when did we develop conciousness?

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Well yes. Remember it suits my purposes to maintain that the whole of reality apart from consciousness can be reductively analysed, because that would be one more thing which makes consciousness uniquely special.

There are emotional reasons for this, no logical reasons, but I guess thats not what you want us to read.

Have you read Geoff's threads? You will find pretty good arguments (from all sides) in there. It would be advisable for you to read and learn why your "special" consciousness (one that its independent from the so called physical universe) its not logically sustainable.

 

[Interesting Ian]

There are emotional reasons for this, no logical reasons, but I guess thats not what you want us to read.

There are emotional reasons and no logical reasons for what?

Have you read Geoff's threads? You will find pretty good arguments (from all sides) in there. It would be advisable for you to read and learn why your "special" consciousness (one that its independent from the so called physical universe) its not logically sustainable.

I have never come across any good arguments from the materialists on here. If you think you've spotted one then post the link to the relevant post and I'll let you know what I think.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

I have never come across any good arguments from the materialists on here. If you think you've spotted one then post the link to the relevant post and I'll let you know what I think.

1) There are no materialists in this forum

2) In such threads there are arguments regarding some of the possible explanations of what is called "consciousness" and its relation to what is called "world".

 

[Darat]

(Not as Admin!)

Could we keep this on track and keep the philosophy and metaphysics ramblings where it belongs - in the "R&P" section? I'm interested in the science that is being discussed.

 

[Piggy]

Btw, I'm not a Wiki fan, but I do think there's some helpful stuff in Wikipedia's entry on Emergence.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Btw, I'm not a Wiki fan, but I do think there's some helpful stuff in Wikipedia's entry on Emergence.

This word emergence is a horribly ambiguous word which has a whole host of differing meanings. But I'll content myself with saying this. It cannot be compatible with reductionism otherwise it would be vacuous to say it is "emergent".

The article states:

One reason why emergent behaviour is hard to predict is that the number of interactions between components of a system increases combinatorially with the number of components, thus potentially allowing for many new and subtle types of behaviour to emerge.

No it's not just hard to predict, it's impossible in principle to predict. Otherwise it's compatible with reductionism and hence not emergent.

What the guy seems to be talking about is simply the fact that many macroscopic phenomena cannot be understood by a reductive analysis due to the enormous complexity, rather than the fact that the phenomenon is not entailed by the interactions of such fundamental particles. But this is not "emergence" at all. Certainly it is not an interesting emergence and it certainly is not how I use the word.

 

[Piggy]

Ian, why do you keep dredging up this business about reductionism? No one here claims to believe in it -- at least not as you describe it. If you don't stop punching that strawman you're going to give us all hayfever.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Ian, why do you keep dredging up this business about reductionism? No one here claims to believe in it -- at least not as you describe it. If you don't stop punching that strawman you're going to give us all hayfever.

{shrugs}

To deny reductionism is to deny the spirit of the scientific enterprise.

Let's consider a good old fashioned clockwork clock. We wonder how it manages to keep time. So we study all the cogs and springs and wheels, and how they all interact, and we can work out why the minute and hour hands move as they do. Now that is reductionism! It's just applied common sense. We understand how thing work by breaking them apart and looking at how all the parts interact. Ocean waves and hurricanes aren't any different in this respect.

To deny this would be as if our clock also had a cuckoo come out on the hour, but this event couldn't be traced back to the interactions of the parts (cogs, springs, wheels etc). Yes the cuckoo comes out when these parts are in a particular arrangement, and doesn't when they're not in this particular arrangement, but a causal story is lacking.

Maybe reality is like that for certain macroscopic phenomena. But it would be against one of the implicit assumptions of physics.

 

[Mercutio]

getting back to the science, Darat...

I don't understand the question.

Here's the difference I mean -- perhaps this will answer.
[snip]

I will return to your example, but I thought I'd share something else first.

So I was looking for a specific study which addresses your example, and found a couple of other things while I was at it. One noted the differences in neurological response to the subject's own name when spoken by either a familiar or unfamiliar voice. Very cool. Stronger reaction to the familiar voice (not surprising). The abstract (all I read) mentioned the use of the subject's own name as a potent stimulus even in sleeping subjects, so I want to find it and see its literature review. I also want to see what the neurological reaction is--that is, which areas represent auditory awareness? Because what I was looking for was an article on visual awareness...and it would be very interesting to see whether the "awareness" part is the same for both senses--or for others as well. (Some evidence suggests that tactile awareness operates differently from visual awareness--I have seen papers on "tactile blindsight" that suggests important differences.)

But what I wanted to post now is separate. It may well be that our difficulty in understanding one another, Piggy, is that we are too close to one another's positions. You may not see the difficulty that I say exists in how we define consciousness. Anyway, here is the abstract from another journal article, from a Hungarian researcher, Kamondi Szirmai:

The notion of consciousness in the English scientific literature denotes a global ability to consciously perform elementary and intellectual tasks, to reason, plan, judge and retrieve information as well as the awareness of these functions belonging to the self, that is, being self-aware. consciousness can also be defined as continuous awareness of the external and internal environment, of the past and the present. The meaning of consciousness is different in various languages, but it invariably includes, the conscious person is capable to learn, retrieve and use information. Disturbance or loss of consciousness in the Hungarian medical language indicates decreased alertness or arousability rather than the impairment of the complex mental ability. Awareness denotes the spiritual process of perception and analysis of stimuli from the inner and external world. Alertness is a prerequisite of awareness. Clinical observations suggest that the lesions of specific structures of the brain may lead to specific malfunction of consciousness, therefore, consciousness must be the product of neural activity. "Higher functions" of human mental ability have been ascribed to the prefrontal and parietal association cortices. The paleocerebrum, limbic system and their connections have been considered to be the center of emotions, feelings, attention, motivation and autonomic functions. Recent evidence indicates that these phylogenetically ancient structures play an important role in the processes of acquiring, storing and retrieving information. The hippocampus has a key role in regulating memory, learning, emotion and motivation. Impaired consciousness in the neurological practice is classified based on tests for conscious behavior and by analyzing the following responses: 1. elementary reactions to sensory stimuli--these are impaired in hypnoid unconsciousness, 2. intellectual reactions to cognitive stimuli--these indicate the impairment of cognitive contents in non-hypnoid unconsciousness. Obviously, disturbance of elementary reactions related to alertness and disturbance of intellectual performance overlap. In conditions with reduced ability to react to or to perceive external stimuli the cognitive disturbance of consciousness cannot fully be explored.

Note the wide variety of things that "consciousness" covers. I would suggest that there is no way any one physiological process, even broadly defined, could account for all these definitions. Fortunately, there is no need for that, as long as we recognise that one term may be used for multiple processes.

 

[Jeff Corey]

As William James, functionalist wonk that he was, said about consciousness, "Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it." (1891)

 

[Mercutio]

Another interesting paper I will have to find a copy of (abstract only, thus far): it appears to agree with Piggy here, if I am understanding both parties. The author is Samsonovich, in the journal Cortex.

We start by assuming that the self is implemented in the brain as a functional unit, with a definite set of properties. We deduce the fundamental properties of the self from an analysis of neurological disorders and from introspection. We formulate a functionalist concept of the self based on these properties reduced to constraints. We use the formalism of schemas in our functionalist analysis, i.e. a symbolic level description of brain dynamics. We then reformulate the functionalist model at a connectionist level and address the emergent "context shifting" problem. We suggest how the model might be mapped onto the functional neuroanatomy of the brain, and how it could be used to give an account of a range of neurological disorders, including hippocampal amnesia, various forms of schizophrenia, multiple personality, autism, PTSD, hemineglect, and reversible anosognosia. Finally, we briefly discuss future perspectives and possible applications of computer implementations of the model.

Again, what I take issue with is the assumption of the self as a single functional unit.

The nice thing about this is that empirical investigation can evaluate whether my assumptions or theirs hold hold more explanatory weight. If we ask the right questions. It is not merely a philosophical argument.

 

[Piggy]

Mercutio, please do share the references you dig up.

I have an obligation this afternoon, but I'd like to steer you to a case study of what might be called "emotional blindness" which is really fascinating. I have it here at home, but have to find. Will do that later today.

There's a lot that I don't miss about living in towns with enormous state universities in them, but one thing I do miss is access to those wonderful libraries!

It may well be that our difficulty in understanding one another, Piggy, is that we are too close to one another's positions. You may not see the difficulty that I say exists in how we define consciousness.

Well, certainly the term is mushy. All terms are, when you get right down to it.

I do think it's possible to speak of "consciousness" in several ways, e.g.:

• felt experience;
• awareness of one's own existence as a unique and separate entity;
• the ability to plan and to solve problems;
• or simply being awake and not asleep or passed out etc.

But as long as we're agreed which meaning of the word is on the table, the problem of multiple definitions doesn't have to be a thorny one.

Personally, I find the first definition above to be the most important, for reasons I've explained above. But the second and third are compelling and worth investigation and understanding as well.

In my own idiolect, I would use the term "consciousness" generally for the 1st and last definitions above. For #2 I'd be more likely to say "self awareness", and for #3 I'd be more likely to say "problem-solving ability" or "competence" or something like that, depending on the situation.

Clearly, C-1 must be present for C-2 to be present. I am not convinced that C-1 must always be present for C-3 to be present.

 

[Piggy]

Again, what I take issue with is the assumption of the self as a single functional unit.

No, I wouldn't say that it's proper to call the self a "single functional unit". The way I see it, our own identities are abstractions maintained by the continual and iterative process of association, involving both perception and memory... and imagination as well.

But as I mentioned above, the particular definition of consciousness that I'm mostly concerned with -- in the OP's terms: When did the phenomena of "felt experience" appear, and by extension which creatures can we expect are subject to it today? -- does not even require that there be a persistent sense identity. I believe that if science finds a way to map these things, this experience of identity will be shown to appear later in evolutionary terms than the underlying phenomenon of felt experience.

 

[Piggy]

Regarding emergence, consciousness, and neural mapping

A quick note re why emergent phenomena should not be assumed to be explanable entirely in terms of the sum of lower-level phenomena.

First, the idea that lower-level properties (e.g. the physics and chemistry of atoms and molecules) could theoretically -- that is, presuming we could actually know everything there was to know about a system on the subatomic, atomic, and molecular level -- be summed in order to produce a predictive model of behavior on the macro level, is indeed an assumption.

I don't know of any reason to believe that it's true. But I do know of some good reasons to believe that it's not true.

It now seems unavoidably clear that randomness is "built into the system" at many levels. The randomness at the subatomic->molecular scale is a barrier to producing a model (even in theory) at that scale which could predict all of the macro-scale behavior we observe, even if we could know everything there was to know at that scale.

There is also randomness at the macro-scale, which is not directly correlated to the randomness present at the lower scale.

When we look at, say, molecules that make up seawater, there's no way to distinguish a molecule that's part of a wave from one that's not. Their behavior is the same. And the presence of randomness in some aspects of their behavior is a barrier to the possibility of summing up their motions in a way that makes the wave comprehensible on these terms alone.

On the macro-level, we find that large-scale organizations of matter obtain functional qualities that exist only at that scale. And that we can describe these qualities without reference to the small-scale physics.

Oceans, boulders, gelatins, and Labrador retrievers have their own functional logic which we should not expect to arise merely from the sum of what's happening at the smallest scale of granularity.

This is why attempts to map consciousness to brain activity at the strictly neural level are, I believe, doomed to failure. In order to understand consciousness in the human brain, we are forced to talk in terms of larger-scale structures such as the hypothalamus, amygdala, corpus callosum, and cerebral cortex.

These all are composed of a rather limited range of neural stuff. The difference is in how this neural stuff is shaped and connected. Only when we view these larger-scale shapes, connections, and relationships can we begin to discern the loops, echoes, and other processes that are likely to be the key to solving the riddle.

The answer is not in the neurons.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Again, what I take issue with is the assumption of the self as a single functional unit.

This is a key issue. Extremely naive accounts treat "consciousness" (a term that I object because its referent is not clear) as if it were a whole "entity" of some sort, with a ''self'' as the little (real) person who, simply, ''see it all''. To a big degree, the foundation of this idea, at least in the west, is Christianity, and it is so deeply attached in the mind of common people that it seems natural to think in souls and such stuff.

Neurophysiology has destroyed this notion forever. What we call "consciousness" is an hypercomplex set of behaviors of different brain structures in relation to an environment. The self or "homunculus" (needed to mantain the "unity" of mind) ideas are now rendered absurd. The ghost in the machine was never there in the first place.

I have to point out that this conclusion was already present in some eastern philosophies, but thats another subject.

 

[CFLarsen]

5,84,058,405 BC +- a few years.

I'd like to see a detailed Darwinian pathway of the evolution of consciousness. Anyone got one?

A classic Creationist argument: If we can't see every step of the way, it couldn't have happened through Evolution.

Shermer has described it like this: Creationists demand a transitional fossil between X and Y:

X....?....Y

If it doesn't exist, then, there is a gap. Ergo, Evolution can't be true.

When a transitional fossil is found:

X....XY....Y

the Creationists claim that there are now two gaps. Ergo, Evolution is even less true!

Come up with something better, T'ai Chi.

 

[Piggy]

If you want to see an interesting, well-produced, non-technical examination of some of the ideas being talked about here, I recommend "The Secret Life of the Brain" by David Grubin, specifically episode 4 "The Adult Brain: To Think by Feeling".

The 2 video clips on this page, excerpted from the program, are very much to the point, in that they illustrate how macro-level brain structures are involved in physical and conscious processing of emotional response.

Of the 3 chapters within episode 4, the 2 involving emotional blindness and PTSD are particularly relevant here.

The subject being described in the video clips (Marvin), as a result of a stroke, does not consciously experience his emotional responses, even though he undergoes the bodily reactions such as smiling and laughing. This may seem bizarre, but as someone who experiences something similar (albeit for entirely different reasons) I can tell you it's very real.

 

[Piggy]

Implicit in the model presented in the "Secret Life" excerpts is a version of Dennett's thesis: Consciousness in human beings is supported by an A/B brain structure.

Marvin's stoke, which damaged tissues in his cerebral cortex, does not prevent the physical reactions we associate with emotion, but does block his experience of these emotions.

What's interesting is that it has also become difficult for him to correctly judge others' emotional states.

It should not be merely assumed, however, that this sort of brain structure is the only one which can support consciousness (in the sense of felt experience). And here is the next major hurdle.

<tangent>

This model has enormous implications for how we might come to understand certain social pathologies which may be based in similar physical disconnects, whether caused by genetics, physical trauma, or severe emotional trauma and subsequent reinforcement (which can result in physically measurable atrophy of neural pathways).

The inability to experience one's own emotional reactions not only results in behavioral anomalies, and damages (perhaps even destroys) one's ability to bond with other people, but if it arises from birth or in early childhood it generates profound confusion -- not only because one cannot understand why everyone else behaves the way they do, which is daunting enough, but because the process of socialization is continually frustrated for reasons that are not at all apparent so that the subject cannot comprehend even why he behaves the way he does.

It is my belief that the study of sociopathy could productively be expanded beyond the study of criminal behavior, which it seems to be limited to today. I believe that there are (who knows how many?) "successful sociopaths" who manage to survive adolescence without being killed by risky behavior or suicide and without becoming permanently homeless or wards of the state in mental institutions or prisons. These successful sociopaths compensate for their flat emotional response by developing other means of survival, by regulating the type, length, and context of their social interactions, by learning human facial and bodily cues (which most folks intuit) consciously, and expending a great amount of effort toward continually attending to such details in social situations and learning how to "fake it" so that they can manage their lives.

It's very likely that some may even come to feed off the physical exhiliration of "faking it", and make a career of it. (Heck, Bundy -- a severe criminal sociopath -- did much the same.) For stellar successful sociopaths, "faking it" could become a life's work, with every foray into public an intense "zone" experience, with the added pay-off of making one's life not only challenging but also worthwhile. I'm thinking here of certain politicians first and foremost (and likely not the ones most folks would assume).

</tangent>