpolarization (light regions) or depolarization (dark regions) affecting ciliary beats and thus directional shifts. So do we want to package all that up and say, "it's aware?" Sure, if we razor the definition down to photochemical response to stimuli, but what else should we (or need we) tack on?

Also, paramecia shift direction (by changing flagellar beats) when they collide with a solid object-- reverse direction, then go forward again. But they do it clumsily and in a way that is not at all sophisticated (that is, they don't behave as if they "perceive" the object as a whole and then just go around the thing). Rather, they continue colliding with it until they fortuitously are able to get around it by an iterative, chemical-driven, seemingly mechanical process of reversed and forward motions of flagella. Is this "awareness?"

So we marvel at this and say, "Wow! It's aware of the object!" or is "paying attention to where it is going and is trying to get around that object!"

So we could say that these responses are driven by a complex functional contiguity and synchrony of chemical reactions regulating locomotive reactions in response to stimuli, but that's too unwieldy. But should we substitute "awareness" for this? Maybe Dennett is correct at this level to just say "little tiny robots."

Also, are plants "aware" because they grow toward light? Somehow, I don't think so.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99441.htm

Yes, all right on the mark. One of the problems we have in dealing with the word is that we use it in so many different ways. I'll get to my take on it a little bit below.

Or the illusion of intentionality? Paramecia appear to have a dumb (not to detract from the marvel of nature, of course), in-built photochemical algorithm for staying in lit regions.

By the way, there's that darned derail word again. Attention.



Meta-awareness, absolutely. Lots more complex. Cerebral cortex probably has something to do with it.

I'm not a stubborn reductionist, I swear!

I think with paramecia we are dealing with intentionality. They certainly have an orientation toward the world.


Here's how I try to pick out some of the components..........

At a 'basal level' we see organisms like paramecia, and you have done a great job of discussing the mechanisms by which they orient to the world. The components seem to include some sense of the word 'attention' as well as 'intentionality' and 'perception'. Now, the way they do these things is fairly simple and not like the way that we do the same functions, but these (I think) are all part of what we call awareness.

Our attentional and perceptual systems are obviously much more complex than what paramecia do, but we essentially do the same things they do in orienting to the world. Paramecia work on the stimulus-response level, chemotactically with ligand-receptor interactions or concentration gradient detection or simple light-receptor orientation. We take similar stimuli and construct a model of the world, or at least a model of the percept in a way that paramecia do not -- so what we do is more complex, which is no shock to anyone.

But there is also another component to what we typically label 'awareness' that a paramecium does not have/do. We not only construct a model of the world when we perceive, but we add semantic content -- we understand what the 'thing' we are perceiving 'is'.

So, at a bare minimum, for 'awareness' I think we have at least four components -- attention, intentionality, perception, and understanding.

We can see how some of it works most easily in pathological conditions; and I'll concentrate on the visual system because we know more about it. With the visual system, people with cortical blindness can perform some simple perceptual/understanding tasks -- what we call blindsight -- at a subcortical (LGN nucleus) level. In that condition people seem to be aware of simple shapes, but they are not aware that they know or understand what those shapes are.

But there are higher order visual perceptual abnormalities that can help us piece out some of the other aspects of both perception and what we call understanding, or semantics. Prosopagnosia is a condition involving the 'what' pathway for visual processing in which affected people can understand or grasp a class of 'object' but not individual members of the class. So, a person with the condition can understand that they are looking at a face but not understand whose face they see (even if it is their own). With one of the components of Balint's syndrome -- simultagnosia -- the 'where' pathway is hit and affected people cannot sufficiently redirect attention away from one object to another so that they literally cannot 'see the forest for the trees' as they can concentrate only on the one object on which their attention directs, ignoring all the surrounding objects within their visual field.

With these conditions we can see aspects of the process of understanding that have been shorn away from what some folks seem to think is a unitary process of 'understanding'. There are clear perceptual and attentional components to the process of awareness -- at lower and higher levels, so it isn't as though there is one 'thing' going on when we become aware of some percept. We seem to understand a class of object with different neurons than we use to understand the individual members of that class, and we move attention from object to object with a process that does not involve the ability to attend to an object in the first place. This may seem picayune, but this is what I think we need to do to understand what the incredibly complex (and not undefinable) process that we call awareness consists in.

There are all sorts of things we can say about perception (some having to do with qualia and others not), but we also must deal with the issue of what we mean by 'understanding' or what we mean by 'meaning'. My intuition is that there are multiple components of 'understanding' just as there are multiple components that make up 'awareness'.

 

[westprog]

I'm not rude, I'm not nasty, I'm not sarcastic, I don't even BEGIN to get as bad in these areas as a lot of other people get, but sometimes I just lose my patience with it.

You're very patient. Perhaps it comes from having to let people throw food over you. Compared with most people on this forum you're extremely equable.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

As a follow-up to that last long post, a few thoughts on perception and meaning.............

When we perceive an object of a certain color -- to use the favorite example around here, say, we see a blue car -- we have to make sense of it. We reconstruct in our occipital lobes the lines, curves, etc. that comprise the outline of car within a greater context (foreground-background) and also sense the color blue (I separate the two because they occur in different brain areas). This reconstruction is analyzed not only in terms of visual content but also in terms of prior experiences. What we call qualia are largely learned phenomena comprising all the previous experience we have had with particular objects in terms of their function, their look, the associations we make both positively and negatively, and probably -- at least to some extent -- built in predispositions toward or away from some percepts/objects (think of snakes and how easy it is to learn to fear them, our orientation toward the blueness of the sky to view it as pretty, etc.).

So, the experience of blue, for instance, consists in a perception that is also analyzed for associations -- previous experiences of blue, positive and negative learned connotations of blue, prior emotional coloring associated with the perception of blue objects, songs about counting blue cars, etc. These memories would invariably include both declarative information involving the hippocampus and emotional memories involving other parts of the limbic system including the amygdala. All of this semantic analysis of 'blue' would proceed at the same time that attention is drawn more fully to the blue car if there were something unusual about it -- what might trigger a self-reflective further analysis (or the blueness of blue-type experience).

At the same time, the car is not only reconstructed visually but analyzed in a similar way for its semantic associations -- function, parts, prior memories of cars, possibly where I lost my virginity, etc (declarative content) and emotional memories of what a car feels, looks, smells like; emotional memories of losing one's virginity, etc.

When we speak of meaning that is what we seem to mean -- declarative and emotional prior experiences with a particular object triggered by perceiving that object once again.

Granted, we don't currently define emotional or motivational states well enough to operationalize them in computer systems, but is there any legitimate argument why we could not? Should we wish to have a computer that works or thinks like a human it would probably have to learn like a human -- have set up predispositions that can be altered over time by learning through interacting with the environment. I don't see why we could not include, with the proper understanding of how they work, both emotional and motivational systems within a robot that could end up doing things much like a human by learning semantic content as it interacts with the environment.

Or is there something to semantics/meaning/understanding that I have left out of the picture?


Blobru, sorry it took so long to get back to your points about relation of percept to memory. I knew we were going back to it but didn't think it was time yet to delve into that area. You were too far ahead of the game.

 

[Iconoclast08]

Ichneumonwasp--

If you haven't already, I think you would thoroughly enjoy Antonio Damasio's writing on extended consciousness. You're hitting on what I find to be very exciting connections among sensation, perception, attention, memory, neurobiological substrates of emotion, etc., the "gestalt" of which could be viewed as "consciousness," at least what most people may be referring to when they use that elusive noun. If I am remembering correctly, Damasio takes a stab at this from a philosophical and neuropsychological view in his book The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. This is really engaging, thought-provoking stuff, and it adds to the mix a temporal perspective and autobiographical self/memory.

Briefly, Damasio calls "core consciousness" the foundation of consciousness comprised of wakefulness, sustained attention, focus, appropriate behavior, and motivated action. It is a necessary condition for extended consciousness, but people can have marked disturbances in extended consciousness but still retain core consciousness. For example, certain types of amnesia patients (transient global) have only "here-and-now" awareness (living in a perpetual present with no past or future). Core consciousness also can allow for rudimentary meta-awareness-- being aware that it is YOU viewing an object or experiencing pleasure or pain. Extended consciousness, however, takes meta-awareness and anchors it within a panoramic temporal context, which comprises the autobiographical self (rooted in a consistently activated, revisionist autobiographical memory).

He goes on to talk about how fleeting feelings of knowing are newly constructed with each passing moment as we are confronted with novel objects in the environment and novel situations. This gets incorporated into a broader autobiographical personal memory/neural network when we move up to the level of extended consciousness.

Extended consciousness is the function of two "tricks:" (a) the build-up and synthesis of autobiographical memories or objects via incessant "pulses" of core consciousness, which is functionally made possible via working memory and underlying neural circuitry and (b) the moment-to-moment core consciousness reactivation of your autobiographical self (cohesive self-awareness). So extended consciousness is the ability to exert a sense of agency or ownership of a broad spectrum of knowledge, memory, and experience, which has been imported into our awareness by moment-to-moment core consciousness.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Yep. Got it on the bookshelf, though it's been a while since I read it.

I've been trying to get across a very simplified version of some of the ideas and I've been trying to stay away from a lot of the neurology, just mentioning bits of it.

He does a terrific job of discussing the different ways that consciousness is defined in neurology and the lesions responsible for arousal disorders, akinetic mutism, etc.

The idea of incorporating arousal/attention into a larger system involving autobiographical memories/emotions/motivational systems is definitely not my idea; it's really just basic neurology; and Damasio's book is great example of this. The new global workspace concept incorporates this type of idea with neurophysiological work on 40Hz event related potentials, which probably represent the reverberating networks that help to incorporate all this information into what appears to be a seamless whole (though it clearly isn't).

 

[kellyb]

Catching up...making sure we're on the same page:

At a 'basal level' we see organisms like paramecia, and you have done a great job of discussing the mechanisms by which they orient to the world. The components seem to include some sense of the word 'attention' as well as 'intentionality' and 'perception'. Now, the way they do these things is fairly simple and not like the way that we do the same functions, but these (I think) are all part of what we call awareness.

Our attentional and perceptual systems are obviously much more complex than what paramecia do, but we essentially do the same things they do in orienting to the world. Paramecia work on the stimulus-response level, chemotactically with ligand-receptor interactions or concentration gradient detection or simple light-receptor orientation. We take similar stimuli and construct a model of the world, or at least a model of the percept in a way that paramecia do not -- so what we do is more complex, which is no shock to anyone.

But there is also another component to what we typically label 'awareness' that a paramecium does not have/do. We not only construct a model of the world when we perceive, but we add semantic content -- we understand what the 'thing' we are perceiving 'is'.

So, at a bare minimum, for 'awareness' I think we have at least four components -- attention, intentionality, perception, and understanding.

At the very bottom level (we can call this "phase one") is perception (ability to detect stimulus) which is tied to "attention and intentionality" (ability to respond to stimulus). This is the operating system for bacteria, plants, probably ants, etc.)

Next level: "awareness" (phase two) : A fairly complex brain is necessary for this, and it synthesizes everything from phase one into "understanding". Now we're at the mammilian level. Feelings and emotions exist, but not necessarily consciousness ("awareness of awareness").

This may seem picayune, but this is what I think we need to do to understand what the incredibly complex (and not undefinable) process that we call awareness consists in.

Right. It also makes sense from an evolutionary POV and understanding the gaps between the phases. Like, fish might be mostly at phase one but also be adapted to actually "understand" a limited number of things relevant to their fishy world.

 

[kellyb]

Granted, we don't currently define emotional or motivational states well enough to operationalize them in computer systems, but is there any legitimate argument why we could not? Should we wish to have a computer that works or thinks like a human it would probably have to learn like a human -- have set up predispositions that can be altered over time by learning through interacting with the environment. I don't see why we could not include, with the proper understanding of how they work, both emotional and motivational systems within a robot that could end up doing things much like a human by learning semantic content as it interacts with the environment.

Or is there something to semantics/meaning/understanding that I have left out of the picture?

I'm starting to think that consciousness is tied (or adapted to, or whatever) to time and space in a way that might not be able to be replicated in binary code. There is no ultimately small unit of measurement that objectively exists in a final sense "here".

I could be wrong, but I'm not sure the size or function of a neuron could really be translated into ones and zeros.

And even if it could be done, in theory, I'm not sure any humans are smart enough to figure out how to do it.

But I'm really talking out of my a$$ and have no idea. lol.