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A New Theory of How Consciousness Evolved

205 points by curtis 10y ago

niccaluim 10y ago
This article was a little confusing for me. When I read "consciousness," I think of private, subjective experience—qualia. This meaning of consciousness is a very hard problem indeed, and any new theory is bound to be interesting. (See Chalmers for a great summary: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html http://consc.net/papers/facing.html) But the article seems to be talking about meta-cognition, not conscious experience. Meta-cognition is interesting in its own right I suppose, but far less so than what I normally think of as consciousness.
- codeulike 10y ago
  Someone like Daniel Dennett would argue that meta-cognition and consciousness are pretty much the same thing.
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Maybe they will come here and do so?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - codeulike 10y ago
      Perhaps start with this: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm (1988)
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    I think Denett is right about that -- and yet I side with Chalmers saying there is a "hard" problem. Or if not a hard one, at least one that is a different problem from what neuroscientists work on. Meta-cognition or any other natural process might be "the same thing" as conciousness; but is nontheless a physical thing that somehow has qualia. Where that equivalence comes from is an interesting question that Dennet & co. seem determined to dodge.
    - abritinthebay 10y ago
      Until someone proves that qualia are even coherent it's a bit moot. Qualia are a great shorthand but they aren't even shown to exist in any real capacity other than the euphemistic way they are defined. The fact that qualia lead to incoherent rubbish like p-zombies should be enough to place the concept solidly in the same place as most of Deepak Chopra's ramblings.
      - adrianratnapala 10y ago
        Ok, I put my hand up to using "qualia" as a shorthand -- as concrete entities I expect they are indeed incoherent. But in a discussion with poeple who have it least heard the term, saying "qualia" is a lot clearer than stumbling about with terms like "subjective reality", "bare expereince" and whatever. But those who determined to dodge Chalmers' hard problem can always choose to say "bare expereince, I don't know what you mean!" It's still a just a dodge.
        codeulike 10y ago
        But if you accept that consciousness arises within the brain and we posit that there's no special unknown branch of physics involved ... then the only possible explanation is that a complex enough system arranged in the right way can become self aware. What would it be 'like' to be a self-aware system? Would it be 'like' anything at all? I guess it would.
        mh-cx 10y ago
        This. Blatatantly quoting myself [1]: "Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality." So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge. Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593
- thinkloop 10y ago
  I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked. It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia. Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.
  - codeulike 10y ago
    In a few decades I think the use of very sophisticated ais in computer games could become an ethical issue.
  - fpvracing 10y ago
    > The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.
    - thinkloop 10y ago
      The last 10% always looks really tough for me. For example we kind'of have self-driving cars right now - but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation - seems like 50+ years to me for just that.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Chalmers from your link: There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true. Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is. Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.
  - sbardle 10y ago
    Are you saying that consciousness does not exist?
    - Marazan 10y ago
      They are saying consciousness is not some special thing. I.e. not Dualism.
  - chanakya 10y ago
    There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first-person experience exists and is the basis of all science, but is very hard to connect with the scientific view of the universe. If science has to "discard" this fact as inconvenient, that says more about science than the fact.
    - joe_the_user 10y ago
      There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first person experience exists and is the basis of all science The most commonly agreed thing is the people agree they have first-person experiences. That this is "the basis of all science" is a fine example of how people jump from this highly value quality to any old thing - I've also heard that subjective experience refutes all materialism, shows humans aren't computers, proves the existence of God and so-forth.
- dovin 10y ago
  So his attention schema theory is actually about consciousness as a whole, not just metacognition. Here's a quote from his book Consciousness and the Social Brain: >The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality? His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.
  - acqq 10y ago
    Also Graziano, 2015 paper: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... "According to this theory, there is, of course, no actual mystery. Attention does have a real physical basis, but the mechanistic details of the process of attention are not included in the only relevant information to which the brain has access." "This view, that the problem of subjective experience consists only in explaining why and how the brain concludes that it contains an apparently non-physical property, has been proposed before (Dennett, 1991). The attention schema theory goes beyond this idea in providing a specific functional use for the brain to compute that type of information. The heart of the attention schema theory is that there is an adaptive value for a brain to build the construct of awareness: it serves as a model of attention." "A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence."
- saint-loup 10y ago
  Influential theories precisely equate meta-cognition and consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consc...
- ttctciyf 10y ago
  I agree - it seems to be another variety of "nothing buttery." I don't see how locating the production of experience in attention schemas (which seem, inasmuch as they're scientifically respectable, to be indistinguishable from advanced signal processing) gets us any further with the hard problem of understanding how any subjective experience at all is necessitated or implied by what the brain does functionally. It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice? On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  I find that lately the term "consciousness" is being overloaded to mean something that I don't think it originally meant. Because of that, I like to distinguish between neurobiological consciousness (which can be studied, probed, and predicted) and experiential consciousness (subjective experience).
- blueprint 10y ago
  What you refer to as qualia are not "private", even though they're subjective. When we say a person is enlightened it means they realize what kind of effect a certain kind of thing has on the "eyesight" of a person's consciousness, and they also can see what kinds of causes people carry within their own consciousnesses. The reason why you may have heard they're private is that a true enlightened being only comes to world extremely rarely – once in every few thousand years.
  - blueprint 10y ago
    What's with the downvotes? What I said is true. If you disagree but cannot form a cogent retort, downvoting is a rather transparent method by which to display the lack of legitimacy of your point of view. After all, what I said is concrete and sincere, and therefore quite convenient to form a useful debate around.
sillysaurus3 10y ago
Are insects conscious? Why or why not?
- thinkloop 10y ago
  It's impossible to be sure, but since it seems consciousness follows a spectrum when it comes to living beings, with more complex beings having "more" consciousness and less complex beings having less, my guess is that all living things have some form of consciousness, including plants and insects. As soon as anything "prefers" any stimulus over another, I think consciousness becomes an emergent property.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Allow my crappy analogy, it takes some space to store debugging symbols and insects are not compiled with -g.
  - back_beyond 10y ago
    Does this spectrum imply that humans have varying levels of consciousness? If so, I think this presents an interesting moral question.
    - simonsquiff 10y ago
      I'd certainly say there is a spectrum of varying human consciousness from fetus>baby>young child>child
      - back_beyond 10y ago
        Does it vary within each category?
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        codeulike 10y ago
acqq 10y ago
The paper from the same author where he formally presents his ideas: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
- kanzure 10y ago
  I thought I had read a very similar idea in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010745/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010745/ but on closer inspection I see that it's referencing that same author...
ttctciyf 10y ago
This passage from the article: > Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes compare covert attention to a spotlight. (The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.) Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another. very much put me in mind of an unusual book: A Life of One's Own (Marion Milner, 1934) - in particular, this: At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow it as I choose.[1] 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77
tim333 10y ago
The new theory summarised (from the paper): >The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom–up influence and partly under top–down control. We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience. Kind of makes sense to me - that the mechanism that forms a model of your body or a place map or whatever also forms a model of your mental setup of senses, memories and the like.
- acqq 10y ago
  The higher "awareness" of the environment and the effects of the body's actions to it can obviously be of evolutionary advantage. And the individuals whose awareness better matches the reality will obviously have advantage too.
- veli_joza 10y ago
  The same theory was also mentioned in Dawkins' Selfish Gene. The evolution favored individuals that could simulate its surrounding and consequences of its actions better. At certain point, that simulation had to include the individual itself in order to be complete, and that gave way to consciousness. Dawkins called this "simulation", while the article calls it "internal model".
  - sridca 10y ago
    Consciousness is nothing more than an organism being aware of itself. However, where you say "to include the individual itself" - that's a different matter, as now you are talking about the feeling of being a "self" (which is not a prerequisite to be conscious).
- Retric 10y ago
  Top down control presupposes consciousness, or something really close to it. Sleep / dream memory formation seems like a much more reasonable argument. Sleep without activity can simply tone down brain activity. But, if activity happens during REM sleep you need a brain / body abstraction to avoid sleepwalking via sleep paralysis. At that point you have lot's of brain structures for simulating things that can be run while your awake. Sleep as a means to conserve energy > Sleep as a means to aid learning (replay events for different types of memory formation) > Sleep as a means to simulate options > Simulating options while awake.
pointernil 10y ago
"New" The papers and work on this theory go on for years already and its due time it gains more/wider public attention, imo. I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" just like heliocentric theories caused when they un-throned the earth-centric theories... we humans love magic, especially when we are told/we think to be magic, right?
- acqq 10y ago
  > I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" Just look how some religion-influenced philosophers fight to obscure the simple fact that everything humans do and even "feel" (yes, also that "feeling" of the "existence of qualia" they have) can be explained with biology and evolution. Humanists, however, already assuming all religious ideas are created only by humans, should not even be surprised.
- wallacoloo 10y ago
  I love the seemingly improbable, not "magic" - it just so happens that they overlap. Children are still fascinated by flying machines. Adults generally aren't as fascinated, just by having grown up with them, regardless of how well they understand them. But both groups know the machines are grounded in reality, as opposed to being "magic". So no, I disagree. And I think it's irrelevant. The people who want to believe in science will be happy to expand their understanding (this is still theory). The people who don't will keep on believing whatever it is they believe. There are still people out there who think there's a god that raises the sun each morning and sets the moon at dawn, despite what science tells us.
robg 10y ago
A theory that's not testable is mere conjecture. Worth reading is Nagel's What is it like to be a bat? http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf
hasbroslasher 10y ago
ITT: New theory which is untestable and unfalsifiable
amelius 10y ago
I'm stuck with a related philosophical problem, perhaps somebody here can help me out. The problem is that consciousness happens "now", but "now" has only a meaning in an inertial frame of reference, and simultaneity in physics depends on the chosen frame of reference. To phrase it differently, you generally don't feel what you felt yesterday, or what you feel tomorrow. You only feel (or experience) what you are feeling at this very moment. But if one (mathematical) point in the brain is conscious, by the time it has communicated to another point in the brain, that "feeling" has been lost to time. So either consciousness happens only at distinct (mathematical) points in the brain, or, somehow, consciousness can span a short non-zero time interval. You experience not just "now", but also briefly in the past and perhaps into the future. This seems contradictory, so a better way of looking at it is needed.
- greatingale 10y ago
  I'm not sure why you assume consciousness happens "now". I would argue consciousness intuitively includes more time than that, perhaps even your entire conscious lifetime, as when you are conscious that includes your identity which would include your memories and hopes.
- carapace 10y ago
  This is a very interesting point. The article takes "consciousness" to mean the contents of awareness, and not awareness (subjectivity) itself, so from my point of view it doesn't even begin to touch on the "hard problem". One interesting clue is that, as you point out, subjectively "it" is always now and you are always here. Whatever "you" are, you're the origin-point in spacetime for the contents of your awareness. This is true even when you are dreaming, which seems significant. We know that phenomenon that are too fast or too slow cannot be perceived, and I think you're right that that indicates something important about how subjectivity functions.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  My narrow physicists' answer is that conciousness doesn't just happen "now", it happens _here and now_ -- and that isperfectly well defined in all relativistic frames of reference. A broader -- and much more speculative answer -- is that concious experience "is happening" (English tenses are not approriate for this discussion) all over the time-space. But at each point along the trajectory (history) of an intelligent being, there exists an unsually coherent, understandable description of a part of that experinece. Our catch-all description for such descriptions is "what Mr X is experiencing now".
corecoder 10y ago
The article (haven't read the paper yet) resonates with things Dennett has said, as many commenters have pointed out. It goes further though, as it details a few different structures and goes beyond speculation, as most of the theses are empirically testable, at least in theory. Two questions: * Are there any objections to the theory, apart from: but consciousness is magic? * What are good resources to learn the history of the idea that complex brain activity emerges from neurons competing with each other?
dr_ 10y ago
For those who are interested in hearing Graziano discuss consciousness further, alongside Chalmers and Tegmark, I recommend this NYAS video from last month: http://www.nyas.org/events/Detail.aspx?cid=43d077ca-947f-4f40-b01e-71569a0719e8 http://www.nyas.org/events/Detail.aspx?cid=43d077ca-947f-4f4...

205 points by curtis 10y ago

This article was a little confusing for me. When I read "consciousness," I think of private, subjective experience—qualia. This meaning of consciousness is a very hard problem indeed, and any new theory is bound to be interesting. (See Chalmers for a great summary: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html http://consc.net/papers/facing.html) But the article seems to be talking about meta-cognition, not conscious experience. Meta-cognition is interesting in its own right I suppose, but far less so than what I normally think of as consciousness.

codeulike 10y ago
Someone like Daniel Dennett would argue that meta-cognition and consciousness are pretty much the same thing.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Maybe they will come here and do so?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - codeulike 10y ago
    Perhaps start with this: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm (1988)
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  I think Denett is right about that -- and yet I side with Chalmers saying there is a "hard" problem. Or if not a hard one, at least one that is a different problem from what neuroscientists work on. Meta-cognition or any other natural process might be "the same thing" as conciousness; but is nontheless a physical thing that somehow has qualia. Where that equivalence comes from is an interesting question that Dennet & co. seem determined to dodge.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    Until someone proves that qualia are even coherent it's a bit moot. Qualia are a great shorthand but they aren't even shown to exist in any real capacity other than the euphemistic way they are defined. The fact that qualia lead to incoherent rubbish like p-zombies should be enough to place the concept solidly in the same place as most of Deepak Chopra's ramblings.
    - adrianratnapala 10y ago
      Ok, I put my hand up to using "qualia" as a shorthand -- as concrete entities I expect they are indeed incoherent. But in a discussion with poeple who have it least heard the term, saying "qualia" is a lot clearer than stumbling about with terms like "subjective reality", "bare expereince" and whatever. But those who determined to dodge Chalmers' hard problem can always choose to say "bare expereince, I don't know what you mean!" It's still a just a dodge.
      - codeulike 10y ago
        But if you accept that consciousness arises within the brain and we posit that there's no special unknown branch of physics involved ... then the only possible explanation is that a complex enough system arranged in the right way can become self aware. What would it be 'like' to be a self-aware system? Would it be 'like' anything at all? I guess it would.
        mh-cx 10y ago
        This. Blatatantly quoting myself [1]: "Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulating reality." So I'd agree: If you reach a certain complexity in your inner model, qualia will "magically" emerge. Another interesting point the article makes is the relation to the theory of mind. I wonder if you could even say, that we first had an inner model for the complex inner model of others and then, by applying that inner model on ourselves developed what we call conscioussness. You could probably assume that many animals are not able to take this final step and that this is what separates our consciousness from those of animals. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11826593
thinkloop 10y ago
I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked. It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia. Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.
- codeulike 10y ago
  In a few decades I think the use of very sophisticated ais in computer games could become an ethical issue.
- fpvracing 10y ago
  > The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.
  - thinkloop 10y ago
    The last 10% always looks really tough for me. For example we kind'of have self-driving cars right now - but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation - seems like 50+ years to me for just that.
joe_the_user 10y ago
Chalmers from your link: There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true. Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is. Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.
- sbardle 10y ago
  Are you saying that consciousness does not exist?
  - Marazan 10y ago
    They are saying consciousness is not some special thing. I.e. not Dualism.
- chanakya 10y ago
  There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first-person experience exists and is the basis of all science, but is very hard to connect with the scientific view of the universe. If science has to "discard" this fact as inconvenient, that says more about science than the fact.
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    There is nothing delusional about the fact that the first person experience exists and is the basis of all science The most commonly agreed thing is the people agree they have first-person experiences. That this is "the basis of all science" is a fine example of how people jump from this highly value quality to any old thing - I've also heard that subjective experience refutes all materialism, shows humans aren't computers, proves the existence of God and so-forth.
dovin 10y ago
So his attention schema theory is actually about consciousness as a whole, not just metacognition. Here's a quote from his book Consciousness and the Social Brain: >The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality? His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.
- acqq 10y ago
  Also Graziano, 2015 paper: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... "According to this theory, there is, of course, no actual mystery. Attention does have a real physical basis, but the mechanistic details of the process of attention are not included in the only relevant information to which the brain has access." "This view, that the problem of subjective experience consists only in explaining why and how the brain concludes that it contains an apparently non-physical property, has been proposed before (Dennett, 1991). The attention schema theory goes beyond this idea in providing a specific functional use for the brain to compute that type of information. The heart of the attention schema theory is that there is an adaptive value for a brain to build the construct of awareness: it serves as a model of attention." "A third advantage of this theory is that it provides testable predictions. If awareness is the internal model of attention, used to help control attention, then without awareness, attention should still be possible but should suffer deficits in control. In this article, we review the existing literature on the relationship between attention and awareness, and suggest that at least some of the predictions of the theory are borne out by the evidence."
saint-loup 10y ago
Influential theories precisely equate meta-cognition and consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_theories_of_consc...
ttctciyf 10y ago
I agree - it seems to be another variety of "nothing buttery." I don't see how locating the production of experience in attention schemas (which seem, inasmuch as they're scientifically respectable, to be indistinguishable from advanced signal processing) gets us any further with the hard problem of understanding how any subjective experience at all is necessitated or implied by what the brain does functionally. It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice? On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.
Xcelerate 10y ago
I find that lately the term "consciousness" is being overloaded to mean something that I don't think it originally meant. Because of that, I like to distinguish between neurobiological consciousness (which can be studied, probed, and predicted) and experiential consciousness (subjective experience).
blueprint 10y ago
What you refer to as qualia are not "private", even though they're subjective. When we say a person is enlightened it means they realize what kind of effect a certain kind of thing has on the "eyesight" of a person's consciousness, and they also can see what kinds of causes people carry within their own consciousnesses. The reason why you may have heard they're private is that a true enlightened being only comes to world extremely rarely – once in every few thousand years.
- blueprint 10y ago
  What's with the downvotes? What I said is true. If you disagree but cannot form a cogent retort, downvoting is a rather transparent method by which to display the lack of legitimacy of your point of view. After all, what I said is concrete and sincere, and therefore quite convenient to form a useful debate around.

sillysaurus3 10y ago

Are insects conscious? Why or why not?

thinkloop 10y ago
It's impossible to be sure, but since it seems consciousness follows a spectrum when it comes to living beings, with more complex beings having "more" consciousness and less complex beings having less, my guess is that all living things have some form of consciousness, including plants and insects. As soon as anything "prefers" any stimulus over another, I think consciousness becomes an emergent property.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Allow my crappy analogy, it takes some space to store debugging symbols and insects are not compiled with -g.
- back_beyond 10y ago
  Does this spectrum imply that humans have varying levels of consciousness? If so, I think this presents an interesting moral question.
  - simonsquiff 10y ago
    I'd certainly say there is a spectrum of varying human consciousness from fetus>baby>young child>child
    - back_beyond 10y ago
      Does it vary within each category?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - codeulike 10y ago

acqq 10y ago

The paper from the same author where he formally presents his ideas: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

kanzure 10y ago
I thought I had read a very similar idea in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010745/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4010745/ but on closer inspection I see that it's referencing that same author...

ttctciyf 10y ago

This passage from the article: > Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes compare covert attention to a spotlight. (The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.) Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another. very much put me in mind of an unusual book: A Life of One's Own (Marion Milner, 1934) - in particular, this: At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought faint patternings which can be brought to distinction when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is. But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can widen or narrow it as I choose.[1] 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77

tim333 10y ago

The new theory summarised (from the paper): >The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom–up influence and partly under top–down control. We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience. Kind of makes sense to me - that the mechanism that forms a model of your body or a place map or whatever also forms a model of your mental setup of senses, memories and the like.

acqq 10y ago
The higher "awareness" of the environment and the effects of the body's actions to it can obviously be of evolutionary advantage. And the individuals whose awareness better matches the reality will obviously have advantage too.
veli_joza 10y ago
The same theory was also mentioned in Dawkins' Selfish Gene. The evolution favored individuals that could simulate its surrounding and consequences of its actions better. At certain point, that simulation had to include the individual itself in order to be complete, and that gave way to consciousness. Dawkins called this "simulation", while the article calls it "internal model".
- sridca 10y ago
  Consciousness is nothing more than an organism being aware of itself. However, where you say "to include the individual itself" - that's a different matter, as now you are talking about the feeling of being a "self" (which is not a prerequisite to be conscious).
Retric 10y ago
Top down control presupposes consciousness, or something really close to it. Sleep / dream memory formation seems like a much more reasonable argument. Sleep without activity can simply tone down brain activity. But, if activity happens during REM sleep you need a brain / body abstraction to avoid sleepwalking via sleep paralysis. At that point you have lot's of brain structures for simulating things that can be run while your awake. Sleep as a means to conserve energy > Sleep as a means to aid learning (replay events for different types of memory formation) > Sleep as a means to simulate options > Simulating options while awake.

pointernil 10y ago

"New" The papers and work on this theory go on for years already and its due time it gains more/wider public attention, imo. I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" just like heliocentric theories caused when they un-throned the earth-centric theories... we humans love magic, especially when we are told/we think to be magic, right?

acqq 10y ago
> I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" Just look how some religion-influenced philosophers fight to obscure the simple fact that everything humans do and even "feel" (yes, also that "feeling" of the "existence of qualia" they have) can be explained with biology and evolution. Humanists, however, already assuming all religious ideas are created only by humans, should not even be surprised.
wallacoloo 10y ago
I love the seemingly improbable, not "magic" - it just so happens that they overlap. Children are still fascinated by flying machines. Adults generally aren't as fascinated, just by having grown up with them, regardless of how well they understand them. But both groups know the machines are grounded in reality, as opposed to being "magic". So no, I disagree. And I think it's irrelevant. The people who want to believe in science will be happy to expand their understanding (this is still theory). The people who don't will keep on believing whatever it is they believe. There are still people out there who think there's a god that raises the sun each morning and sets the moon at dawn, despite what science tells us.

robg 10y ago

A theory that's not testable is mere conjecture. Worth reading is Nagel's What is it like to be a bat? http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

hasbroslasher 10y ago

ITT: New theory which is untestable and unfalsifiable

amelius 10y ago

I'm stuck with a related philosophical problem, perhaps somebody here can help me out. The problem is that consciousness happens "now", but "now" has only a meaning in an inertial frame of reference, and simultaneity in physics depends on the chosen frame of reference. To phrase it differently, you generally don't feel what you felt yesterday, or what you feel tomorrow. You only feel (or experience) what you are feeling at this very moment. But if one (mathematical) point in the brain is conscious, by the time it has communicated to another point in the brain, that "feeling" has been lost to time. So either consciousness happens only at distinct (mathematical) points in the brain, or, somehow, consciousness can span a short non-zero time interval. You experience not just "now", but also briefly in the past and perhaps into the future. This seems contradictory, so a better way of looking at it is needed.

greatingale 10y ago
I'm not sure why you assume consciousness happens "now". I would argue consciousness intuitively includes more time than that, perhaps even your entire conscious lifetime, as when you are conscious that includes your identity which would include your memories and hopes.
carapace 10y ago
This is a very interesting point. The article takes "consciousness" to mean the contents of awareness, and not awareness (subjectivity) itself, so from my point of view it doesn't even begin to touch on the "hard problem". One interesting clue is that, as you point out, subjectively "it" is always now and you are always here. Whatever "you" are, you're the origin-point in spacetime for the contents of your awareness. This is true even when you are dreaming, which seems significant. We know that phenomenon that are too fast or too slow cannot be perceived, and I think you're right that that indicates something important about how subjectivity functions.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
My narrow physicists' answer is that conciousness doesn't just happen "now", it happens _here and now_ -- and that isperfectly well defined in all relativistic frames of reference. A broader -- and much more speculative answer -- is that concious experience "is happening" (English tenses are not approriate for this discussion) all over the time-space. But at each point along the trajectory (history) of an intelligent being, there exists an unsually coherent, understandable description of a part of that experinece. Our catch-all description for such descriptions is "what Mr X is experiencing now".

corecoder 10y ago

The article (haven't read the paper yet) resonates with things Dennett has said, as many commenters have pointed out. It goes further though, as it details a few different structures and goes beyond speculation, as most of the theses are empirically testable, at least in theory. Two questions: * Are there any objections to the theory, apart from: but consciousness is magic? * What are good resources to learn the history of the idea that complex brain activity emerges from neurons competing with each other?

dr_ 10y ago

For those who are interested in hearing Graziano discuss consciousness further, alongside Chalmers and Tegmark, I recommend this NYAS video from last month: http://www.nyas.org/events/Detail.aspx?cid=43d077ca-947f-4f40-b01e-71569a0719e8 http://www.nyas.org/events/Detail.aspx?cid=43d077ca-947f-4f4...