Has consciousness been fully explained?

[Piggy]

I also am not understanding what you mean by an executive mechanism.
Do you mean how do the neurons get started firing? Or what started the neurons firing in the specific way to bring about consciousness? Like maybe there is a trigger that turns it on at a specific point?

I tend to think of consciousness as a side effect of high intelligence.

See above.

 

[Beth]

Actually, I really don't get the time thing

If I was modeling a wave then I wouldn't say that the wave had failed to exhibit wave behavior because it was not in real time. Time is part of the model

If I was modeling plant growth I would not say that it failed to exhibit the correct behavior because it was not in real time.

I think I understand the requirement for being in 'time'. Consider the 'this is not a pipe' painting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images), the model of the wave is only an abstracted ideal, a symbolic representation of something else that exists in our material world. Why, in the case of consciousness, should we expect the symbol to actually be the thing it is representing?

This is an interesting question in it's own right. I tend to feel that, if we continue to progress in our technological prowess, we will eventually be able to build conscious machines. But I don't have a good answer to that question other than to note, as others have, that consciousness isn't a material thing, but a process - i.e. a non-material thing. Non-material objects are not bound by the limitations of material objects.

Hmmm.....strikingly similar to arguments for ESP and other such stuff, isn't it?

On the other hand, why should a non-material object be considered 'real' when it clearly isn't existing in our spacetime continuum any more than a non-material object should be considered 'real' when it just as clearly doesn't exist in our spacetime continuum? Time is as much a part of the familiar four dimensional place we live in as the three spacial dimensions.

So while I don't agree with them, I think their argument has merit. We simply don't know enough yet for me to feel confident of either side.

I have no good answer for the question about why should simulated consciousness actually BE consciousness, I only know that I think that it is true. If consciousness were simulated sufficiently closely, it would actually be consciousness.

So why is the model of the brain different in this respect?

Would the same go for a mouse brain model?

An ant model?

A tapeworm?

I think yes for the mouse, no for the tapeworm and probably not the ant, though GEB does have an interesting conversation with an ant colony in it. But those are my instinctual feelings about it. I don't know why I feel that way exactly and I don't know why the model of the brain should be different in this respect. It just seems that way to me and I don't feel there is a good reason to reject that perception.

Can you think of a reason why the model of the brain might be different in that respect?

For every other bodily function, in order for the overt behavior to take place -- blinking, shivering, regulating the heartbeat, regulating temperature, running, focusing light on the iris -- the firing of neurons has to be coupled with some sort of executive mechanism of another type.

Piggy, I don't know if your meaning has eluded anyone else, but I had been a bit puzzled with this argument. I had been thinking you were talking about an executive mechanism as that which coordinates the work of the other parts. But it dawned on me with this post that you meant executive as in executing - actually doing the physical work in a material sense. Your posts now make much more sense to me.

Consciousness is certainly the weirdest bodily function we know of, and it appears to be different in some profound ways from all the others.

Our brains, our consciousness appear to be one of the main advantages we have over all other species on earth. It's clearly fundamental to our success as a species.

The study I cited upthread, which made use of deep brain implants, finds that at a "signature" of conciousness is a simultaneous activation of 4 different types of waves spanning the space of the brain.

Yes, thanks for that. It was quite interesting. There was also an interesting study published late last year identifying activity in the glial cells.

There's no doubt that machines can, in theory, be built which will also do consciousness, just as our bodies do consciousness.

But it will not involve "running the logic" alone.

For the behavior to happen, there must be the logic (which, again, is an abstraction for what's actually happening physically) combined with an executive mechanism of some sort to produce actual behavior.

I appreciate your articulating the issue so well. I find this issue an interesting one. Thanks.

 

[Robin]

I think I understand the requirement for being in 'time'. Consider the 'this is not a pipe' painting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images), the model of the wave is only an abstracted ideal, a symbolic representation of something else that exists in our material world. Why, in the case of consciousness, should we expect the symbol to actually be the thing it is representing?

I wouldn't.

All I would expect of it is for the various components of the neural architecture to act and intereact as the laws of physics say they should.

Whether there is consciousness is another matter altogether.

 

[Piggy]

Piggy, I don't know if your meaning has eluded anyone else, but I had been a bit puzzled with this argument. I had been thinking you were talking about an executive mechanism as that which coordinates the work of the other parts. But it dawned on me with this post that you meant executive as in executing - actually doing the physical work in a material sense. Your posts now make much more sense to me.

Ah, you're right... I didn't consider that definition of the term. Which I should have.

Yes, by "executive" I mean "executing" or carrying out.

I am not talking about a higher-level coordinating function.

Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for the confusion.

 

[Robin]

But it will not involve "running the logic" alone.

For the behavior to happen, there must be the logic (which, again, is an abstraction for what's actually happening physically) combined with an executive mechanism of some sort to produce actual behavior.

So what would your take be on the computer modelled human - down to neuron level or deeper?

Would it exhibit the external behaviours we associate with conscious people?

 

[PixyMisa]

Wow! There is a big difference between being wrong and being an idiot. Typically, idiots don't become Rhodes Scholars and don't have entire fields of research directed at proving their argument wrong.

There is no entire field of research directed at proving his argument wrong. It's useful as an example of logical fallacies for an introductory philosophy course, but beyond that, it is without any merit whatsoever.

That doesn't make Searle an idiot, merely wrong. What makes him an idiot is that the problems with his argument have been clearly established, and his response has been a series of progressively weaker and more obviously flawed counter arguments.

And while typically idots don't become Rhodes Scholars, sometimes they do.

 

[rocketdodger]

Well I am interested - but I think I am going to have to take a while to take that in.

It isn't that complicated, I just explain things badly.

You would reach the same conclusion if you meditated on it for a bit.

Basically, it is just an answer to the question "how is a thermostat different from a bowl of soup" in purely mathematical/statisical terms, with no reference whatsoever to any notion that is human centric.

And it isn't really important (although I find it rather elegant, since it explains why life exists), I just came up with it because I was so sick of westprog's constant cop-outs.

 

[Piggy]

Btw, I think the case of Marvin -- one of my perennial favorite examples -- is of use here.

His brain and body functioned perfectly well emotionally, except that a stroke disrupted the pathway which made information about his emotional states available to consciousness. (A significant exception, that.)

He would laugh at a joke, but he had no conscious awareness of any emotional state of amusement. He simply had to infer, intelectually, that he was amused.

Bizarre? Yes. But illuminating.

Presumably -- drawing on the deep brain probe experiments -- the mechanism responsible for performing consciousness was not able to "pick up" necessary input from where it expected it to be, because the cascade of neural activity was short-circuited.

The result is a kind of blind spot, similar to our visual blind spot.

Here we see quite clearly the dichotomy between brain activity involved in the bodily function of Sofia, and brain activity which is not involved in this function, even though neural activity is involved in both.

Reacting emotionally is not the same thing as being conscious of those emotional states.

If the deep probe studies are any indication -- and it's hard to argue that they're not, since they're the only studies so far to provide hard evidence of "signature" processes which are only engaged during consciousing -- then there is some mechanism in the brain that can coordinate input from various sectors globally to carry out the function.

And if some of the expected "information" (an abstraction, but a necessary one here) is unavailable, it continues to carry out its function without that bit, generating a Sofia experience with an "invisible" blind spot, just as we have an "invisible" blind spot in our visual fields.

We don't see any kind of "hole" in our visual field. Neither did Marvin sense any sort of missing chunk in his conscious experience, regardless of the fact that this missing information had a profound effect on his personality and behavior.

 

[PixyMisa]

Searle coined the term Strong AI and he was critiquing cognitive science. But what I meant was that there is an extensive literature both in philosophy and cognitive science devoted to proving Searle wrong. I can pretty much guarantee that none of the people that hold the views that Pixy thinks he/she is supporting would say that Searle is an idiot.

Just to make one thing clear - I think that we're all idiots. Our entire species. The best we can do is try, in the final balance, to be more right than wrong.

But the fact is, Searle has been proven wrong. His argument is hopelessly flawed. His counterarguments are hopelessly flawed. And yet he persists.

I'm not sure why you'd think Searle was not an idiot. Just take the Chinese Room for a moment. What value has it, except as a thought exercise to show why a particular line of argument against the computational model cannot succeed?

Great for first-year philosophy students. Here's Searle's argument. Here's the great gaping fallacy of composition. Here's his counterargument. Here's the same great gaping fallacy still. Winding back, here we can infer the unstated premise that led him to his error, and show that the argument, properly constructed, would simply be circular.

Does he recognise his failings and move on? No. So we leave him out by the dustbins in the faint hope that the council will come round and collect him, and we get on with our work.

 

[Piggy]

So what would your take be on the computer modelled human - down to neuron level or deeper?

Would it exhibit the external behaviours we associate with conscious people?

To answer that, I would have to know what you mean by a "computer modelled human". What physical setup are you proposing?

 

[Robin]

To answer that, I would have to know what you mean by a "computer modelled human". What physical setup are you proposing?

Here is my original post:

For all concerned - I would be interested in your opinion.

Suppose that there was a sufficiently detailed computer model of a human brain, and say this brain is given realistic sense data, including modelling of the sense data associated with body control and feed back.


Perhaps it starts as a model of an embryo and models the brain development up to birth and then childhood even adulthood - obviously this would take vast computing power.

But suppose that could be done - do you think it possible that the virtual human being modelled would exhibit human like behaviour?

For my own part I cannot see any reason why it would not exhibit human like behaviour.

Sort of Blue Brain but on a much grander scale.

 

[Malerin]

A more important question - do you think I might not be conscious?

Now there's the best question of all.

 

[Piggy]

Sort of Blue Brain but on a much grander scale.

Well, if I use different materials other than those normally used to build a car, and I build an object with those materials that does everything, in every detail, that a car does, then I'm not building a model of a car, I'm building a car.

 

[Robin]

Well, if I use different materials other than those normally used to build a car, and I build an object with those materials that does everything, in every detail, that a car does, then I'm not building a model of a car, I'm building a car.

But if I write a program that simulates the behaviour of a car I am modelling the car, no matter how detailed the simulation.

But I am not really concerned with what you call it - if you want to call it an actual brain rather than a simulation of a brain I am fine with that.

I am more interested in whether you think the virtual person it was attached to would exhibit the external behaviour we normally associate with conscious people.

 

[westprog]

Dude, that never flies around here.

And no, my questions have not been answered, or I wouldn't have to keep asking them.

More to come....

Oh, got the reading list, did you? "Read these thirty articles, and then you will agree with me. My arguments are too pure and wonderful to actually write them out for you any more."

It is quite fun to go through some of the references to find where they quite explicitly contradict his position, though.

 

[Dancing David]

Some would say that we can tell that we are not part of such a simulation because we are conscious - and that the simulated human would not be conscious.

Then that leads to the p-zombie. A thing that behaves as though it is conscious is conscious. Otherwise we have to face the fact that we just assume we are conscious because we have the behavior of consciousness, the same standard applies.

No organism knows that it is actually conscious it could be a BIV, a simulation , a butterfly dream, godthought or material organic being.

All these states will be exactly the same for the 'entity' that beliefs that it is conscious. There is no way to tell if you are a conscious entity or an advanced simulation of a conscious entity.

 

[Dancing David]

Why do you think preemptive multitasking software is not Turing equivalent?

For the same reason Westprog says that digital computers are not digital but analog machines.

By establishing semantic barriers the discussion does not occur about the concepts behind them. So the fact that Turing did not conceive of modern computing techniques means Westprog can just categorically make statements about the concept of a Turing machine.

 

[Dancing David]

Of course the behaviors exist.

Consider yourself going to sleep at night, dreaming, not dreaming, waking up the next morning.

When you're asleep and dreaming, the behavior is happening.

When you're asleep and not dreaming, it's not happening.

When you wake up again, it's happening.

There is absolutely no denying that.

And if you say no mechanism is required for this behavior -- although we need a mechanism for every single other behavior -- then you're going to have to explain with some precision what is going on.

Strangely there are studies that show we are dreaming all night and various levels of arousal are involved. Dropping an object that makes a loud noise will also show that most sleeping people are 'aware' at some level.

So again it is the 'aggregate of behaviors' that makes for the definition of consciousness.

 

[Dancing David]

Neither. See my posts above.

Consciousness is certainly the weirdest bodily function we know of, and it appears to be different in some profound ways from all the others.

But nevertheless, this does not give us free rein to cast aside the basics of biology.

The brain's neurons can fire all they want, but if something other than that is going to happen, then some other mechanism must be involved.

We know the brain alone generates consciousness.

But so far, we're at a loss to explain how.

It's no use simply chalking it up to vague yet insufficient non-explanations like SRIP, or neurons, or parallel processing. Why? Because all of this goes on in brain functions that have nothing to do with conscious awareness.

We just don't know what is going on to make this stubbornly confounding bodily function occur.

The study I cited upthread, which made use of deep brain implants, finds that at a "signature" of conciousness is a simultaneous activation of 4 different types of waves spanning the space of the brain.

Yes, neurons are involved in that, but it is not the classic toe-to-heel, chain reaction firing that we usually think of when we imagine neural activity.

And the exciting thing about this discovery is that, at last, we have an activity of the organ which is correlated with consciousing, but not with other activities of the brain.

Whatever the mechanism turns out to be, it will have to meet that criterion if it is to have any explanatory power.

SRIP, neural activity in general, and parallel processing in general do not meet that criterion.

There's no doubt that machines can, in theory, be built which will also do consciousness, just as our bodies do consciousness.

But it will not involve "running the logic" alone.

For the behavior to happen, there must be the logic (which, again, is an abstraction for what's actually happening physically) combined with an executive mechanism of some sort to produce actual behavior.

I will wait on the defintion of your use of executive apparently, thats cool.

The study I cited upthread, which made use of deep brain implants, finds that at a "signature" of conciousness is a simultaneous activation of 4 different types of waves spanning the space of the brain.

Yes, neurons are involved in that, but it is not the classic toe-to-heel, chain reaction firing that we usually think of when we imagine neural activity.

Well it is a bit more that toe to heel, there are the direct dendrite connections as well, which would allow for greater synchronization of cells that the neurotransmission at the synaptic cleft.

The 'brain wave' thing is always a conundrum at this point because it is as in so many things a possible byproduct of the other mechanisms. When it is shown how it has an influence on neural behavior at various levels, then we will know.

So it could be like the heart muscle, where the synchronized pulse wave is essential to the function of the heart or it could just be a side effect from taking the EEG.

Just as with a super large old fashioned computer like ENIAC, we could probably find cycles in the EM pulses (which brains don’t use they use a biochemical phase shift in the cell wall), but the question is how does that relate.

It might be significant , it might not.

To quote your reference paper "We argue that all of those measures provide distinct windows into the same distributed state of conscious processing."

So they say that they think it demonstrates a distributed state of processing. Which fits nicely with many neural net models.

The changes in the gamma and beta band spectrums may be causal or they may be side effects of that processing.

 

[PixyMisa]

The brain's neurons can fire all they want, but if something other than that is going to happen, then some other mechanism must be involved.

Sure. But nothing else is required for consciousness.

We know the brain alone generates consciousness.

Yes.

But so far, we're at a loss to explain how.

No.

It's no use simply chalking it up to vague yet insufficient non-explanations like SRIP, or neurons, or parallel processing. Why? Because all of this goes on in brain functions that have nothing to do with conscious awareness.

Show me an example of self-referential information processing that has nothing to do with conscious awareness. Just one. That would, after all, quite demolish my position.

The study I cited upthread, which made use of deep brain implants, finds that at a "signature" of conciousness is a simultaneous activation of 4 different types of waves spanning the space of the brain.

Yes, neurons are involved in that, but it is not the classic toe-to-heel, chain reaction firing that we usually think of when we imagine neural activity.

Yes it is.

And the exciting thing about this discovery is that, at last, we have an activity of the organ which is correlated with consciousing, but not with other activities of the brain.

No. The article says nothing of the sort, and nothing from which you could rationally infer that.