Explain consciousness to the layman.

[lupus_in_fabula]

Exactly what consciousness is remains illusive.

Yes, it seems there’s no consensus on what we mean by consciousness. It’s my guess that if we’re asking “what consciousness is” in such a way as to imply something other than brain processing existing in the brain, like some physical force in its own right, then we might be looking in vain. Such thing might not exist. “That” could thus be considered to be an “illusion”.

However, if we’re looking for a gross difference between systemic conditions in the brain, where one exemplifies a condition of unconsciousness and the other consciousness, then I think there’s a good chance we’re able to map the differences in ever more detail, thus also explain how consciousness works. Thus I think we could be able to extract some more general principles for defining it … i.e. what consciousness “is”.

I am wary of making any attempts to restrict or define it - but anyway - consciousness could be said to be perceiving. Among the things we perceive is the fact that we are perceiving.

Could that “perceive that we are perceiving” also be described, in systemic terms, as something like self-reference?

 

[PixyMisa]

To my knowledge, only PixyMisa makes claims that the issue is solved (by SRIP).

To be precise, what I'm saying is that consciousness is not the issue; the issue is all the other stuff.

See Dennett, Consciousness Explained.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

You don't "perceive consciousness".

Your body -- your brain, specifically -- performs experience.

While that's happening, "you" exist. When that's not happening, "you" don't exist.

There is no independent self to "perceive" anything.

Yes, I pretty much agree with this.

Our experience is entirely the performance of our brain. Nothing you experience -- color, pain, emotion, sound, heat, cold, texture, etc. -- has any objective existence at all. Out there, it's all just interacting "wavicles of probability".

I think the objective-subjective divide is somewhat unnecessary here. If we experience pain, then that experiencing exists, plain and simple. Pain itself is not to be found in the brain in its own right of course. I don’t think anyone is even suggesting that. Yet experiencing pain exists … as a systemic condition, as particular brain processing, as different processing from when experiencing happiness, etc., etc.

Considering that fundamentally it’s all just interacting "wavicles of probability" (i.e., at the fundamental level the fundamental units interact in the same way regardless of particular "systemic conditions").How would you describe "systemic condition", "brain processing", "different processing" here? As subjective or objective?

 

[Belz...]

Not according to the computational literalists on this thread.

They claim, for instance, that the logical computations are actually being performed by the machine.

Like I said. Computations are, necessarily, physical.

Like I said, it wasn't built to be conscious, so it's not.

Replace "conscious" by "heavy" and maybe you can see your non sequitur.

But experience is not necessary for attention, memory, learning, and perception. The non-conscious parts of the brain are fully capable of handling the task of starting up the experience generator when a loud noise hits your ear.

How do you know they are not conscious, then ?

 

[Belz...]

Well, catch up on some complexity and chaos theory, and you'll see how.

The assumption that "it's only particle interaction" has been popular for some time, but never proven, and now it's on extremely shaky ground.

The weight of the ice is what breaks the branch.

Which is gravity, which is particle interactions. Please name one thing that isn't.

 

[PartSkeptic]

Morning coffee and newspaper. This cartoon seemed an appropriate bit of humor. Acknowledgment to Scott Adams 11-23-11.

Dilbert (in meeting): "Once again, none of you responded to my emails this past week."
He continues: "So I put together a project timeline that reflects neither consensus nor reality."
Wally (holding his coffee): "Can a have a copy so I can mock it?"
Dilbert: "No. I am still enjoying the illusion of progress."

I hope that all reading this are in a fully awake state, and in good humor, that no-one get too Self-Referential while Processing this bit of Information, and everyone is Conscious of a good-natured attempt at injecting some levity into a highly technical and very interesting thread.

If anyone does fly off the handle, would that be considered self-powered flight? Try to avoid a blow-up with particle scattering rendering one dysfunctional.

How good are machines at humor? Anyone tried teaching a young kid to invent a joke? Start them with "How to fit 4 elephants into a car- 2 in the front and 2 in the back." Their responses and attempts to make one laugh gives an insight into human development.

It took me many years to be able to joke "with" people. I unfortunately was too perceptive and exposed some personal traits that people wanted hidden. I then started to poke fun at myself, and gradually brought others into it. God forbid anyone here takes offense at my well-intentioned attempt now. I take no offense at any fun poked my way.


To get serious (but only as a sideline) ...


I have learned a lot on this thread (thanks to all), and finally did a web search on consciousness, and the debate surrounding it. Sparked wanting to know what the Libet experiment was.

Right. As the Libet experiment suggests, we think consciousness involves agency, but that may just be an illusion. It seems that agency might be an unconscious process and consciousness is just the action replay.

I found an online text-book http://www.intropsych.com/ch03_states/consciousness.html with the following reference: I am not sure whether this has already been referenced (and the material is some-what out of date)

Many scientists have made specific proposals about brain mechanisms that might produce consciousness. For example, Tononi and Edelman (1998) review evidence that the biological substrate of consciousness is a dynamic core of neurons, widely distributed but not equivalent to the whole brain, which can organize itself in a tenth of a second to form a unified response such as a thought or a perception. They predict that a "distinct set of distributed neural groups" will be identified through brain scanning as the basis of conscious experience.

For a great many other perspectives on consciousness, see the archives of the PSYCHE-D discussion group. It ran from April 1993 to October 2007. During this time, the topic of consciousness emerged as acceptable and then "hot" for experimental psychologists and neuroscientists. The complete, unedited archive of the mailing list PSYCHE-D is preserved at archive.org at this URL:

http://www.archive.org/details/PSYCHE-D.

A extract of psyche-d.log002 is:

1. So far, nobody has come up with an operational definition that has achieved anything approaching consensus within the scientific community. As a field, we cannot really explain what it is that the research is attempting to investigate. Typically, supposed definitions depend upon some roughly synonymous term such as "awareness." The resultant circularity makes it extremely difficult to pin down the phenomenon.

2. Partly as a result of (1), there is no satisfactory test for the presence of absence of the phenomenon. We agree that humans possess it, based on the fact that we all say that *we* personally have it, and other humans seem pretty similar, so it seems fair to assume that they have it too. A lot of people are willing to extend it to other primates, particularly the other great apes, basically because they seem to be a lot like humans. When I finally get my consciousness program to run on my Pentium II desktop computer under Windows, by far the hardest part of the project will still be ahead--convincing anyone that the computer is conscious. Likewise when the 2" gold spheres visit from another galaxy. So far, I haven't reached the hard cases, like planets and trees. The bottom line is that, until we have a way of testing for the presence or absence of consciousness, it will be very hard to come up with experimental designs.

3. Even in those cases that most agree are paradigmatic instances of consciousness, normal waking adult humans, we have very little idea what specific microfeatures of the human are clearly correlated with the phenomena. Probably this is the issue that has received the majority of attention. However, the problems of *objectively* testing for the occurrence of consciousness, which take us back to (2), make it exceedingly difficult to conduct research that is not riddled with confounds (such as Dennett has repeatedly pointed out) related to questions about memory, confabulation, and other difficulties that spring from a reliance upon subjective reports. For example, we can identify neural activity with great accuracy, but we have no way of knowing certainly whether or not a particular instance of neural activity indicates consciousness.

4. The chicken and egg problem: until we have adequate experimental criteria, we cannot clearly specify the conditions and/or constituents that comprise consciousness...

I confess that reading parts of this debate meant I had to look up words in the dictionary.

 

[anglolawyer]

Part Skeptic

Great post. Thanks. I like this quote you reproduce:

'So far, nobody has come up with an operational definition that has achieved anything approaching consensus within the scientific community. As a field, we cannot really explain what it is that the research is attempting to investigate. Typically, supposed definitions depend upon some roughly synonymous term such as "awareness." The resultant circularity makes it extremely difficult to pin down the phenomenon.'

because that's it in a nutshell. What is it about the problem that makes it so hard to define?

I have no answer or anything approaching one. I do remember reading in one of Richard Dawkins' books a speculation that consciousness arises when the brain includes the self in its simulation of reality. Like the computer racing games (my analogy, not Dawkins'): sometimes the view is just the road ahead with other cars passing or being overtaken but sometimes you can select a camera view which brings the cockpit onto the screen with steering wheel, controls and perhaps the driver's (i.e. your own) arms and hands.

So, a definition to be shot down: consciousness is the brain's representation of the self in its simulation of reality.

 

[PartSkeptic]

I was researching the mirror and rouge tests. I am not sure that they are adequate to test for consciousness (or self awareness). There seems to be an element of "learning" and experimentation involved, particularly with the pigeons. Intelligence is definitely required.

On the radio, the Naked Scientist (super bright guy) was explaining that humans use 1/3 of their brain in visual processing, while dogs use 1/3 of their brain in sense of smell processing.

Then I read

I love my wife, and I like to think she is conscious, it makes my time with her more enjoyable.

If she happened to be a perfectly programmed sneaky chinese room android, who just happened to know the exact behavioral response to every possible event she would ever encounter in her existence, such that she appeared conscious to every external observer .... who cares?

and I thought... What if a more superior race than us humans (What! Impossible!) decided to test us for consciousness (before using us as a food supply, so goes the sci-fi).

A possible test would be to see if we could detect an android built as a "mirror" of ourselves, but of the opposite gender. Would we fail the test if we just fell in love with it, instead of getting suspicious?

 

[Beelzebuddy]

A possible test would be to see if we could detect an android built as a "mirror" of ourselves, but of the opposite gender. Would we fail the test if we just fell in love with it, instead of getting suspicious?

Come on. There's no way you wouldn't hit that. Me and Beelzebot would be on top of each other in under a minute.

 

[anglolawyer]

I was researching the mirror and rouge tests. I am not sure that they are adequate to test for consciousness (or self awareness). There seems to be an element of "learning" and experimentation involved, particularly with the pigeons. Intelligence is definitely required.

On the radio, the Naked Scientist (super bright guy) was explaining that humans use 1/3 of their brain in visual processing, while dogs use 1/3 of their brain in sense of smell processing.

Then I read




and I thought... What if a more superior race than us humans (What! Impossible!) decided to test us for consciousness (before using us as a food supply, so goes the sci-fi).

A possible test would be to see if we could detect an android built as a "mirror" of ourselves, but of the opposite gender. Would we fail the test if we just fell in love with it, instead of getting suspicious?

Isn't this the theme in Bladerunner? Except the bots are made by humans instead of superior aliens. The star ends up falling for the bot knowing she's a bot. Wouldn't that spook the aliens a bit?

 

[rocketdodger]

I think that a concern as to whether your wife (or even husband) is experiencing happiness or sadness is an important part of marriage. I suppose it is also true that many people would settle for their spouse giving a good simulation of happiness, regardless of some theoretical inner state.

Wow.

Nothing I have ever said to you even comes close to being as insulting as this post.

Congrats westprog.

 

[rocketdodger]

Well there is your problem, if your not thinking about the robot, it won't pass the Turing Test. Or maybe that's just your plan. Define thinking as not thinking ;-).

You seem to have missed the point.

I am saying that if someone tells me I am not really thinking when I think, then I don't particularly care about their opinion, because what matters to me is whether I think I am thinking not whether they think I am thinking.

 

[westprog]

Come on. There's no way you wouldn't hit that. Me and Beelzebot would be on top of each other in under a minute.

Let's face it, consciousness has never been a requirement in this particular area.

 

[Piggy]

You don't think a metric that allows one to reject candidates without fear of false negatives is a useful metric?

If you try to go into a neurobio experiment using "self-referential information processing" as your definition of consciousness, you have no place to start.

There is a lot of self-referential (loop/feedback) activity in the brain.

Some of it affects conscious experience, and some of it does not.

And the term "information" doesn't refer to anything specific in the brain.

Like I say, it's a non-starter. Which is why it isn't used in the study of consciousness.

 

[Piggy]

"Information flow" being something that's never been defined in a satisfactory way. It either presumes conscious interpretation, or else - if we were to use a physicist's definition - there's far too much of it.

Yeah, how long now have we been waiting for this Goldilocks definition of "information", which never seems to appear?

 

[Leumas]

Let's face it, consciousness has never been a requirement in this particular area.

How about this one... they are made of silicon too.

 

[Piggy]

Huh?

If they behave the same, then why does the branch break in one case and not the other?

Magic beans again?

It could be magic beans, if you had a sufficient weight of them.

It could be anything, if you had a sufficient weight of it.... ice, beans (magic or no), lemurs, a substance of extra-universal origin which is not made of particles at all, whatever.

And that's the point... the micro-level properties of the thing don't matter.

I don't know why you believe that a particular arbitrary level of granularity is the realm at which all significant things happen.

 

[Piggy]

How about the extremely simple to understand meaning like "whatever is going on in your brain when you are not dead" ?

I would like you to explain why "whatever is going on in your brain when you are not dead" is so fundamentally different from "whatever is going on in a computer when it is not turned off," given that both transistors and neurons, our brain and electronic circuits, are so similar to each other when compared to everything else in the universe.

As has been explained, transistors and neurons are similar in certain ways, but extremely different in other ways (which is why we have different names for them) and we don't yet know which features of the brain are involved in the performance of experience.

If "everything going on in your brain when you're not dead" is "information", then we're back to stars, oceans, and piles of grass also being information processors.

So in that case "information" is not a particularly useful term, and certainly not one that draws any special relationship between conscious brains and the machines we call computers.

 

[Leumas]

1. So far, nobody has come up with an operational definition that has achieved anything approaching consensus within the scientific community. As a field, we cannot really explain what it is that the research is attempting to investigate. Typically, supposed definitions depend upon some roughly synonymous term such as "awareness." The resultant circularity makes it extremely difficult to pin down the phenomenon.

No one responded to this challenge.... I wonder why

Ah... I forgot to mention that this operational definition is in fact circular. See if you can spot the circular reasoning in it.

 

[Piggy]

I can't wait to read it. Except, oh wait -- nobody ever claimed a sim could replace a brain.

Speak for yourself. We've had long-running arguments in which it was claimed that you could take a computer running a simulation of a brain and it would produce an instantiation of consciousness which could be used to make a "robot" conscious.