On Consciousness

[PixyMisa]

As far as I can see, your link doesn't say what you claim it does. The link says that the brain is not analagous to a general purpose computer if it uses non calculable functions in its operation. It doesn't show that the brain can or does do this.

Add to that, if space and time are quantised, any physical process can be represented by a single number, and numbers are by definition calculable.

 

[PixyMisa]

Never mind.

 

[Piggy]

Now, now, no need for dick-waving. It never adds anything to an argument to brag about whose CV is longer.

Well, it does matter to some extent, because there's a group saying they know how to take behavior that goes on in an animal's brain, and replicate it in a machine.

However, there's an immediate problem with this claim, because nobody knows how the animal brains accomplish the task.

So before someone tells me that they can replicate this behavior, I need to know how they think the animal brains perform it.

That has to be the starting point -- a description of how my brain and a monkey's brain perform color, sound, smell, texture, and so forth.

 

[Belz...]

I have a strong impression that people who say computers can't be conscious, or can't be conscious currently or in the near future, will continue to claim that they aren't conscious no matter what behaviour the computer displays.

But they interpret consciousness in others based on similarity of appearance and behaviour. And all this because they interpret themselves as conscious. That doesn't sound very objective.

 

[Prometheus]

Thinking is just like crapping?

If you question the premise, then you should spend more time over in the American politics forum.

 

[Piggy]

You don't have the slightest idea what we're talking about, do you? You literally stopped reading at "magic," and chose to take umbrage at the word itself rather than understanding what it meant for your argument. Call it phlogiston or dumbsucker theory or whatever you like, you're still asserting something's existence with no evidence but a dislike for the alternative.

You used the term "magic legume" which has a long history on these threads, and is fraught with baggage.

Those using the term (more commonly "magic bean") use it to cast aspersions on those who make what should be an entirely non-controversial claim that information processing alone is not sufficient as a cause for the phenomenon of consciousness.

The notion that this is "asserting something's existence with no evidence" is rather silly, for precisely the reason I pointed out.

Before we knew anything about solar winds or earth's magnetic field, if we wanted to investigate the northern lights, our choice would not have been between "information processing" and "magic".

Same is true for consciousness.

Right now, there is no coherent theory which can account for the brain's performance of color, sound, scent, and all the other essential elements of conscious experience on the basis of "information processing" alone (the "programming only" solution, or "all syntax, no semantics" solution).

Folks who assert that consciousness has no hardware component other than what's needed to send the impulses around the brain tend to fall back on nonsensical statements such as "that's just how light looks from the inside" in order to get around the hard problem of consciousness.

Of course, one has to wonder who's doing the looking -- back to Descartes' homunculus -- and why only some brain activity "looks like" something "from the inside" while most of it doesn't, and why it looks the way it does and not some other way.

As far as is known, all real phenomena in spacetime have causes rooted in matter and energy.

Even in a computer, if you only have enough matter and energy to support the programming, but no hardware to do anything else, then you get no events other than the components changing states. No display, no printout, no fan, no sound, nothing.

It has become clear through brain research that consciousness can't be explained merely by what I'm calling the bounce-back system. If it could, then we'd be conscious of much more than we're conscious of.

What is correlated specifically with conscious experience are (a) activity in specific regions of the brainstem, (b) the presence and coherence of 3 particular deep brain waves, and (c) rapid bursts of synchronized electrical oscillations in the various regions of the brain associated with the fundamental components of conscious experience such as sound, color, scent, and so forth.

Doesn't sound much like magic to me.

It's true that nobody yet understands how the trick is done... or even really what the trick is. But gaps in our understanding do not imply magic.

What makes no sense, though, is to assume that there are no gaps in our understanding, and that therefore anyone who proposes that "something we can't identify" is involved must be referring to magic.

It's not that I "dislike the alternative", it's that there is no alternative.

It really is as though we were looking at the northern lights 200 years ago and a proposal was put forward that no particular mechanism was necessary for this phenomenon, that's just how the air happens to look, and anyone who thought that there was some matter/energy process involved that we hadn't yet identified must be proposing the existence of a "magic bean".

It's rather absurd.

Consciousness happens in real spacetime. When you wake up, the brain starts doing something it wasn't doing before, which somehow involves those 3 processes I mentioned, and which causes your brain to begin performing everything that makes up your conscious experience.

When you go to sleep, the signature waves weaken, then lose coherence, at which point the synchronized oscillations stop and all the phenomenology stops, too.

When you dream, the process gins up again. When you stop dreaming, it ceases.

When you're put under general anesthesia, the waves don't weaken, but lose coherence suddenly. But when you come out of anesthesia, the process is much the same as waking up naturally from dreamless sleep... first the brainstem engages, then the waves appear and cohere, then gain strength, and you get the feeling of moving from a very vague and hazy sort of consciousness to a more crisp and clear sort of experience.

Again, this isn't magic.

But it's also clearly not simply "information processing", except in the sense that every change of state of matter and energy in the universe can be described as "information processing", which it certainly can be.

The problem with chalking up consciousness to "information processing" is that it's rather meaningless.

That's why cognitive neurobiologists are busy studying the physical activity of the brain to determine what's going on.

Magic it ain't.

 

[Prometheus]

<snip>
What is correlated specifically with conscious experience are (a) activity in specific regions of the brainstem, (b) the presence and coherence of 3 particular deep brain waves, and (c) rapid bursts of synchronized electrical oscillations in the various regions of the brain associated with the fundamental components of conscious experience such as sound, color, scent, and so forth.
<snip>

Could you point me to the research which demonstrates these three features. I'm interested in seeing the acual research designs and in a detailed description of the results (What sort of activity in which regions of the brain, frequencies of the observed brainwaves, etc.). Thanks.

 

[Belz...]

Am I on Piggy's ignore list ? Those seemed like simple and straightforward questions.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Hey Piggy! I'm trying to see if I can distill your position so that I understand it.

You believe:

Consciousness is the product of the brain, like nutrients are the products of digestion, sugar is the product of photosynthesis, destruction is the product of tornados, etc. Sometimes you describe this as "performing consciousness," or blue, so do you mind if I call it "performing qualia?"

Now, if qualia is not data, then is it matter, or energy? Which type of matter? Which type of energy? Do we have even the faintest hint of what it is, physically? This thing that we only know exists because we sense it from inside of it?

 

[annnnoid]

Thinking is just like crapping?

A very succinct explanation for your posting history.

No, time to define "conscious".

…but…as of this point in time, nobody knows how to. Perhaps, rather than behaving like a broken record, you might go and explore the reasons why such a definition has yet to be achieved.

Consciousness is the ability to ‘know’ what consciousness is. Slightly tautological. Slightly paradoxical. Slightly incomprehensible. Otherwise…entirely appropriate.

 

[Belz...]

…but…as of this point in time, nobody knows how to. Perhaps, rather than behaving like a broken record, you might go and explore the reasons why such a definition has yet to be achieved.

I'm not asking you. I'm asking Piggy, who claims that it can't be done. I want to know what his definition is so I can try to discuss this with him. Thank you.

Consciousness is the ability to ‘know’ what consciousness is. Slightly tautological. Slightly paradoxical. Slightly incomprehensible. Otherwise…entirely appropriate.

And that's a very succinct explanation for your posting history.

 

[Piggy]

Could you point me to the research which demonstrates these three features. I'm interested in seeing the acual research designs and in a detailed description of the results (What sort of activity in which regions of the brain, frequencies of the observed brainwaves, etc.). Thanks.

Sure.

For discussion of the role of synchronized pulses, see the book Synch by Strogatz. You can find further references there.

And here's a related piece from last November.

For the role of the brainstem -- and pretty much everything else you could want -- see The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. by Gazzaniga, in the section on consciousness.

This may be a good place to start on the deep brain waves. These were only recently discovered in epileptic patients who had to have implants in the brain, which allowed a deeper look into the goings on that was previously possible. The medical benefit is that it allows doctors to tell when patients are regaining consciousness during surgery even if they can't express themselves.

 

[Piggy]

Hey Piggy! I'm trying to see if I can distill your position so that I understand it.

You believe:

Consciousness is the product of the brain, like nutrients are the products of digestion, sugar is the product of photosynthesis, destruction is the product of tornados, etc. Sometimes you describe this as "performing consciousness," or blue, so do you mind if I call it "performing qualia?"

Now, if qualia is not data, then is it matter, or energy? Which type of matter? Which type of energy? Do we have even the faintest hint of what it is, physically? This thing that we only know exists because we sense it from inside of it?

I think "performing qualia" is fine. Not as precise as we'd like, I'm sure, but for the moment it may have to do.

That last bit's the kicker, isn't it?

That's the thing about consciousness -- we don't even really know how to frame the most important and fundamental questions.

One thing about data, tho, is that nothing is data. "Data" is an abstraction, and it implies an interaction between an observer and something observed. If we all vanish tomorrow, there is no longer any data, just stuff.

That's why I avoid describing what goes on in the brain, as much as possible, in terms of "data" or "information". It's too easy to entify such things, and come to think of the abstraction as if it were the thing being abstracted.

We have to be very careful with "information" especially because there's more than one meaning of the term, depending on the field, but in all cases it's a measurement.

The way I look at what's happening in the brain is in terms of physical, chemical, and electrical interactions.

It just gets too easy to think that there is an image of a tree, for example, sliding down our optic nerves. But it's really more like the stone, water, and shore. The light causes something to happen in our skulls which is not light, but which translates some of the patterns in the lightwaves into different sorts of patterns in our nerve webs.

These patterns are just as different from one another as the patterns in the stone are from the patterns in the water.

But that doesn't matter for the body. The body doesn't care. As long as the different sets of patterns relate to one another in consistent ways, the body can make use of them in similarly consistent ways.

And great headway has been made in observing and understanding these patterns in the gooey mass inside our skull.

But it's a much bigger problem when we get to the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). Here, there's a tremendous gap between the neural patterns and the patterns of what we call qualia.

For instance, if you shine the right sort of wavelength and frequency of light into a human eye, the physics is pretty straightforward for how that light bounces off the retina and causes a chain reaction of electrochemistry.

It's also pretty straightforward physics if we're talking about something like a squint response.

But what about red?

What the heck is red, and where does it come from? Nobody has a clue.

There's no red in the light. There's no red in the neurons. And as we've seen, one animal's brain may perform red in response to that light, while another's may perform gray, and yet another's may perform no color at all. Even stranger, in some brains where activity is aberrantly transferred across brain real estate which normally shouldn't be affecting each other, you can get red, AND a flavor!

We have no calculus yet to describe the relationship between the neural activity and the qualia. We just don't.

In other words, we have no idea why the NCC for red is an NCC for red. Or put another way, we don't know why the human brain performs red in response to having that sort of light bounce off a retina, rather than performing some other color, or some other qualia besides color, or no qualia at all.

And this is one of the primary problems with the stance taken by PixyMisa and rocketdodger, for example. They hold what I call the "passive position".

Rocketdoger has said that there is no such problem, it's just that this particular type of light manifests as red "from the inside". But this is no explanation, and it doesn't take into account the fact that different brains perform different colors, or no color, in response to the same kind of light.

You can get different colors by building a different brain (e.g. a dog's brain) or by altering the activity of a human brain (e.g. taking hallucinogenic drugs).

Why is that so? Nobody knows yet.

PixyMisa holds a similar position. For example, he has said that thermostats might be conscious because there is informational feedback going on inside them. As best as I can tell, Pixy holds the position that any sort of representation inside a machine results in consciousness.

The trouble with that position is that it's long been disproven in the lab. We know for a fact that a relatively small portion of what might be called "representations" in the brain, or "information processing", even self-referential information processing, ends up getting translated into qualia, or conscious experience.

Probably the most well known example of non-conscious information processing is subliminal stimulation, and now it's been proven that not only do our brains process subliminal stimulations (for example, visual images that have too short a duration to be included in our conscious experience) but that our brains can even learn as a result of exposure to such stimulation without our ever being consciously aware that we've seen anything, much less learned anything.

So the passive approach won't work.

Consciousness is something the brain does, something it's specifically built to do. It doesn't just happen as a side-effect or by-product of "information processing".

I've given a description of what consciousness appears to be, given the current state of research. It's what I've called a "phenogram".

We know there are certain physical processes in the brain associated specifically with conscious awareness. Whether these are causes themselves, or whether they're simply side-effects of other processes that are causative, nobody can say at this point.

But what is clear is that consciousness is a bodily function of some sort, that it has physical causes in the brain, that it is not an automatic by-product of information processing, and that human brains -- and monkey brains, and almost certainly all mammal brains -- are designed (by evolution) to perform this task.

It's also clear that phenograms have extension in space and duration in time. They are real spacetime events.

But what the heck they are... that's what cognitive neurobiologists are struggling to discover.

 

[Belz...]

That's the thing about consciousness -- we don't even really know how to frame the most important and fundamental questions.

Have you considered the possibility that the fundamental questions are meaningless ?

 

[Prometheus]

Sure.

For discussion of the role of synchronized pulses, see the book Synch by Strogatz. You can find further references there.

And here's a related piece from last November.

For the role of the brainstem -- and pretty much everything else you could want -- see The Cognitive Neurosciences, ed. by Gazzaniga, in the section on consciousness.

This may be a good place to start on the deep brain waves. These were only recently discovered in epileptic patients who had to have implants in the brain, which allowed a deeper look into the goings on that was previously possible. The medical benefit is that it allows doctors to tell when patients are regaining consciousness during surgery even if they can't express themselves.

Thank you. I'll read the articles tonight. The closest library copy of Synch is almost 100 miles away from me and not part of my local library consortium, unfortunately. The Gazinga textbook is available at my alma mater's library, and it happens I'm having lunch with a professor there this weekend, so maybe I'll have a chance to drop over and pick it up. Not that I have a chance of finding the time to read 1200 pages before I'll have to return it.

 

[Piggy]

Thank you. I'll read the articles tonight. The closest library copy of Synch is almost 100 miles away from me and not part of my local library consortium, unfortunately. The Gazinga textbook is available at my alma mater's library, and it happens I'm having lunch with a professor there this weekend, so maybe I'll have a chance to drop over and pick it up. Not that I have a chance of finding the time to read 1200 pages before I'll have to return it.

I recommend reading the introduction to the Consciousness section of The Cognitive Neurosciences by Christof Koch, Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness by Ned Block, The Neurobiology of Consciousness by Koch, Visual Awareness by Geraint Rees, The Role of Feedback in Visual Attention and Awareness by Macknik and Martinez-Conde, Emotion and Consciousness by Koenigs and Adolphs, Volition and the Function of Consciousness by Hakwan Lau, and Toward a Theory of Consciousness by Tononi and Balduzzi.

That's less than 100 pages.

 

[Belz...]

Well I guess I'm on ignore, then.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

Well, it does matter to some extent, because there's a group saying they know how to take behavior that goes on in an animal's brain, and replicate it in a machine.

Well, let me repeat that I don't think it's necessary or advisable to insist on credentials in what should be a reasoned discussion. Any argument that relies on "I have read/am an expert" instead of standing on its own really isn't strong enough to be worth arguing over anyway.

That said, you seem to put a lot of faith in authority, so if it helps you to take the other side a bit more seriously, I have a doctorate in neurobiology from a fairly prestigious institution, and am a published author in the field. So when I say we can replicate something in silico (or more accurately we haven't found anything we can't replicate in silico, nor any indication there will eventually be such a beast), rest assured I'm not talking entirely out of my ass.

You used the term "magic legume" which has a long history on these threads, and is fraught with baggage.

I'm just going to stop you here. First of all it was "prestidigitating legume," but more importantly I'm not going to get drawn into walls of text where you leave numerous false assertions and fallacious arguments buried beneath mounds and mounds of unnecessary verbiage and repetitious analogies. I hope you don't think it's unfair that I ask you this given that others are asking you to be even more verbose, but if you want me to engage you directly you'll have to state your arguments more concisely. I just don't have the patience to take a long-ass post and pick it apart a nit at a time these days.

 

[tsig]

A very succinct explanation for your posting history.




.

 

[Piggy]

I hope you don't think it's unfair that I ask you this given that others are asking you to be even more verbose, but if you want me to engage you directly you'll have to state your arguments more concisely.

It makes absolutely no difference to me whether or not you engage me directly, or indirectly, or at all.

You'll either deal with the topic or you won't.

If your attitude is tl;dr, so be it.