Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2].
Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contribute to who you are, and that you are a physical being that can think in-situ as well as plan your physical actions in the future.
I'm favoriting this link and will try to return to it after my dissertation is done for reflection.
There are actually two problems, that people often mix up. One is how we get a sense of self, which I think is what you're talking about. Another is how qualia, like the perception of color, arise at all. Nobody seems to have any idea how that happens; we have no way to map some arrangement of atoms to a perception and prove from first principles that one leads to another.
Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow. There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can perceive how we percieve. Naturally you then can wonder: Why/how does this stimuli lead to this internal state? But if the states were different, you would be wondering about those states. And you only wonder about it, because you can due to reflection.
There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation.
But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We could be like robots, behaving exactly the same as our nerve impulses move us around, with no inner experience at all.
And what about electrical impulses in things other than brains? Are there qualia associated with them? Is there something it's like to be a computer, light bulb, thermostat, lightning bolt, or rock? If not, why not?
If you and I both see that 450nm light, how do you know that I'm not having an experience of color that you have in response to 700nm, i.e. red? Maybe the rainbow of colors is upside-down in my experience compared to yours. Maybe my qualia are different entirely. We have no way to prove anything different, because all we can measure is the electrical impulses. And because we haven't the faintest hint of a theory that connects the physical stuff to the particulars of the conscious experience.
Something that might help laypeople like myself, would be to relate them to the colors of things. That's the third dimension in this puzzle. There are wavelengths, and we have nerve impulses, but in addition, things interact with wavelengths in different ways.
Talking about wavelengths and electrical impulses seems too abstract. Let's talk about a tomato. Do you experience a 450 nm (or maybe 550 to be fair) tomato the way I experience a 700 nm tomato?
Do we have qualia for empty and full? Do you experience an empty beer bottle the way I experience a full beer bottle?
Is the question about qualia even a meaningful one? It feels to me like running a program twice and asking whether it's really the same program that was run, given that each time, the addresses of library functions the program used were different[0].
It could be that when you see 450nm light, the pathways in your brain that process this information correspond to the pathways that respond to 700nm light in my head. But it doesn't matter; our experiences are adjusted to match, because they're synchronized, thanks to shared environment and language. In both of us, despite invoking different neuron groups, seeing a blue sky will evoke images of water, or Windows error codes, and not of roses or rust. If we talk, both of us will use the word "blue" to describe what we're experiencing.
Whether the rainbow is upside-down or not in your head doesn't seem to be a meaningful question, if through all imaginable ways to observe and communicate it, it seems you perceive it the same way as the rest of us.
I would say the question of qualia is meaningful, in the sense that a good answer might teach us something about the nature of reality. It's just not a practical question.
However, it might become a practical question, if someday we have to decide whether AGI should have rights, or whether we think a human uploaded to silicon would have qualia.
Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure.
Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexity might be another 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to believe qualia arise somewhere between "uniform black body emitter" and "human brain learning and experiencing over time".
That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness.
People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism.
And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.
> E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience
I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe.
Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.
> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism.
What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ?
And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".
It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).
If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative.
i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
If you consider a brain as a sparsely connected graph then it also explains these experiences. The nodes nearby to the color blue perception nodes are those that we think of as clearly related (sky, water, certain crayons), but also those that are less directly related: water, cold, sadness.
"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve."
I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.
1) The issue of what perceptions "actually" are will be impossible to answer because qualia are ireductible.
Let me explain: you feel pain in your foot.
As a scientist I cut your foot and you no longer feel pain in your foot.
Or I cut the pain nerves, or the spinal cord, or give you pain medicine.
Or I find a brain receptor and a chemical responsible for pain.
Or in the future, we find a couple of brain networks that when hacked turn of or exacerbate this and that sensation. We find the exact neuron microstructure that is actually a quantum computer and a certain process/instruction set can precisely manipulate sensations. We find the exact process that is responsible for the "self" sensation.
I know that would still not satisfy my question of "what are sensations?".
"Yeah, this and that neural network, but WHO is actually feeling that sensation?".
It would be a little bit like trying to "see" in 4D space -- impossible actually.
2) Why are sensations really needed?
If we get to that advanced level as to technically answer the first question, even without a gut feeling understanding, I think we could actually understand the answer to this question.
The answer might be -- "because AI can happily process numbers, but the biological quantum neural nets cannot, and they need this "sensation" representation to actually work in the most efficient way possible.
By "quantum" I mean some missing stuff we don't know yet, I'm not saying the brain is a "quantum computer".
This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized value; it emerged as a phenomenon out of how the system as a whole ran.
When you are in pain, your conscious mind - an emergent phenomenon from the physical processes of your body (primarily the brain), or so I suspect - observes itself. There is nothing mysterious in systems observing themselves; that's what a computer doing when it raises and responds to a segfault, for example.
Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind.
Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing.
Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.
> So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are.
The most plausible answer, in my opinion, is that our lack of knowledge about how our minds work means that we are free to imagine something that probably isn't so. Imagination is not a good enough guide to how things are to be the considered a basis of knowledge.
Most people, say 99% or so, can form an internally perceived image of something in their mind's eye. The rest aren't seeing things in their mind's eye, other than that which is built from direct sensory input. Both are form.
You see with your eyes
I see destruction and demise (that's right)
Corruption in disguise
From this fuckin' enterprise
Now I'm sucked into your lies
Through Russel, not his muscles but percussion he provides
For me as a guide
Y'all can see me now 'cause you don't see with your eye
You perceive with your mind
That's the inner
So I'ma stick around with Russ' and be a mentor
Bust a few rhymes so motherfuckers remember where the thought is
I brought all this
So you can survive when law is lawless (right here)
Feelings, sensations that you thought was dead
No squealing, remember that it's all in your head
I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment".
I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas.
When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.
I've sometimes wondered if people precieve things qualitatively different way then I do to give rise to this problem, since to me it seems like s non-problem. To me, i have trouble even conceptualizing what is meant by the qualia problem. What is the fundamental difference between something's "redness" and say a tall person's "tallness". Maybe "redness" is a bit more mysterious because its non-spatial, but still is it really that different of a quality it needs an explanation? What would even be explained in the explanation?
Qualia are easier to understand when you think about things you can't experience. For example, think about echolocation. We understand how it works, we understand what parts of a bat's brain light up when echolocation is used. However, I have no idea what the experience of echolocation might be like.
I guess it's kind of like hearing.. but different? Maybe a weird combination of hearing + seeing black and white? Or similar to one of those LIDAR depth-field renderings? In other words, I don't have access to the qualia of some echolocated object. Exactly how I wouldn't have access to the qualia of some red object if I were blind.
Tallness is a physical property of the thing itself.
Light also has its own physical properties, e.g. a wavelength of 700nm. But the qualia of red is the experience you have when that 700nm light hits your retina.
It's conceivable that when 700nm light hits my retina, I have an experience which you would call "blue." That's why the qualia and the physical property of the light are two different things.
We have a lot of evidence of how people perceive color, and the differences of perception. There are tests that measure the ability to distinguish color. Some people are only colorblind in one eye, and report perceptual differences that are predictable by phenotype. I would expect any meaningful difference in qualia would have some conceivable (if not performable) test. Otherwise we're calling two equivalent things different for no reason at all.
I personally tend to believe that non-falsifiable statements are necessarily non-physical.
Is that a meaningful difference in qualia? Does a relabeling of what are arbitrary labelings change my subjective experience. Is precieving the colour spectrum in reverse even a meaningful statement? Or is it more like saying you can't prove i added 2+1 instead of 1+2.
But you dont experience tallness as an objective property of the object. You view it relative to the scene, people who intimidate you appear taller, etc. The tallness might cause us different emotional experience too - maybe im intimidated, maybe it makes me feel safe, maybe it makes me feel trusting, etc
Its entirely possible that when the exact same light hits our eyes to form a scene, you and i would experience the tallness of the person in the scene differently.
“ Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels". A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a cooked feel is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable, raw feel, while the experience of warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel. Cooked feels are not qualia.” — Wikipedia
Why does an internal state lead to an experience of color or pain? Computers have internal state without any expectation of them being conscious, and this internal state can be the result of external stimulus like a camera. But the internal state isn’t experienced as color.
> But the internal state isn’t experienced as color.
How would a conscious entity experience an internal state in a way that's not like color (or pain, etc)? I think the claim is that conscious entities must experience some internal states somehow (otherwise what are you concious of) - how else could they do that other than via sensation?
I don't think that internal states of non conscious entities has much bearing on what a conscious entity does or is.
Maybe qualia is generational knowledge; Certain distinct objects developed differentiation and over time wee learned to associate it visually with color. Initially in our evolution we only had two wavelengths of color differentiation, but somewhere along the line a mutation caused a third, offset wavelength to appear. This is what color blindness is - my third mutated wavelength is just slightly closer to the second wavelength.
The problem with qualia, as I understand it, is that we can build machines that process images, and in the future let's say, can exceed what cat is capable of, but that machine will never actually have sensations.
So there are two issues: what sensations actually are and why was it necessary for life to have those sensations, after all, a robot cat would do just fine without any sensation, just processing the inputs and reacting to those inputs.
You say the machine wouldn't have sensations. Yet a cat and a human also are just complex machines. Maybe being a sufficiently complex machine is all that is needed to have sensations.
And if we could imagine for example that an ant or a fly actually experiences things, if it too has some sort of degree of what we as humans have when we see or hear things, maybe there actually already are machines that "see" and "experience" things.
The difference might just be that we as humans have the extra layer of meta observation that allows us to reason about our experience in the context of the world and turn us into an active participant in that experience while an ant or a neural network are mostly just passive observers even though they too make decisions and process information.
I think people already simulated a worm's neural nets, but we simulated just high level abstractions of what those "simple", 200 neuron networks are.
Sure, by simulation tickling part of the worm, we get the exact reflex reactions a living worm would, but surely the simulated worm does not have sensations, I can do the same worm simulation with if-else statements, just because I see a worm realistically wiggling on the screen I do not believe it can suffer pain, or else I would never play Worms Armageddon.
I believe there is something to the chemical processes themselves that we will not be able to replicate in pure software.
That brings the question, what if we could simulate the quantum particles themselves, not just some high level representation of cells, would that simulated being have sensations/feelings?
If we perfectly simulated, at the quantum particle level a cat, would the cat behave like a real cat?
That is mindboggling to me; unfortunately we cannot do that yet.
Thanks for sharing. My own pet theory is very similar to yours: humans evolved consciousness in order to ‘observe’ our cognitive and emotional state, so that we can build models and apply them to reason about other people’s cognitive and emotional states. It’s hard to have ‘theory of mind’ about someone else when you don’t have access to your own mind to start with.
This sounds similar to claims I've heard that consciousness arises from language. Taking a component of our cognition which is heavily intertwined with the rest of it and taking its ubiquity to imply some sort of primacy.
To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still be capable of seeking goals, and of abstract thought. They would still have moral standing and personal dignity - it would be immoral to mistreat them, and we would consider that human rights still apply to them.
We are deeply social animals, and this is integral to our sense of self as we usually see it, but I'm not convinced it's integral to consciousness.
I have a similar objection to your second point. Lacking a sense of personal narrative and timeline would constitute a serious disability, but would not render a person unconscious. If you had total retrograde amnesia, you would still be conscious.
I see the same problem with your third point. I'm confident that, under the right concoction of psychotropics, my mental function could be degraded to the point that I would be unable to reason effectively about my future, or to make decisions, while still keeping me conscious. Someone suffering something akin to shell-shock might be unresponsive, but still conscious.
> To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability.
Ha! Under the influence of certain psychotropics, your ability to do functional planning would be diminished, but the number of creatures that you thought worthy of your empathy might well grow. :-)
Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind?
I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.
As a former psychology student (lol) I have to point out that an epiphenominal mind is perhaps the least parsimonious thing imaginable. It's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood - some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals.
Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness?
My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop them?
The comparison I've always liked is the "steam whistle set off by a locomotive". The steam whistle has no causal efficacy on the locomotive but is a waste byproduct of a steam engine.
Consciousness shouldn't have any causal effect on physical processes (assuming a strictly materialist framework), if it's explained as a byproduct of functioning physical processes it tends to deal with the issues 'consciousness' has that are in inherently in conflict with strict materialism.
I'm still confused. The steam whistle is built intentionally, alongside the locomotive, and together the train serves a clear, externally imposed purpose. The whistle doesn't impact the function on the engine, but a train with a whistle was decided to be a better train, because it does casually interact with the train's environment.
I get the ontological claim that mental states are real but cannot cause effects on physical states. But it seems unsatisfactory to claim that these rich, real but non causal states just happen to arise, without purpose, in only some physical systems, without further explanation.
Please forgive me for Going There, but I believe [2] is also Original Sin, even in a secular definition as a generic source of evil perpetrated by humans against humans.
While not a test for the belief directly nor a test of consciousness, I would start with making a sufficiently advanced embodied reinforcement learning agent that can do each of these things on a super basic level, then test for emergent goal setting and seeking.
Yes, let's move the soul from being an emergent property of the staggeringly complex arrangement of billions of neurons to their electromagnetic byproducts. It's cool because instead of grappling with the consequences of material reality we can satisfy our dualists instincts by ascribing consciousness to mystic energy despite it being equally mechanistic in the eyes of modern science.
I want to see the college debate where the negative position fires a HERF gun and asks the audience if they feel like they just lost their souls. (Given our mobile phone addictions, many might say yes.)
This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.
HAHA this is why i love HN. Seems as though, given this wiki page that this has been an ongoing field of study for a while. Everyone seems to be dismissing this as out of pocket. I don't see why both action potentials, electromagnetic waves and whatever phenomenon we discover next can't be all contributing factors to consciousness?
I would be thrilled to hear somebody's theory of consciousness that takes into account the following axioms:
1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff.
2. Consciousness affects matter. The water crystal experiments by Masaru Emoto(b) are the simplest and least fringe example. Project love, hate, anger, etc. to water results in changes to the crystal structure of water when frozen.
I tried to keep it as non-fringey and simple as possible. If you consider these, it leads to the framework that consciousness is not emergent from the physical brain but is instead a field or carrier-wave from somewhere else and brains act like antenna receivers.
"Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community.[9][17] In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them prone to manipulation or human error influencing the findings.[9][18] Biochemist and Director of Microscopy at University College Cork William Reville wrote, "It is very unlikely that there is any reality behind Emoto's claims."[9] Reville noted the lack of scientific publication and pointed out that anyone who could demonstrate such a phenomenon would become immediately famous and probably wealthy.[9]"
Those two axioms would make a fantastic sci-fi novel.
The second one isn't that interesting to me philosophically, but your first questions gives rise to so many questions about human nature, free will, etc. Also, it would give credence to the theory that we are just one giant super consciousness. it'd also have the added affect of making the concept of war super brutal.
No. There's no evidence for that. There's an incredible mountain of evidence supporting the idea that neuronal action potentials are. The currents in neurons aren't even in the direction of the action potential propagation. They're perpendicular to it and only over a handful of tens of nanometers. Yes, the substrate of our macroscopic reality is dominated by electromagnetics but the brain isn't a very conductive place.
but it begs the question; why? Obviously there is a biological necessity for these forms of propagation. I remember reading an old neuroscience textbook that said glial cells were purely support cells but they are finding a-lot of emergent phenomenon there as well.
Not finding an obvious "use" for something doesn't mean it doesn't have one. Especially when that thing has survived millions of years of evolutionary pressure to preserve useful stuff and cull useless stuff. Remember "junk DNA"? Turns out it wasn't junk. Anybody calling "useless" any of the outputs of nature's exquisite forge is likely to be proven wrong.
Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it?
Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and the subconscious in the brain.
It's like the "I" is an impostor taking over the body. Theories and writings around the "soul" have been around since the dawn of civilization.
Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke?
Even as a physicist (sorry) I can see a clear evolutionary utility of consciousness. If all organisms as a rule are guided towards an optimal state (survival, reproduction, etc.) based on sensory input and a learned world model, then the second order evolutionary trait that would help an organism the most is executive access to the optimizer itself or the ability to synthesize a phase space of possibilities through imagination/dreaming. Both of these aspects may be what we call consciousness.
>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Think of it in terms of salience. Why do we need multiple levels of salience, such that some signals are intrinsically more important than others to the bearer of those signals? The answer is that once organisms were able to move under their own power, there needed to be a mechanism for the organism to have an intrinsic interest in its own well-being. A plant doesn't move under its own (intentional) power. It has no power to move itself into a damaging state nor move itself out of one. An intrinsic salience to its bodily integrity would serve no purpose. But once organisms were able to move based on goal-directed behavior, say to seek out food, it needs to have an interest in its bodily integrity such that it doesn't intentionally move into a damaging state.
An intrinsic salience to nociceptive signals, i.e. the suffering of pain, gives organisms an innate interest in its bodily integrity. To evolve the same behavioral patterns without pain's intrinsic suffering quality would require evolving an organism that had an innate comprehension of why it is important to avoid damaging states, i.e. declarative representations of value which would require complex intelligence to co-evolve. Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious.
But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states.
Have a read of Blindsight by Peter Watts, it has an interesting take on this very idea. An alien species with advanced intelligence but not consciousness takes our attempts to communicate with it as an attack, intended to cause it to waste valuable resources on decoding our low information chatter. The implication is that consciousness is empty of content, merely supposed to be the relay from my subconscious processes that do the driving to other individuals corresponding processes. Our over-developed conscious behaviors are thus viewed as a kind of computer virus by other lifeforms.
Blindsight is also the name of a phenomenon that provides some evidence for the fascinating hypothesis that cognition and consciousness are at least to some degree, separate.
The articles are more focused on how the brain works, which imo is equally as important (though not as interesting for me), for purposes of copying/replicating consciousness/intelligence, for example.
Maybe it is important to replicating consciousness, maybe it is not. At some point people thought that an ability to perform arithmetic operation is an exclusive ability of a human mind, but then machines grown to perform calculations better than humans without need to replicate human mind itself.
Maybe consciousness is like calculations? Maybe to replicate it we need to understand it, not the underlying mechanisms of a particular device (brain) with an ability to be conscious?
It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future.
Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.
I would rather assume that basic consciousness is a property of a certain kind of computation over time that keeps state in a way that allows you to experience the events of the world as a continuous process and track your state in it over time.
Of course one could say that the way that is implemented for us is using matter.
Then again one could argue that all matter is just a manifestation of a huge amount of computation.
So we are just computers built on a substrate of manifested computation, and we built even more computers ourselves that way.
Thus I'd argue that anything that can compute and keep state can have consciousness.
How intelligence fits into this all, I am not sure.
The 'self conscious I' can make logical inferences about the future and decisions about one's own wellbeing that are sometimes at odds with our lower impulses which govern most of our behaviour, and that's mostly it I think.
'Hunger' is something that has been with us for 200 million years of evolution.
'Emotions' since the dawn of Mammals roughly.
Developed cognition to the degree where we can even try to very conscientiously adapt our behaviour towards achieving goals - this is a very new thing.
I think it makes a lot of sense that we 'really want to eat that cupcake, but also try not to'.
Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique.
This explains, for example, the complexity of language.
But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our role in society, the benefits we gain from pro-social behaviour, etc
These insects are pre-coded to fill a certain niche in their society. A human is born into a role to some degree but can use intelligence to change that role as well. This requires some ability to reason about the self, and to some extent being able to reason about the self improves the ability to reason about others.
I often see the question asked as "what if there was something that behaved just like you, but without consciousness, isn't it just as evolutionarily fit?" But it presupposes that such a creature could exist, and a creature that behaves like a conscious one without consciousness seems like a bizarrely inefficient solution to me.
> "Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke? "
This suggests a common bias that you feel like the human species is the only one on this planet that has attained consciousness. Many other species are conscious, sentient, we just happen to the one that have gone into space. Regardless of it's a fluke or not it's clearly an advantage used by many species on the earth.
>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex.
Yeah, I think it's as simple as you start modeling entities in the world around you, for making predictions when deciding on behavior, then include a self in that model.
Start simple, "there's delicious food lodged between those fingers and if the fingers relax the food will fall to the ground, falling food is bad, don't relax those fingers", then add depth. Eventually you reach a point where you also model peer animal entities ("if food falls because fingers relax, that guy will take it") and from there it's only a very small steps to also model a "self" to go with all those "others". That's basic consciousness. At this point you are only a few linguistic principles away from diving into philosophy.
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert.
We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of being hungry and sleepy, etc. It also takes care of basic memory storage and emotional imprinting. It's the oldest brain, evolved as a simple logic operator, where it evaluates an input, and then triggers a response. Hungry? Look for food. Scared? Run. Etc. It learns and stores memories too. I nearly got eaten when I went over there, scary, tag that place memory with a bad feeling.
Then we have a more advanced mammalian cognition level, where more advanced behaviors came from, more complex memory indexing making the reptile brain more useful for long term storage and more nuanced learning. Daytime over there is fine, night can be scary. Oh, that scary thing over there is actually safe, but let's be careful there anyway. More advanced social interactions, forming packs and such with social hierarchies.
Now we also have a more advanced logical component and pattern matching ability. A rustling of that specific type of bush tends to mean there's a lion in there. When I see dark clouds, I should find shelter because water might fall. I can take this stick and push it in this anthill to get ants, or I can take this other stick and knock down fruit I can't reach. Rocks from over here chip really well when I bang them together the right way, and I can use the result to cut things. Now we see high order logical cognition emerge.
That leads to a part of the brain that helps coordinate the other parts of the brain leading to the ability for abstract thought, symbolic thought, and internal monologue for enhanced creative thinking. This part of the brain is what we think of as "us", our "mind" but it's just a part. Other parts aren't as verbal. That's why sometimes ideas "just come to you", and something you can't quite recall is on the tip of your tongue, another part of the brain was working independently, and pushed that information over to your forebrain, or your forebrain remembers a trigger for a memory, but the memory part isn't quite picking up on the index cue. It's why we "sleep on things", or go for walks and need time to think, we're letting our various parts work independently so they can not worry about communicating with each other for a bit and focus. It's why you get "in the zone" when you're really productive, and it's even why we go on "autopilot" and get home but don't remember the drive, our forebrain shuts up for a bit, or is naval gazing and the other parts took over the drive.
I'm not saying these are the only parts, but ever since reading Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" and learning evolutionary physiology it's a concept that made a lot of sense. I don't think it's all as subdivided or mindless as Minsky think, but I REALLY think is over all concept is dead on.
In short, consciousness doesn't arise FROM anything, consciousness is what the brain is doing. It's not a side effect, it's the main one. We just think it's special and different from animal cognition because we have language. We think and feel just like dogs and cats and elephants, just in a more complex fashion.
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness:
The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness.
The brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.
> Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole
I disagree, it seems to be totally disrupted by general anesthesia. Having experienced it, from my perspective it was time travel in a way that normal sleep never is. When you wake up from sleep there is some perception of time passed, and therefore a sort of continuity. Not so under general anesthesia. The time spent under is simply gone without even leaving a sensation of a missing gap.
There are some interesting hypotheses around microtubules and their potential role in consciousness; this directly ties in with your comments around anesthesia - I've certainly had a similar subjective experience under anesthesia, when compared to other forms of consciousness disruption (sleep, psychedelics, and seizures).
It's seamless to the experiencer (you don't experience the moments or the objects unexperienced), but not necessarily at a 1 to 1 correspondence with properties of the world. Discontinuities in time is a good example.
That seems like useless hair splitting. It's similar to pondering whether, in the cell of a DRAM chip, it is the electric field of the stored charge that is representing the 1 or 0 meaning, or whether it is the presence or absence of electron particles which is doing the representing.
In the case of the DRAM chip, the only relevant feature is its functional behavior. The stored charge and its electric field are isomorphic, i.e. have the same functional properties. So the difference is meaningless. But the question of what constitutes consciousness isn't merely about functional equivalence. If we took away the brain but left the dynamics of the electromagnetic field in tact, would there still be consciousness? Or vice-versa? The distinction I point out points to different answers to this question. This is a relevant philosophical difference, although no practical difference.
>Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole.
That's not necessarily true. We experience vision as a unified whole as well, but we have a blind spot as well. How would you argue that consciousness is a seamless whole and not just the illusion of one?
Our awareness of the outside world isn't seamless, e.g. our blindspot. But our experience of the outside world is seamless. This experience is normally what consciousness refers to, i.e. qualia.
You also have an argument with saccades, not just the eye's blind spot.
And in looking closely at electrical currents, is there really an entity or is it just a of collection independent electrons acting on each other?
Still, to look at the current and imagine that collective action creates a higher order entity (like the water in a river) is really poetic -- even if it doesn't turn out to be the case.
The neurons, chemicals and electrons flowing through them are the electromagnetic field too (and the other 3 fields). Its a useless definition, we could literally say everything is the interaction of the em field, that would be correct but doesnt give us any information.
Nonsense. Your DNA is made of atoms. Those are parts. Your cells are made of proteins and fats. Those are parts. Your computer is made of transistors and wires. Those are parts. Cities are made of people, buildings, and streets. Those are parts.
What premise of my argument are you objecting to? Nothing you have said appears to contradict anything I have said. I obviously agree that the body is made out of many individual parts at all levels of analysis.
Cars, when driving, have speed that is a continuous, seamless "whole". Therefore, the driver, engine, and wheels have nothing to do with speed because they are parts? Or, the driver must be connected to the wheels via magickal electromagnetic fields?
Your points are not analogous to my argument which suggests you don't really understand it. Wheels can have continuous angular velocity which cashes out the continuous speed of a car. I don't preclude collections of parts from correlated behavior, which is what a rotating tire is. A road in contact with a tire is interacting with the complex of correlated parts and so the road's perspective of the tire is that of a unified whole. Similarly, our perspective of a table is that of a unified whole due to electromagnetic forces that keeps the dynamics of the constituent molecules highly correlated and our inability to perceive the seams between the parts (without the aid of tools). But when it comes to consciousness, there is no perceiver distinct from the perception, and so you cannot rely on such a distinction to cash out the apparent unified whole of consciousness.
None of that has the slightest bit to do with how brains work to weave the activity you have chosen to noun as "consciousness". Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform. To imagine that mind can't come out of brain cells being brain cells is woolly mysticism that is pointless even to write: rejecting reason, you reject language and communication, and there is nobody to talk to and nothing meaningful to say.
You could equally well say that, being in the car, you can't experience the motion. But that is also nonsense: you do.
There is nothing profound about noticing yourself noticing. Brain activity is not distinct from other activity, just because it can react to itself. Individual, nanoscopic transistors do it all day long.
>Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform.
This is a contentious claim, for which you have provided no arguments. Unsupported assertions are entirely useless in this discussion. My argument is very clear and straightforward. If you disagree, you should point out which premise you disagree with and why. Unspecific incredulity does not make an argument.
Note that my claim that consciousness supervenes on the dynamics of the EM field generated by the brain does not make it "mysticism". The EM field is a perfectly kosher physical property of the universe. The core claim of my argument is rather mundane in fact. If you feel compelled to resist the argument at all costs because it strikes you as mysticism, you simply didn't understand it.
You appear to imagine that something you think of as "EM fields" can achieve things that cannot be done with wires or axons and transistors or nerve cells.
EM fields are linear. That means you can't get any information out of EM interactions [except in ferromagnetic materials] that you didn't put in. It makes them useful for communication, but not for computation, or "consciousness", whatever woowoo you imagine that to be. That you don't understand electromagnetics utterly fails to endow electromagnetics with divine powers.
Information processing with nonlinear computational elements such as transistors and nerve cells is stuff we (like every living creature, and your thermostat) use all day, every day. Magickal "consciousness" processes that don't depend on nerve cell operations are an extraordinary claim that demands actual, you know, evidence, which would require words that have actual, you know, definitions. If you imagine that you have this "consciousness" magick that bonobos, ravens, and elephants don't, it is on you to demonstrate it. Good luck.
I find "consciousness" mysticism actively disgusting, overwhelmingly worse than Martian UFO fantasies, homeopathy scams, claims of quantum-based ESP powers, or even Ayn Rand objectivism. Even to bring it up is an insult to thinking persons.
Again, your comment completely fails to demonstrate comprehension of my argument. It's not a complex argument. I don't know why you fill it in with nonsense and then disparage your made up nonsense. What a waste of effort!
The specific thing that EM fields can do that axons or transistors cannot do is provide "intrinsic unity", the seamless cohesion that underpins the unified whole of conscious experience. This is because the EM field is itself a unified whole. The computational aspects of consciousness are still found in the dynamics of neurons.
Again, I was very specific in the argument about what property of the EM field I'm referencing. I'm not sure why you insist on battling strawmen. But increasingly obtuse and indignant responses do not make an argument. So you should really abandon that shtick.
"Intrinsic unity" is woo. "Seamless cohesion" is woo. "Unified whole of conscious experience" is woo.
There will never be a theory of undefined term. Seeking a scientific blessing for your religion is barking up the wrong tree. Science doesn't issue blessings.
These aren't undefined terms. It might help if you read even a little bit on philosophy of mind so you can be familiar with the common usage of such terms before dismissing them. But that's really not necessary as these terms aren't jargon heavy.
No one is conflating consciousness with mysticism other than you here. It's not about feeling special like I'm sure you think it is. It's about a phenomenon that science cannot explain, and to think that it is explained by some low-resolution correlations or "intuitive" associations is indeed damaging what science stands for. This attitude is religious faith at its best (or worse).
Next you will be saying termite mounds aren't really built by termites, and that we only imagine they are because we often find termites all through them. ("Even more often, we don't! Explain that!")
Of course I am not going to say that. There is a precise, empirical, causal account of how mounds are built by termites, we can actually see them during the build process, and we don't have to do any category jump in order to understand that process. It's definitely not a good analogy for the absurd category jump which posits that an electron jumps to a different potential orbital and I experience redness.
the paradigm with consciousness is that there is a "thing" that has experiences, at the basest level an _experience_ of thought parallel to the _process_ of thought.
to wit this is decartes "thinking thing" that gives rise to cogito ergo sum.
First person consciousness is just a fundamentally different thing than any third person property of reality such as matter or energy or electricity. These sorts of ideas are just category errors, like trying to determine what number 1 tastes like.
My untested hypothesis is that fungi trigger an otherwise vestigial sense that allows us to perceive an energy that we have a symbiotic relationship with
The nature of the symbiotic relationship is not known, and the capabilities of this relationship have not been explored
Since the brain can communicate between both hemispheres without a corpus callosum[0] I think it is obvious that our brain does interact with itself via electromagnetic fields.
It is a travesty that this guy is a department head somewhere, with serious responsibilities for, at least, students, and pushing this BS.
Might EM fields and waves have a role in brain operations? Sure. Does that have anything at all to do with us perceiving our own cognition? Absolutely no way!
Cars have (1) spark plugs that emit radio pulses, and (2) a radio in the dash panel. Therefore, spark plug E-M pulses control traffic flow? No.
The biggest mystery about consciousness is that anybody thinks there is anything at all mysterious about it.
Can you prove that conscious is an emergent property of the bio-chemical brain? If you can, there is a sweet noble waiting for you. Otherwise it’s speculation on your part.
You probably have image recall. Some people have audio recall. The recall events can contain imagery, moving imagery, sounds, speech, thoughts during event. They may be historic recordings/memory, creative "visualizations" or a hybrid. Some people can insert objects into their version of reality. Dots on walls. Boxes on tables.
Your internally perceived reality is a "visualized+ object" that is similar to a visual and auditory recall of a historic event, or a future event "imagined". That object includes body impressions, smell, taste, etc. Hunger. Pain. Impatience in understanding the nature of consciousness. Etc. All of that is built from sense impressions. Buddhists call these "aggregates".
The internal model of reality is an aggregate object which is refreshed from senses. While it looks very close to what everyone else sees inside, it is very individualistic to the person experiencing it and distinctly different from the various wavelengths of light and sound bouncing around in various material configurations which are then sampled by imperfect sensors.
Would it be surprising to learn that not everyone's world model is complete, especially when attention is not being held on it? See "basketball gorilla attention" on Google. Yet, we all take it for granted so much that we forget we do it, sort of like the fact most people take for granted they can see their parents in their mind's eye but don't ever bother wondering how it is they can actually see an image representation of something without it being processed through a sense organ.
It shouldn't come to anyone's surprise that reality is hallucinated into being and we experience that hallucination inside alone and outside together. If you stop hallucinating it, you lose consciousness. Dreams.
You didn't ask a question, nor contribute an answer, yet presume to reply with a judgment which is an opinion devoid of basis. Typical downvoter mentality.
A little bit of awareness of cause and effect goes a long way.
If your speech center is damaged, your speech is impaired. If your audio processing center is damaged, your hearing is impaired. If your visual cortex is damaged, your vision is impaired. If your hippocampus is damaged, memory formation is impaired. If your frontal lobes are damaged, your judgement is impaired. If your cerebellum is damaged, physical coordination is impaired. If your reasoning ability is damaged, you believe in woo.
Correlation does not mean causation, and I am baffled that this needs be repeated here on this forum over and over again. If you throw a bottle into the television, are you effectively convinced that you have just disrupted the broadcast signal or do you entertain the possibility that you have simply messed up enough the proxy by which you were registering the signal? This is not woo. This is intellectual honesty. You seem skeptic and rational judging by what you write. Go all the way. We simply don't know that brain causes consciousness. We just don't, and I'm the first not happy about the possibility that it may not be the case, but I must accept rationally that there's all kind of holes in the brain-causes-consciousness narrative. By that account, for instance, every reduction in brain activity should correspond to a reduction of consciousness. Well, this is not the case, see for instance Carhart-Harris et al 2012, 2016 and many others more recently. Moreover, NDEs reports demonstrate enormous level of conscious experience in the absence of any brain activity. There's no space where to fit this empirical evidences in the causal framework.
Moreover, to believe in the fairy tale of physicalism implies accepting that the building blocks of such worldview (fundamental particles) pop up into existence out of thin air, that the universe is made mostly of "dark energy", and that experiential properties "emerge" from unconscious matter... is this the kind of woo you were referring to when you mentioned damaged reasoning ability?
What have you got against fairies? Can you prove that fairies don't exist? Can you prove that fairies are not the true manifestation of consciousness? Can you prove that you, yourself, are not a fairy who is extremely confused? Woo.
Dressing up religion as sense never turns out well for religion or sense.
Again, it's not religion, it's intellectual honesty. I am not interested in demonstrating that consciousness is or is not woo. It's clearly something we don't understand, and at the same time I am perfectly comfortable in accepting the "placeholder" descriptions we have of the current mysteries of reality (like the above mentioned) since we can't do better right now.
What I am interested into is exposing the double standards of materialists/physicalists whose world view is based on even more woo, it's way less parsimonious, leaves out the most in-your-face phenomenon we observe, and when it makes the huge mistake to venture into philosophy/metaphysics like many militant materialists like to do, it's even internally inconsistent.
It's a shame, because science is not supposed to be a religion. We should be looking past our own nose tip.
But, sure, flat-earth creationist moon-landing denialism is engaging and zero-calorie fun. You can twiddle away your life and not interfere with people actually, you know, doing things.
This is a confused comment if I have ever seen one. Well, not surprising given the line of reasoning that led to the conclusions made clear by the other comments. Have a good life.
And forgot to add, everything you mention here has empirical evidence of not being conclusive. Read about acquired savant syndrome (for instance Lythgoe et al 2005 or Treffert 2006) where severe brain injuries and impairments corresponded to acquired genius-level mathematical abilities, hyper-proficient linguistic or artistic skills, etc.
Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contribute to who you are, and that you are a physical being that can think in-situ as well as plan your physical actions in the future.
I'm favoriting this link and will try to return to it after my dissertation is done for reflection.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition