Consciousness: The Fun Part. :)

[rocketdodger]

Now that I find very hard to believe. Mutually re-inforcing projection of beliefs perhaps, but productive I very much doubt.

Well, let me put it this way:

I have learned nothing from speaking with you in the history of this forum.

I have leared much indirectly from speaking with individuals like westprog and Malerin, but only insofar as I research and think through issues in order to provide counter-arguments to their incorrect claims.

I have learned a great deal, directly, from indivuals like Paul, Pixy, yy2bggggs, drkitten, Dr.Adequate, and the rest of the individuals who are able to formulate their arguments using mathematics.

In the last page of the other thread alone Pixy has convinced me that consciousness works going backwards in time and yy2bggggs brought up the possibility that consciousness also works out of order.

What have you contributed?

Addendum: and absolutely none of you have the slightest idea how to test something for qualitative and subjective sensibility.

Oh -- that. Yeah, I have learned nothing from you.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Guys, I thought this was supposed to be the FUN discussion about consciousness? Maybe the brawlers should take the fighting back to the "My take" thread

 

[James in New York]

HypnoPsi:

Do you think brains are more like radios? Do you feel the brain is the "creator" of consciousness or do you think it could be a receiver/transmitter/filter for the endlessly existing consciousness that you have talked about? Just like to the uninformed (to people 500 years ago), a radio could be the "creator" of the music or a transmitter/receiver of the music.

 

[Maia]

Guys, I thought this was supposed to be the FUN discussion about consciousness? Maybe the brawlers should take the fighting back to the "My take" thread

That might be good. Take the snippy snippyness elsewhere, please! Play nice and share your toys, or you won't get a snack at naptime.

I just got through another thirteen-hour day of working with Alzheimer's and assorted dementia patients, so I can say that the question of human consciousness isn't exactly an academic one for me. Every day (well, every work day, anyway), I spend every minute around people who cycle in and out of every imaginable level of consciousness. For some of them, I almost think that their lives must be like one long waking dream, where they never manage to quite connect with the world around them in any coherent way.

 

[yy2bggggs]

So, in the OP, I think you may be misinterpreting what Blackmore is saying. I think you should take vision per se as an analogy... the "stream" she describes that we generally have an illusion of is more of a concept that there's a single "thread" of thing we're conscious of at any given time, and that we can take our attention and direct it towards some content to pay attention to it, at which time we pick out details of what we're paying attention to.

I'm picking this out of the details of her description, though, of what consciousness is like instead of the stream she describes. Her positive description of what the stream is doesn't quite seem precise enough to me.

Hopefully I'm making some sort of sense.

 

[PixyMisa]

Now that I find very hard to believe. Mutually re-inforcing projection of beliefs perhaps, but productive I very much doubt.

Addendum: I've just had a look and you all seem to be in total disagreement with each other about how you know 'this' or 'that' is conscious.

Well, no.

Pixy's waving around the words "self-referencing" like they're magic

In a sense, they are magic. Self-referencing system are qualitatively different from non-self-referencing systems.

and absolutely none of you have the slightest idea how to test something for qualitative and subjective sensibility.

Ask it. Dead simple.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Ask it. Dead simple.

Wouldn't you just bounce off the surface?

 

[AkuManiMani]

That might be good. Take the snippy snippyness elsewhere, please! Play nice and share your toys, or you won't get a snack at naptime.

I just got through another thirteen-hour day of working with Alzheimer's and assorted dementia patients, so I can say that the question of human consciousness isn't exactly an academic one for me. Every day (well, every work day, anyway), I spend every minute around people who cycle in and out of every imaginable level of consciousness. For some of them, I almost think that their lives must be like one long waking dream, where they never manage to quite connect with the world around them in any coherent way.

I've always thought that developing Alzheimer's has to to be one of the worst ways to go. I don't think I could be in your line of work -- it would be way to depressing

 

[Maia]

I've always thought that developing Alzheimer's has to to be one of the worst ways to go. I don't think I could be in your line of work -- it would be way to depressing

Well, I think that the worst place to be is in the moderate to severe stage, because affected people know that their gears are really slipping and that they're getting more and more out of sync with their communication with the rest of the world. Yet the question that always fascinates me is this: does that really mean that their internal consciousness has changed? I'm not so sure that the answer is yes, but rather that their capacity to receive and process input has radically changed.

It seems to me that this is what Blackmore essentially talks about in this article (not Alzheimer's, but the idea that we construct an artificial "stream of consciousness" that supposedly doesn't really exist.) If it did exist, according to her argument, then our visual representations of the world would actually be as good as we think they are. But they're not, and part of the proof is that they don't match the real world. She says that we don't have a neural correlate to what we are actually seeing (so this is the opposite of what someone like Kanwisher argues.) I do think that she uses the visual example as an example, because she also mentions other ways in which the "stream of consciousness" is supposedly an illusion and how this can be shown by demonstrating how it is not correlated to the outside world. I think what she's trying to say is something along the lines of : we don't take in all the information that we think we do, and we sort of construct different versions of consciousness and reality and then pick out one at any given time when we need to. (Although by the end of the article, I"m not sure it's even possible to figure out exactly what she's saying anymore.)

But severe dementias may show what happens when people lose the ability to constantly check their ongoing consciousness against the outside world and mesh with it. In a way, I think the situation of a patient with severe Alzheimer's actually supports a version of something like Dennett's "multiple drafts" theory, except that I don't believe that it's at all in the way that Dennett originally intended it. Now this is something that would be worth discussing!

 

[Meadmaker]

Anyway, can we just take it as a given here that of course consciousness arises from the brain? (Where else would it come from??)

Isn't this an argument from ignorance?

 

[Cynic]

Isn't this an argument from ignorance?

Eh. There's a lot of implied language there. I expect she means, of the various parts of mammals, only the brain seems to have any obvious connection to consciousness, as opposed to the spleen, or the liver, etc, and that going outside the body altogether is just unnecessary until proven necessary.

While we could argue that various sensory organs -- eyes, nerves, ears, the nervous system in general -- were/are necessary for the development of our current rendition of consciousness and even for development of what we'd consider normal consciousness in single, distinct animal, this gets us into trouble if not thought of "correctly".

For instance, we define humans as having two arms, two legs, etc. Cut off my legs, am I not still human? The same line of reasoning haunts consciousness. Take out my eyes, my ears, etc, and I will still be conscious. There is development, and then there is the "product".

I think the only (if I may set a trap for myself) proper way to explore the boundries of consciousness is to focus on the fact that it is an emergent property of a given state, and figure out what the necessary requirements of that state must be to allow such emergence. It turns out in practice that we can lose quite a lot. I've seen little indication to suggest that we couldn't, given the proper surgical expertise and a way to keep the cells happy, be conscious by most standards of thinking about it as merely one hemisphere and a brainstem.

It would surely be a confusing, miserable existence, but it would be consciousness. If that doesn't back up the notion that the brain is the seat of consiousness, I don't know what does.

 

[Maia]

Eh. There's a lot of implied language there. I expect she means, of the various parts of mammals, only the brain seems to have any obvious connection to consciousness, as opposed to the spleen, or the liver, etc, and that going outside the body altogether is just unnecessary until proven necessary.

While we could argue that various sensory organs -- eyes, nerves, ears, the nervous system in general -- were/are necessary for the development of our current rendition of consciousness and even for development of what we'd consider normal consciousness in single, distinct animal, this gets us into trouble if not thought of "correctly".

For instance, we define humans as having two arms, two legs, etc. Cut off my legs, am I not still human? The same line of reasoning haunts consciousness. Take out my eyes, my ears, etc, and I will still be conscious. There is development, and then there is the "product".

I think the only (if I may set a trap for myself) proper way to explore the boundries of consciousness is to focus on the fact that it is an emergent property of a given state, and figure out what the necessary requirements of that state must be to allow such emergence. It turns out in practice that we can lose quite a lot. I've seen little indication to suggest that we couldn't, given the proper surgical expertise and a way to keep the cells happy, be conscious by most standards of thinking about it as merely one hemisphere and a brainstem.

It would surely be a confusing, miserable existence, but it would be consciousness. If that doesn't back up the notion that the brain is the seat of consiousness, I don't know what does.

Yep, that's a pretty good summary of basically what I meant. (Although, ick! I can see some real problems with getting that surgical procedure by an ethics committee... ) Essentially, I just picture William of Ockham chasing everyone around with a big ol' razor in hand so that we can just kind of focus on other topics instead of endlessly getting bogged down in "is the brain the seat of consciousness or not"? Clearly, nobody is going to argue with the idea that it is and must be in the sense that nothing else in the human body can possibly serve as that seat. Now, whether or not consciousness can exist in some form outside the brain is a separate question and I don't really think it's the one I'm interested in here. I don't think we have to endlessly get stuck in that quicksand in order to have a discussion about different aspects of consciousness. For instance, there are a lot of things I don't like about Dennett's arguments (or that Santa Claus beard), but his "multiple drafts" view of consciousness is something I could really get behind-- but not for the same reasons he would. I feel that he's right but doesn't actually understand why. And I really wish that Dennett would debate Onno van der Hart someday. That would truly be worth seeing.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Well, I think that the worst place to be is in the moderate to severe stage, because affected people know that their gears are really slipping and that they're getting more and more out of sync with their communication with the rest of the world. Yet the question that always fascinates me is this: does that really mean that their internal consciousness has changed? I'm not so sure that the answer is yes, but rather that their capacity to receive and process input has radically changed.

Stuff like that makes me wonder what it would be like to be able to "step into" the mental perspective of another person and then compare notes with how it differs from my own. I think the most frustrating thing when it comes to studying consciousness is that we're only able to study our own from "the inside" >_<

It seems to me that this is what Blackmore essentially talks about in this article (not Alzheimer's, but the idea that we construct an artificial "stream of consciousness" that supposedly doesn't really exist.) If it did exist, according to her argument, then our visual representations of the world would actually be as good as we think they are. But they're not, and part of the proof is that they don't match the real world. She says that we don't have a neural correlate to what we are actually seeing (so this is the opposite of what someone like Kanwisher argues.) I do think that she uses the visual example as an example, because she also mentions other ways in which the "stream of consciousness" is supposedly an illusion and how this can be shown by demonstrating how it is not correlated to the outside world. I think what she's trying to say is something along the lines of : we don't take in all the information that we think we do, and we sort of construct different versions of consciousness and reality and then pick out one at any given time when we need to. (Although by the end of the article, I"m not sure it's even possible to figure out exactly what she's saying anymore.)

But severe dementias may show what happens when people lose the ability to constantly check their ongoing consciousness against the outside world and mesh with it. In a way, I think the situation of a patient with severe Alzheimer's actually supports a version of something like Dennett's "multiple drafts" theory, except that I don't believe that it's at all in the way that Dennett originally intended it. Now this is something that would be worth discussing!

It seems like one of the main functions of our brain is to filter information about our bodies and the outside world to our minds in a way that's relevant to our biological form. So yea, we really don't experience the world to it's full extent or "how it really is", we just get to observe a little slice of it. IMO, the "stream" is just the finished product of all that data processing and filtering that finally reaches the level of our conscious awareness.

I've watched some of Blackmore's talks where she explains the view that there really isn't a Cartesian theater in the brain. However, I think its a bit premature to completely throw out the "theater" idea all together. I agree that there is no observing homunculi in the theater of our brains. IMO, we ARE the theater. All the subconscious brain processes work together to compile the incoming sensory data and then "projects" it on to the monitor of our conscious minds. Now the trick is to figure out what minds are and exactly what it means for them to be conscious

 

[Maia]

Stuff like that makes me wonder what it would be like to be able to "step into" the mental perspective of another person and then compare notes with how it differs from my own. I think the most frustrating thing when it comes to studying consciousness is that we're only able to study our own from "the inside" >_<



It seems like one of the main functions of our brain is to filter information about our bodies and the outside world to our minds in a way that's relevant to our biological form. So yea, we really don't experience the world to it's full extent or "how it really is", we just get to observe a little slice of it. IMO, the "stream" is just the finished product of all that data processing and filtering that finally reaches the level of our conscious awareness.

I've watched some of Blackmore's talks where she explains the view that there really isn't a Cartesian theater in the brain. However, I think its a bit premature to completely throw out the "theater" idea all together. I agree that there is no observing homunculi in the theater of our brains. IMO, we ARE the theater. All the subconscious brain processes work together to compile the incoming sensory data and then "projects" it on to the monitor of our conscious minds. Now the trick is to figure out what minds are and exactly what it means for them to be conscious

What's so funny about the "Cartesian theater" thing is that Dennett is the one who came up with it in the first place! So I can really kind of see the point when his critics say that he's created a straw man and then attacked that. It's easy to say that it's a "common-sense" belief-- okay, if it's such common sense, then why did he have to make up the phrase? Dennett himself says that "Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea." Is anyone actually saying it at all except for him? In fact, when reading this entry (as much as Wikipedia really isn't the be-all and end-all of wisdom), it really seems to me that he made up "Cartesian materialism" too.) Isn't it a BIT much to make something up and then attack it??

 

[PixyMisa]

What's so funny about the "Cartesian theater" thing is that Dennett is the one who came up with it in the first place!

No, he just named it.

 

[Maia]

No, he just named it.

Did anyone else actually use the term before Dennett, though? I'd honestly like to know if they did, because I did give it a try, and I couldn't find any examples of this. A very common criticism seems to be that he keeps insisting others were trying to push the entire idea when this actually wasn't happening (I didn't see anyone who called themselves a Cartesian materialist until after Dennett came up with the term.)
Anyway, it all would make more sense if I wasn't up at four a.m. digging through everything in an attempt to find the Percoset, I'm sure...

 

[James in New York]

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.

 

[Malerin]

Notice how Pixy, Paul, yy2bggggs, and myself are having a very productive side discussion in the other thread precisely because we are using maths. Compare that discussion with the rest of the thread...

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Anyway, can we just take it as a given here that of course consciousness arises from the brain?

No.

(Where else would it come from??)

Do you want speculation or hard evidence?

Then we don't have to spend all of our time hashing over that particular point and endlessly getting stuck at the starting gate...

If you wish to start in the wrong place, please don't complain when we don't get very far. The really intractable problem with consciousness is precisely the fact that it looks highly unlikely that a purely brain-based explanation of consciousness is even possible. You cannot start by assuming that this is not the case, simply because you do not want to follow the line of debate which acknowledges the Hard Problem.

Sure, there are interesting questions other than the Hard Problem, but please do not expect for one second that anybody is going to let you get away with just assuming it out of existence.

 

[Cynic]

No.



Do you want speculation or hard evidence?



If you wish to start in the wrong place, please don't complain when we don't get very far. The really intractable problem with consciousness is precisely the fact that it looks highly unlikely that a purely brain-based explanation of consciousness is even possible. You cannot start by assuming that this is not the case, simply because you do not want to follow the line of debate which acknowledges the Hard Problem.

Sure, there are interesting questions other than the Hard Problem, but please do not expect for one second that anybody is going to let you get away with just assuming it out of existence.

I think she's made it clear that she wants speculation because she'd like to be able to actually participate in the thread she started. That isn't unreasonable, is it? I know we have high expectations in this forum, but it's not a Nature publication...

I'm not dismissing your claim, just pointing out that only dealing with the Hard Problem isn't very fun.