[HN Gopher] Temporal circuit of brain activity supports human co...
___________________________________________________________________
Temporal circuit of brain activity supports human consciousness
Author : hhs
Score : 246 points
Date : 2020-04-09 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (advances.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (advances.sciencemag.org)
| naasking wrote:
| The anti-correlated behaviour of these two networks, and even
| their default mode vs. attention functions, reminds of the
| attention schema theory of consciousness [1].
|
| Specifically, the attention schema theory posits that some
| constant back and forth signal switching between internal and
| external models of the world results in the illusion of
| subjective awareness, in an analogous manner to how task
| switching provides the illusion of parallelism on single-core
| CPUs.
|
| [1]
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...
| ryeights wrote:
| I can see how that would lead to an illusion of _continuous_
| subjective awareness, but I don 't think it supports the notion
| that subjective awareness is entirely illusory. I think
| therefore I am, the existence of qualia [1], etc.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
| naasking wrote:
| "I think therefore I am" assumes the conclusion. "This is a
| thought, therefore thoughts exist" is the valid, non-circular
| version.
|
| The attention schema theory addresses the specific problem of
| how we apparently infer first-person subjective facts when no
| such concept exists in physics, the latter of which consists
| entirely of third-person objective facts. The answer is that
| we erroneously conclude that the facts we perceive are first-
| person, but this perception is a sensory trick, similar to an
| optical illusion.
|
| The question of qualia is larger than this specific question,
| but subjectivity was probably an important problem to
| overcome for a materialist explanation of consciousness.
| Dennett has long held that what we call "consciousness" is
| very likely a bunch of distinct phenomena that all get
| muddled together, and the fact that we have started to pick
| it apart hints suggestively that he was right.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >"I think therefore I am" assumes the conclusion.
|
| But the thought is self-referential. The thought is about
| itself thinking, and so the thought instantiates the
| sufficient case for a subject. And so there is no question-
| begging.
|
| >The answer is that we erroneously conclude that the facts
| we perceive are first-person
|
| But as long as these facts are presented or represented as
| being first-person, the sufficient case for first-person
| acquaintance has been established. Whether these first-
| person facts are ultimately grounded in third-person
| descriptions or phenomena doesn't make them illusions.
| naasking wrote:
| > But the thought is self-referential. The thought is
| about _itself thinking_ , and so the thought instantiates
| the sufficient case for a subject.
|
| You just assumed the existence of a subject again. Where
| is the proof that a thought requires a subject? One that
| isn't vacuous or doesn't just assume its own conclusion?
|
| > Whether these first-person facts are ultimately
| grounded in third-person descriptions or phenomena
| doesn't make them illusions.
|
| It does for the technical purposes of the consciousness
| debate. The terminology we're using, like "illusion", has
| a technical meaning for the debate between materialists
| and antimaterialists, wherein antimaterialists argue that
| a first-person fact _cannot_ be reduced to third person
| facts, even in principle.
|
| Obviously even materialists speaking informally would
| still use first person language and speak normally about
| their experiences.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >Where is the proof that a thought requires a subject?
|
| I'm not sure what you're asking. If the thought is self-
| referential, then the subject is inherent in the self-
| reference of the thought, namely the thought itself. I am
| not assuming some kind of conscious subjectivity here.
| Merely that the content of the thought is instantiated in
| the case of self-reference. If this were not the case,
| then the thought could not self-reference.
|
| >has a technical meaning for the debate between
| materialists and antimaterialists
|
| I'm familiar with the usual suspects in this debate (e.g.
| Dennett, Frankish), and I don't find their usage of
| illusion particularly "technical". They use it to mean
| that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist or isn't
| real. But its this very usage that I take issue with.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > The answer is that we erroneously conclude that the facts
| we perceive are first-person, but this perception is a
| sensory trick, similar to an optical illusion.
|
| I'm extremely skeptical of answers that involve labeling
| difficult challenges to a theory as "illusions."
| naasking wrote:
| > I'm extremely skeptical of answers that involve
| labeling difficult challenges to a theory as "illusions."
|
| So calling [1] an optical illusion warrants skepticism
| because it's attempting to dismiss the challenge of
| having to explain how water can physically break and
| magically reconstitute pencils? Don't you see the problem
| with this sort of argument?
|
| The point is that integrating all of our knowledge leaves
| no room for first person facts. Additionally, every time
| we've tried to ascribe some unique or magical property to
| humans or life (like vitalism), we've been flat out
| wrong. No doubt there are plenty of challenges left to
| resolve in neuroscience, and no one is claiming that a
| materialist account of qualia is unnecessary.
|
| [1] http://media.log-in.ru/i/pencilIn_in_water.jpg
| ardy42 wrote:
| > So calling [1] an optical illusion warrants skepticism
| because it's attempting to dismiss the challenge of
| having to explain how water can physically break and
| magically reconstitute pencils? Don't you see the problem
| with this sort of argument?
|
| Yeah, but that's a bit of a straw man.
|
| The kinds of claims-of-illusion that warrant particular
| skepticism are the ones that deny fundamental
| observations in defense of some particular (usually
| sectarian, for lack of a better word) philosophical
| perspective.
| md224 wrote:
| > we erroneously conclude that the facts we perceive are
| first-person
|
| this doesn't make sense... the perceiving itself is what
| makes something first-person, not the object of perception
| naasking wrote:
| That's not the technical meaning in the consciousness
| debate. I invite you to read about Mary's room for an
| introduction to the distinction I was describing.
| md224 wrote:
| Oh okay... I thought you were denying the reality of
| first-person subjective experience as commonly
| understood, not a narrowly-defined technical term. That
| seems more reasonable then (though also less
| interesting).
| naasking wrote:
| It's still pretty interesting! Mary's room thought
| experiment is pretty short and simple, but it'll make you
| think pretty hard.
| david_w wrote:
| naasking, as I see it, Dennett (in Consciouness Explained)
| engages in a sleight of hand. He redefines consciouness as
| "a bunch of distinct phenomena that gets muddle together",
| but that doesn't touch the mystery of qualia, it tries to
| just deny that there is anything to explain, owing to the
| fact (Dennett claims) that the problem is mischaracterized
| from the start.
| naasking wrote:
| And your mind plays sleight of hand all the time, which
| Dennett clearly establishes in his work. Or do you
| actually see the physical blind spot that's a fundamental
| feature of your eyeball?
|
| So why would you trust your direct perception over the
| mountains of evidence that clearly demonstrates that we
| can't trust our perceptions?
| david_w wrote:
| No literate scientifically minded person disputes your
| point, but it doesn't address my point. My point is this-
| qualia as a phenomena exists. Even if I think a red thing
| is blue, I am still experiencing some color and the
| experiencing itself- aside from its accuracy- is what
| needs explaining.
|
| So experience, aka qualia as a phenomena unto itself is
| in need of explaining, not any particular qualia and not
| the presence of absence of any correlation between the
| qualia and objective reality, i.e. the "truthfullness" or
| "accuracy" of the qualia.
| goatlover wrote:
| If we can't trust our perceptions, then there is no
| mountain of evidence to say the mind is playing a trick
| on us regarding consciousness. That's because the
| scientific evidence is empirical, which is knowledge
| based on perception. Dennett's argument risks undermining
| the foundation for scientific knowledge.
| voxl wrote:
| Calling it an illusion is not interesting. We define
| consciousness and subjective experience to match the very
| experience we understand.
|
| There is literally no way for it to be an illusion, the
| definition itself precludes it. No matter how consciousness and
| subjective experience are implemented in the hardware of our
| brains, it is still a concept that we use to describe the
| experience, and the experience is real no matter what.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Consciousness is basically the only thing we can conclusively
| say is NOT an illusion, right?
| goatlover wrote:
| Does this mean the experience of pain, sound, color, etc. are
| illusions?
| LASR wrote:
| What does it mean to be an illusion?
| naasking wrote:
| They are an illusion in precisely the same way your car or
| your day job are illusions: we don't admit any notion of
| qualia/cars/day jobs into our ontology of physics, and of
| qualia must ultimately be explained by appealing only to our
| ontology.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >the same way your car or your day job are illusions
|
| But what work is calling these things illusions doing for
| you? That they're not fundamental units of the furniture of
| the universe doesn't mean they don't exist or play
| necessary causal or explanatory roles.
| naasking wrote:
| > But what work is calling these things illusions doing
| for you?
|
| It serves to help distinguish that which is reducible to
| more fundamental ontological entities, from that which is
| irreducible and thus ontologically fundamental.
|
| I agree that these concepts certainly fulfill _useful_
| causal and explanatory roles. Whether they are
| "necessary" has some room for debate.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| You can only really "experience" the model your brain makes
| of the world, not the world directly. You end up assuming the
| world exists and there's no Descartes' Demon.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Right... we are just colonies of cells which behave in
| programmed ways to generate predictable responses from
| other cells in other parts of the colony who have their own
| jobs to perform in maintaining the homeostasis of the
| colony. The illusion of self is useful because it ensures
| that the collection of cells entrusted with executive
| functions act in the interest of the entire colony by
| perceiving it as a unified whole.
| someguyorother wrote:
| Another way to put it: the experience is real, but it might
| be misleading.
|
| A hallucination is an experience of something that doesn't
| exist, but the experience itself does.
| codeulike wrote:
| Fascinating, an actual idea about consciousness that I havent
| heard before
| hirundo wrote:
| So psuedo basic for the consciousness algorithm:
| 10 look at world 20 look at my reaction to world 30
| goto 10
|
| Which generates consciousness like frames per second generates
| motion. Or like the colored lines over this black and white
| photo generate a color image:
|
| https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1248000332027715584/...
| goatlover wrote:
| Except without the frames and colored lines. Lines 10 and 20
| don't provide the experiences. They're just behavior. Somehow
| all the sensations have to be added in when looking at the
| world and looking at one's reaction to the world.
| hateful wrote:
| let experience$ = INKEY$
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Taking this further, I suppose you could consider persistence
| of vision [1] as analogous to consciousness.
|
| It's an artifact of the limitations of the system.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_of_vision
| anticensor wrote:
| Persistence effect has to exist in one way or another to
| get real-time self awareness; if it were not an input
| alternation, it would exist at the reasoning level.
| akozak wrote:
| > Here, we conservatively use the term "unresponsiveness" instead
| of "unconsciousness" to allow for the possibility that covert or
| disconnected consciousness could occur in the absence of
| behavioral response.
|
| Conservatism is very wise! Given what they say in that quote, I'm
| very confused why they think it's justified in the intro to
| suggest they've identified 2 systems responsible for
| consciousness. Shouldn't they replace every use of the word
| "consciousness" with "responsiveness"? They're relying on a
| purely behavioral understanding of consciousness
|
| Descartes famously thought that consciousness lived in the pineal
| gland, and similar arguments has tended to generate some well
| deserved criticism from philosophers of mind. Pointing at a
| physical thing and saying it's the source of conscious experience
| should come with pretty extraordinary evidence.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >They're relying on a purely behavioral understanding of
| consciousness
|
| They're relying on the fact that consciousness has physical
| manifestations in behavior. The alternative is
| epiphenomenalism. While it may be a philosophically interesting
| position, its useless scientifically and so its fair to assume
| consciousness has some physical artifacts in a scientific
| context.
| akozak wrote:
| I don't think we're forced to choose between behaviorism and
| epiphenomenalism.
|
| But my point is more internal to the paper. They make claims
| about the physical basis for consciousness and seem to
| believe they've generated evidence for it, but they also
| explicitly say they've only gathered evidence about
| responsiveness.
|
| EDIT: To be clear I'm objecting to the semantics (which I
| consider important), not the potential value of the research.
| shireboy wrote:
| ELI5 "anti-correlated" here? What I envision is the temporal
| circuit acting like a computer clock, and the other as
| input/output. But "anti correlated" makes it sound like that's
| not the case?
| cjhveal wrote:
| Not ELI5 exactly, but the article does a pretty good job of
| explaining in the first paragraph:
|
| > The default mode network (DMN) is an internally directed
| system that correlates with consciousness of self, and the
| dorsal attention network (DAT) is an externally directed system
| that correlates with consciousness of the environment... the
| DMN and DAT appear to be in a reciprocal relationship with each
| other such that they are not simultaneously active, i.e., they
| are "anticorrelated."
|
| The "temporal circuit" the paper describes is the neural
| architecture that facilitates the transitions between these two
| networks.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Your description parsed back into electronics-land sound to
| me like: "temporal circuit" is a clock signal, DMN ticks on
| raising edge, DAT ticks on falling edge.
| abvdasker wrote:
| Totally fascinating. It makes me wonder what kind of
| dysfunction would result from both the DMN and DAT being
| active at the same time, and especially what my subjective
| experience of that would be if it were happening to me.
| Mithriil wrote:
| I may have found a partial answer to that, or at least a
| track to explore. I read some research articles from Robin
| Carhart-Harris on psylocibin/psylocin ("magic mushrooms")
| last year. The effect of psylocibin on the Default-Mode
| Network (DMN) seemed to be a critical part of his research,
| and so I searched if there was also some observations on
| the antiphasic nature of the DMN and the Dorsal Attention
| Network (DAN), and I found something rather interesting
| [1]:
|
| "The following example may help to illustrate what is meant
| by competition between conscious states--and the loss of it
| in primary consciousness. Functional brain imaging has
| identified distinct brain networks that subserve distinct
| psychological functions. For example, the DMN is associated
| with introspective thought and a dorsal frontoparietal
| attention network (DAN) is associated with visuospatial
| attention and is a classic example of a "task positive
| network" (TPN)--i.e., a network of regions that are
| consistently activated during goal-directed cognition. If
| the brain was to be sampled during a primary state (such as
| a psychedelic state) we would predict that the rules that
| normally apply to normal waking consciousness will become
| less robust. Indeed, we recently found this to be so when
| analysing the degree of orthogonality or "anti-correlation"
| between the DMN and TPN post-psilocybin. __Post-drug there
| was a significant reduction in the DMN-TPN anticorrelation,
| consistent with these networks becoming less different or
| more similar (i.e., a flattening of the attractor
| landscape). __The same decrease in DMN-TPN anticorrelation
| has been found in experienced meditators during rest
| (Brewer et al., 2011) and meditation (Froeliger et al.,
| 2012). Moreover, decreased DMN-TPN inverse coupling is
| especially marked during a particular style of meditation
| referred to as "non-dual awareness" (Josipovic et al.,
| 2011). This is interesting because this style of meditation
| promotes the same collapse of dualities that was identified
| by Stace (and Freud) as constituting the core of the
| spiritual experience. The DMN is closely associated with
| self-reflection, subjectivity and introspection, and task
| positive networks are associated with the inverse of these
| things, i.e., focus-on and scrutiny of the external world
| (Raichle et al., 2001). Thus, it follows that DMN and TPN
| activity must be competitive or orthogonal in order to
| avoid confusion over what constitutes self, subject and
| internal on the one hand, and other, object and external on
| the other. It is important to highlight that disturbance in
| one 's sense of self, and particularly one's sense of
| existing apart from one's environment, is a hallmark of the
| spiritual (Stace, 1961) and psychedelic experience
| (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012b)."
|
| [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014
| .0002...
| lifty wrote:
| I am not sure if this is accurate but intuitively, in
| strong psychedelic experiences it feels that both the DMN
| and DAT are active at the same time, which leads to, among
| many other things, a clearheaded view of mental processes
| that are hard to observe otherwise. One example would be
| observing emotions and how they affect your state of mind,
| while at the same time being totally detached from them.
| Some studies [1] propose that this happens because of an
| increase in connectivity between various parts of the
| brain, which could also be the thing that leads to ego
| dissolution.
|
| [1] https://www.cell.com/current-
| biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)...
| hoorayimhelping wrote:
| > _We demonstrate that the transitions between default mode and
| dorsal attention networks are embedded in this temporal
| circuit, in which a balanced reciprocal accessibility of brain
| states is characteristic of consciousness._
|
| I read it is as the temporal circuit manages the anti-
| correlated relationship between the two networks to produce
| consciousness. Almost like the temporal circuit is a function
| whose goal is to return 1 given two anticorrelated inputs that
| add up to about 1 and the computation to arrive to the solution
| is what consciousness is. Weird unresponsive stuff happens when
| the sum of the inputs is above 1.
|
| Consciousness is an emergent side effect of trying to keep two
| input systems synchronized
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| In general activity in the DFN decreases when a person is
| engaged in a task; the more demanding the task, the more the
| decrease. The attention and salience networks do the opposite.
| A classic experiment in this case would be to contrast BOLD
| signal in an fMRI experiment between easy and hard blocks, or
| between active periods and rest periods. The general
| observation about the anti-correlation of the DFN and task-
| activated networks is a very robust result, seen over and over
| again.
| bronlund wrote:
| That Tiphareth is the natural consequence of Geburah is ancient
| news. A little bit late to the party there :P
| stcredzero wrote:
| Language is a Virus. Consciousness is an OODA Loop. (You could
| write an alternative set of lyrics to the Laurie Anderson song.)
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Man, I love seeing more research like this. My personal
| experience, as someone who has dealt with a variety of issues in
| psychiatrists' offices and rehabilitation rooms, is that a clear
| scientific understanding of what is actually going on under my
| skull provides a much firmer basis for any therapeutic approach.
| I'm really hoping that in my lifetime we will see connections
| made between the physiological elements of consciousness and the
| modern psychiatric plagues of depression, anxiety, and addiction
| that finally produce the targeted, universally effective
| therapies that are desperately needed.
| trub wrote:
| psychedelic plant medicine is highly effective
| kohtatsu wrote:
| I was recently talking to a registered psych nurse, and we got
| talking about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
|
| I believe I've been self administering a form of it for a
| couple years, and I summarized my understand of CBT as "moving
| more thinking from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex", and
| she confirmed that with "in laymen's terms; yes".
|
| It's not like the fields are completely isolated, I guess is
| what I'm getting at with that anecdote. It's hard to go from
| neuroscience to psychology, but that's always being looked at.
| I reckon most big advancements will start coming when we start
| understanding the connectome more, but it's not like all
| advancements will come from there, and it's not like people
| aren't working right now to bridge neuroscience and psychology.
|
| Also I want to hang out with the laymen she does.
| curo wrote:
| I'm not qualified to contest this, but I do remember a side
| blurb from "Principles of Neuroscience" (Kandel, Schwartz,
| Jessell) that said overactive mPFCs are attributed with
| autism and below is some more research on it.
|
| I don't think you're saying this overtly but I have seen
| people from the Thinking Fast & Slow crowd glorify their PFCs
| as arbiters of cognitive bias while forgetting that healthy
| social, emotional processing required integrated functioning
| between all neural correlates involved, including the
| amygdala. I would venture to guess CBT is effective because
| it stops overactive PFCs which is the opposite of what the
| nurse's guess is. But as a laymen here, I can't say one way
| or the other.
|
| I remember a decade or two ago, the ACC+vmPFC combo was
| getting a lot of praise as this balancing force between the
| dlPFC and the amygdala saying strong ACC+vmPFC could be the
| clue to healthy brains. I think the answer will always be,
| "hey all these parts are important. Just meditate, exercise,
| and eat right. And don't believe your thoughts too much
| (CBT)"
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5192959/
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688328/
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Do you mind sharing your approach to how you make that shift
| from "amygdala to the prefrontal cortex"? Is it similar to
| practicing mindfulness with a focus on the now?
| mettamage wrote:
| No, prefrontal cortex is about planning, reasoning and
| inhibiting emotions (we do it all the time without
| realizing) among a lot of other things. Amygdala is based
| on reacting to fear, among other emotions.
|
| CBT gives you a toolset to ask yourself questions to
| understand (a) which perspective you're currently looking
| things from and (b) which other perspectives you could use.
|
| The 10 cognitive distortions and recognizing them is a good
| start. Cognitive distortions happen mostly through
| emotional processes (e.g. the amygdala but the whole limbic
| system really).
|
| Mindfulness meditation is an emotional-based approach as it
| mostly relates (for laymen like me) to scanning the body.
| Scanning the body gives marked improvements to the insular
| cortex. It also gives marked improvements to the PFC (the
| inhibition part, not the planning part).
|
| This is all written way too short and my knowledge is a bit
| stale on it. I used to be _really_ into this a couple of
| years ago. It was during the time when I studied psychology
| (I even published a neuroscientific literature review :D).
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I love the spirit of your response, but I feel the need
| to disagree a bit and elaborate about your statement:
| >Mindfulness meditation is an emotional-based approach as
| it mostly relates (for laymen like me) to scanning the
| body
|
| The REAL essence and power of mindfulness is becoming
| aware of the contents of your attention. For some reason,
| focusing the attention inwards on bodily somatosensory
| experiences tends to encourage that, but the two are not
| the same. Body-scanning is more a technique to help
| encourage the development of mindfulness rather than the
| end goal in itself.
|
| The reason this distinction is so important and powerful
| is that the brain regions which are feeding the contents
| of your attention are the ones that get reinforced. When
| you combine mindfulness with practice in _redirecting_
| your attention, it becomes an insanely powerful tool to
| fundamentally reshape your reality by restructuring your
| brain.
| fossuser wrote:
| There's some irony there given that excessive body-
| scanning and hyper-vigilance can be common symptoms
| related to anxiety.
|
| Though the CBT stuff in general and being aware of your
| attention does seem empirically helpful, I just find the
| body scanning focus as a common start may not be the
| best.
| uoaei wrote:
| Yes exactly. The "mindfulness" designation is a recursive
| one, where first you are mindful, then you are mindful of
| that which is mindful, and all the way down.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > Mindfulness meditation is an emotional-based approach
| as it mostly relates (for laymen like me) to scanning the
| body
|
| Just to clarify, body scanning is just one type /
| approach to meditation. Many practices don't utilize it
| at all, or only do so in conjunction with other
| techniques.
| mettamage wrote:
| I appreciate the clarifications. I did write it a bit too
| hastily. Sorry about that.
| ta1234567890 wrote:
| Sounds like the temporal circuit is acting like a clock, as in a
| computer chip's clock. Pretty cool.
|
| > We demonstrate that the transitions between default mode and
| dorsal attention networks are embedded in this temporal circuit,
| in which a balanced reciprocal accessibility of brain states is
| characteristic of consciousness. Conversely, isolation of the
| default mode and dorsal attention networks from the temporal
| circuit is associated with unresponsiveness of diverse
| etiologies. These findings advance the foundational understanding
| of the functional role of anticorrelated systems in
| consciousness.
| david_w wrote:
| The brain is the most complicated structure in the known
| universe. The probes currently available to science- fMRI and GSR
| - are both gross measures of cortical electrical activity.
| They're enough to start to explore apparent structural and
| (gross) electrical correlation between brain areas and (gross)
| alterations in "consciousness", in this case unconsciousness
| invoked via propofol and ketamine. Fair enough.
|
| However, it irritates me when I hear scientists loosely throw the
| word "consciousness" into these studies and here's why.
|
| In these studies, consciousness is always implicitly defined
| operationally as the electrical activity in some identified
| networks- DAT and DSM and front-parietal and sensory motor etc..
| But the concept of consciousness has another life in philosophy
| where in works by people like Patricia Churchland and others, it
| references something more subtle- the mystery of why there should
| be anything we call experience at all.
|
| Experience itself doesn't seem to be necessary to the working of
| any machine, including our brains. We don't think our TVs have
| any experiences despite (being capable of) accurately
| representing all human visual experiences. The reason we don't
| think they experience what they're displaying is because we know
| how they work and we know there's no ghost in the machine. Adding
| on "experiences" to an explanation of how TVs work is gratuitous
| and unnecessary.
|
| But that's not the case with humans-just the opposite. Experience
| is absolutely foundational.
|
| Descartes tried to boil his world down to what he could know with
| absolute certainty and arrived at his famous "Cogito ergo sum"
| formulation, but actually, he skipped a step; that step is
| simply- "There is experience".
|
| Experience is perfectly gratuitous to any explanation of brain
| activity since all that activity, like an electrical storm, could
| take place in exactly the same way without it. We (our brains)
| could be, and most scientists believe are, very complicated, but
| purely mechanical machines. They could be exactly as they are
| with no more awareness- not to say feedback loops- than a
| blender.
|
| But that account leaves the problem of experience or
| consciousness completely untouched. That would be O.K. except we
| know we have it.
|
| The mystery of consciousness is not totally defined by questions
| like of "can I make you unconscious or conscious?" or "can I
| cause you to have this or that illusory experience by stimulating
| your brain?". The mystery of consciousness is _why is there
| anything like experience at all ?_
|
| So whenever I read a paper that makes some confident assertion
| about consciousness, it gets under my skin. It's electrical
| activity and perhaps human behavior and speech they are actually
| examining, not consciousness. I hear these papers gratingly
| assuming the consequent with respect to the biggest mystery there
| is. They are implicitly saying "this is consciousness, this
| pattern of electrical activity in the brain and here is what we
| have discovered about consciousness". That's one perspective, but
| to philosophers, both academic and non-academic, it's a form of
| punting on the real question.
|
| Consciousness is to brain science what AGI is to AI. Researchers
| just love to make assertions and grand predictions.
|
| Actually the correlation between the two is closer than that
| since strong AI claims that consciousness can be captured in a
| computer; Kurtzweil and his Singularity concept is in this school
| of thought.
|
| He and people like him claim that not only does experience arise
| as a direct result of brain activity but any substrate- including
| general purpose computer platforms- will similarly give rise to
| the same experiences if only they are programmed in a particular
| way, specifically, if the computations are functionally
| equivalent to the brain's computations.
|
| Are badly programmed computers therefore experiencing chaos?
| Well, why not? Are simpler computers, like a thermostat which
| "experiences" temperature changes, also somehow dimly conscious?
| If that seems like a straw man argument to you, you should know
| Marvin Minsky bought it and so do a lot of other scientists
| whether they realize it or not.
|
| All of this is just a non-starer to people like me. You don't get
| to skip a step because it keeps your theory neat or provides you
| the promise of immortality because you uploaded your "you" to a
| machine.
|
| Consciousness, understood in this way, is a genuine mystery which
| for now at least I don't think we have the conceptual tools to
| even define much less make pronouncements about.
| sofal wrote:
| I think we're a long way from a good understanding of how
| consciousness works, but I also think a lot of people are going
| to subscribe to a sort of consciousness-of-the-gaps idea no
| matter how much progress is made in understanding the actual
| mechanisms. Even if we fully understood and and could reproduce
| it, there would be scores of people who would flat out refuse
| to see the evidence and would simply assert that the ineffable
| "experience" does not exist within beings for which they don't
| want to acknowledge it. The very concept of p-zombies
| illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible
| evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could
| simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves
| in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to
| demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all.
|
| I think if you want to put forth a hypothesis that there is
| some ghostly ineffable part of consciousness called
| "experience" that cannot ever be touched or measured by
| scientific means, then you have a self-defeating argument that
| cannot be supported. You might as well go full solipsism.
| There's nothing stopping you.
|
| Consciousness is a genuine mystery at this point, but I think
| some people will still see it that way even if we solve it, and
| this is clearer to me every time I see people trash any kind of
| effort or progress made by science in understanding the brain,
| claiming that it is not in fact progress at all.
| david_w wrote:
| Just to toss off one more worthwhile idea to you since it
| seems like you're interested in this topic. p-zombies is not
| the most challenging scenario strong-AI deniers are likely to
| face. Brain cell replacement is.
|
| With p-zombies you have two observers outside the system
| arguing about the system's inner life. With brain cell
| replacement, you have the subject directly and quite
| authoritatively experiencing the system in question and
| reporting back.
|
| It seems many times more likely some of us will live to see
| this, but you just never know. Newtonian mechanics had it all
| locked up save for a few details and look what those details
| held.
|
| Every brain science / cog-sci paper it seems has some
| alternative amputating conclusions to pronounce about
| consciouness.
|
| They sort of have to do that because of the funding model
| they live under. Positive results only ! It's not the
| researcher's fault; I don't fault them. I just adopt a highly
| skeptical, wait and see, there's-probably-more-to-the-story
| attitude generally in science, that, and the more concrete
| counter-arguments I mentioned in my other comments make me a
| very highly dissident observer of this field.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| On the other hand, I think that many people are emotionally
| invested in believing that science must be capable of solving
| the hard problem of consciousness even though there is no
| reason to assume that science is.
|
| It is perfectly possible that the hard problem of
| consciousness is in principle and forever beyond the reach of
| scientific investigation.
| david_w wrote:
| "The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori
| refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of
| consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am
| in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of
| thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I
| "experience" anything at all."
|
| This is a good point and makes the problem interesting in an
| additional way. We (I) assume something like p-zombies exist
| in non-human consciousness, dogs and cats for example. It's
| like something to be a dog. How far down do we want to go ?
| Frogs? I'll bite; it's like something to be a frog:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8IY2eTBqd8
|
| But here's a counter to the p-zombies argument, OK?
|
| The p-zombies argument is usually taken to mean there comes a
| point where what has been created is so indistinguishable
| from "real" people, ala Ex Machina, that arguing over it is a
| form of ideologically motivated perversion.
|
| Let me turn that round and say that the p-zombie argument is
| (accidentally) making the following strong claim- it is
| impossible to build a machine which in every way acts human
| but has no experience.
|
| That's a very very strong claim on this universe. I wouldn't
| take the bet, because someone's going to do it.
|
| But if someone is going to do it, how can we tell when they
| have or they haven't? The Turing Test is outdated (as I see
| it) and anyway already passed for some judges ( re: ELIZA).
|
| To me, this circles back to the original problem. We can't
| distinguish between the high probability that someone can
| eventually create an actual zombie and "real" experience-
| having artificial intelligence, and why is that ?
|
| The issue is just another form of the basic problem- we don't
| have the conceptual framework to get our minds around what
| experience is.
|
| Our basic assumptions may be off. Instead of quarks et.al.
| being the basic building blocks of matter and matter of
| brains and brains of consciouness, some people take
| experience to be the most basic building block of the
| universe.
|
| This was my conclusion and I thought it would just brand me
| as an eccentric so I never pushed it, but now I see it's
| being kicked around by people with careers.
|
| Another assumption is that experience/consciousness is
| comprehensible to the level of scientific causality/reality
| we're aiming at, (let's just shorthand it to "ultimate
| reality"), because there are separate, distinct things in the
| first place.
|
| But what if separate things is not a fact about ultimate
| reality? What if they're more like a hardwired perceptual
| compulsion we can't escape? Then we might very well find
| truly insoluable mysteries on the foundational tier of our
| conceptual scaffolding, because none of the "things" we think
| about are real in the first place. Things which don't exist,
| don't have to "add up".
|
| So this would mean our minds and ultimate reality are just
| not made for each other, _even as that reality directly
| impinges on our personal daily lives in ways we can and do
| readily experience and talk about_.
|
| It seems like the most far fetched and deflating hypothesis
| possible, but consider we'd merely be joining the rest of the
| animal kingdom in this regards.
| codeulike wrote:
| The thing is, if you're an atheist (and I write from one of the
| non-USA countries in which being an atheist is entirely
| unremarkable) then experience (or qualia) and consciousness
| itself are still very mysterious, but it's hard to avoid the
| conclusion that it must all be a side effect of processing or
| information somehow.
|
| Daniel Dennett has some good stuff on this (see Consciousness
| Explained, etc). Its not that he knows the answers, but his
| point is that consciousness might not be exactly what we think
| it is, there are lots of thought-traps around it, so we have to
| carefully unpick some of our assumptions about it to get
| anywhere - e.g. what he calls the cartesian theatre is one very
| powerful misconception (too long to explain here).
|
| Also I always like to drop this Iain Banks quote in these kinds
| of discussions (from A Few Notes About The Culture)
|
| _Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of
| [strong] Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to
| one of three assertions: one, that there is some vital field or
| other presently intangible influence exclusive to biological
| life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life - which may
| eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding
| but which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is
| neither impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness
| resides in a supernatural soul - presumably linked to a broad-
| based occult system involving gods or a god, reincarnation or
| whatever - and which one assumes can never be understood
| scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an
| atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or
| more precisely that it cannot support any informational
| formulation which might be said to be self-aware or taken
| together with its material substrate exhibit the signs of self-
| awareness). ...I leave all the more than nominally self-aware
| readers to spot the logical problem with that argument._
|
| Edit: changed 'cant really avoid the conclusion' to 'its hard
| to ...'
| axguscbklp wrote:
| >if you're an atheist [...] you can't really avoid the
| conclusion that it must all be a side effect of processing or
| information somehow
|
| Why? I'm an atheist-leaning agnostic, but I think that the
| hard problem of consciousness might well turn out to be
| impossible for scientific investigation to tackle.
|
| I cannot think of any valid logic that would show that "there
| are no gods" implies "consciousness is a side effect of
| processing or information somehow".
| codeulike wrote:
| Well yes OK. I guess I'm jumping from 'being an atheist' to
| 'general distrust of the so called supernatural'.
|
| Do you mean 'impossible for scientific investigation to
| tackle' because its just too complex (in the same way we
| can't predict the weather very accurately) or do you mean
| more like: because you suspect there is some outside-of-
| known-physics involvement that we wont ever be able to get
| a grip on?
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Not because it is too complex, but because I suspect that
| there may be something to consciousness that is outside
| of knowable physics. There is no reason to assume that
| scientific investigation is in principle capable of
| getting a grip on all of reality. That does not mean that
| consciousness is some mystic woo-woo, it just means that
| scientific investigation may in principle be limited.
| Consciousness might well turn out to be impossible in
| principle to tackle using mathematical modeling,
| reproducible experiment, theories of physical mechanisms,
| etc. - but that would not mean that consciousness is not
| real. It does not require scientific inquiry to show that
| consciousness is real. Subjective experience is
| immediately obviously real, as subjective experience.
| codeulike wrote:
| I agree that what you say is possible, but it's also
| possible that consciousness does lie inside known
| physics, so I reckon it's worth people investigating that
| angle, as formidable as it seems.
|
| I've edited my comment above to be a bit less absolutist
| axguscbklp wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's impossible, although honestly I
| cannot even begin to imagine how consciousness could lie
| inside known or even knowable physics. But if people want
| to try, more power to them. I'm open to my suspicion
| being wrong.
| david_w wrote:
| Never take the arguments of a side from their opponent's
| mouths.
|
| The arguments I offered have nothing to do with any of the
| three he claims they all boil down to.
|
| If you think I made one of these three, please tell me which
| one so I can clarify the argument.
|
| Assuming it's a side effect of processing- known as an
| epiphenomena- immediately commits you to answering the
| question- does a badly programmed computer have a form of
| consciouness? Does a thermostat have a primitive form? Is it
| specifically impossible to create AI which emulates human
| thinking to the last detail, but has no consciouness, i.e.
| really is just an empty machine with zero experience? Is that
| an impossible task which could not be achieved by anyone by
| any means?
|
| Suppose I debate with someone who has a computer programmed
| to be conscious. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to
| very very slightly change the programming so whatever output
| it's producing which is proving, my opponent claims, the
| computer is conscience, starts to degrade.
|
| I'm going to do that then ask my opponent- still conscious?
| I'm going to do this and I'll guess my opponent will say
| "less so perhaps" , which would be his best reply.
|
| Then I'm going to repeat until I get a "probably not" and
| then a "no" from him, which by his own hypothesis has to
| happen.
|
| Then I'm going to diff the conscious program and the
| unconscious program and ask him if he really thinks those
| slightly altered lines of code are the difference between
| consciousness and a humdrum computer.
|
| Because that's where this goes, this idea that a certain type
| of computation is consciousness.
|
| It also goes to consciousness being granted to a machine like
| a Turing Tape. You may not think that squishy biological
| matter should be bequeathed with a "magical" property which
| hosts consciousness, but tell me, how do you feel about a
| Turning Tape?
| downerending wrote:
| All true enough, and I think any honest scientist would say
| that the most we can hope for is to notice a few patterns in
| the wallpaper on Plato's Cave. There's no reason to think that
| any real insight beyond that is possible.
| sebringj wrote:
| This feels right in terms how I experience things when I've had
| bad migraines and notice parts of my capability going away
| temporarily such as understanding speech or being able to read
| words or missing visual areas entirely. Things get jumbled or
| confused, all the while, I am aware of these things happening yet
| unable to control them. It feels like there are separate parts of
| me like modules that go offline but the one that is constant is
| the sense of "me" or the consciousness part. These episodes are
| few and far between but I am still thankful to have a different
| perspective of our bio-mechanical nature. It also makes me feel
| closer to my pets in the sense that awareness or consciousness
| doesn't correlate with cognitive ability or intellect but that is
| just my guess.
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