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Consciousness: The Mind Messing with the Mind

115 points by pavs 10y ago

marxidad 10y ago
One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether our brains have more than one consciousness arising from it and we are just one of them. In split-brain experiments, it's shown that two independent consciousnesses can exist in the same skull, since they have been physically cut from each other. The predominant assumption is that when both hemispheres are connected, only a unified consciousness arises. Tononi says that in any composite system of consciousness, the component consciousnesses are suppressed and only the highest-level one is active. But what if they're still active and have their own subjective experiences? We won't necessarily see it in other people just as split-brain patients seem like one person until you scrutinize them. And that all consciousnesses will have access to the same memories sort of muddies it up a bit, but it still accounts for different phenomena, including unconscious thoughts, desires, and behaviours; and changes in personality.
- xena 10y ago
  Here is a perfect read for you then: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/
  - marxidad 10y ago
    Thanks! Apparently, there's a subreddit for cultivating these other sentient agents in a way that you are conscious of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/
vbit 10y ago
The argument that we are machines made of meat and so machines made of any other substance may be conscious too is a remarkably weak one to me (a lay person, not a consciousness or AI researcher). Isn't any arbitrary region in space a machine? Because it has physical inputs, physical outputs can some kind of physical computation within? An elevator is a machine but so is the building with many elevators. A city with many buildings, cars, people etc. (all the physical space and things in it withing the bounds of the city) is another machine. Is a city conscious? Clearly it is more complex than an individual brain? From a slightly different angle - why does my consciousness stop at the limits of my body while the physical chain of reactions extends smoothly well beyond it, and infinitely into the universe?
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. Oooh. That's a little problematic. Because you have to wonder how far that sort of simulation has to go to be of any use. If they mind has an image of itself, then wont' the image have an image of itself, and so on ad infinitum? Is that physically possible? If it isn't and so the mind doesn't have that infinitely recursive image of itself, won't then its perception of itself be inaccurate? And if it's inaccurate, how useful is it after all? Specifically, how well can the mind use its image of itself to influence itself if it doesn't know itself very well? I mean, we're in angel-dancing on pin-heads territory here. Maybe not state facts about how the mind works with such absolutely conviction when all we have is speculation? Just a thought, like.
taliesinb 10y ago
Michael Graziano's Attention Schemata Theory is in my opinion a pretty convincing way of thinking about consciousness. Here's a talk he gave about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE. (warning: includes wacky ventriloquist act)
bytefactory 10y ago
The article mentions the brilliant Scott Aaronson, who's written a couple of articles on the subject: 1. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 2. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951 I'll admit that 85% of what he said flew way over my head, but the 15% I did grok was quite interesting.
azeirah 10y ago
The most interesting problem out there :) Would it help to perhaps, instead of philosophizing, guessing and mathing, to try and look at things that definitely do influence consciousness (birth, death, alcohol, sleep, others) and experiment from there? No matter how far removed it is from answers, at least you can get some arguably measurable datapoints, compared to guesswork that's a big win!
- delecti 10y ago
  > alcohol Alcohol has an effect on the brain, which then results in effects on consciousness. It might seem like a pedantic difference, but we don't really have a solid grasp on how the brain results in consciousness, so I would imagine that investigating alcohol>consciousness has so many confounding variables involved is so complicated that we might not benefit from it. Of course I'm certainly not under the impression that my college psych 101 class makes me any sort of expert, and I might be being far too pessimistic.
  - azeirah 10y ago
    Seeing you took one psychology 101 class that makes you more of an expert than me :p I'm more of a consciousness enthousiast.. I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it. Experiment with your own consciousness, it's the only one that's provably observable to you. Based on this assumed truth, you can ask others to do the same. Following the alternative path of experimenting with our own consciousness, I come up with questions like these, very fun to think about.. but I don't know what I can do with it. I'm no neuroscientist, or even a scientist at all. Are any of them actionable? What would it take to add another qualia space to our every-day experience (and with qualia spaces I mean the range of qualia experienced that are linked to any sensory experience, all possible observed images fall into one qualia space.) Would it take another sensor attached to our body? Adaptations to our brain? Are the ones we have (vision, sound, smell, touch, internal feelings, emotions, heat, thought) all the qualia spaces there are? Imagine a volume slider for your hearing. You know that louder sounds in the outside world means a louder experience of sound in your mind. What is the mind's volume limit? Is there even a volume limit? Can we reach it with by producing sound waves? Assuming the limit is far higher than whatever we have ever experienced in our every-day lives, what would it do to a person to hear a sound that is so much louder? So much to think about!
azeirah 10y ago
For anyone interested in this, I can highly recommend Giulio Tononi's book "phi". Part fictional, part art, part science. Pleasure to read while being an informative introduction to his findings about consciousness
- melchebo 10y ago
  Seemingly the only relevant reply in this comment section. That said, the article is kind of vague and has a few big misunderstandings unrelated to Tononi's Phi and Information Integration Theory. Phi is basically a complexity metric that tries to put a number on the effect of memory in a system. I'm unsure wether this has any relation to 'consciousness', but it's at least interesting to measure effects of having a low or high Phi. For example functional programming languages favor a low Phi. Everything is defined by the input, memoization is possible (sort of what you call 'mocks' in other programming languages). There are no side-effects (memory of past events elsewhere), or at least they have to be invoked explicitly as 'unsafe' operations. Also, code that calculates Phi: https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples.py https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples...
scotttt 10y ago
Interesting, but I'm not sure how you can summarize the cutting edge of ideas about consciousness without mentioning Daniel Dennett
woodandsteel 10y ago
This is one case of the larger issue of the limits of human knowledge. According to some versions of mysticism, it is possible to unify completely with the universe so nothing in it is beyond our knowledge. However, if you stick with the methods of the natural sciences, it seems there must be limits. For instance, if you explain an observed phenomena in terms of an underlying law, then you have the question of why that law is so. If you explain the law as due to a deeper law, then you in turn must ask why that law is so. It seems pretty clear that, going down in levels like this, eventually you would have to reach a point where you would say "That's just the way it is, we don't know why" Now with respect to consciousness, the question is whether we can explain it through some more fundamental, knowable features of reality. Many think you can, and are striving to do so. Others, like the noted philosopher Colin McGinn, say no, this is a question we will never be able to answer. In particular, he argues the human mind was designed to understand many sorts of things, but this is beyond its abilities. I tend to think he is right.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  The truth is the opposite, and always has proven to be: the natural sciences are the only way to acquire real understanding, while every form of mysticism by which "nothing is beyond us" ends up being us fooling ourselves again.
  - woodandsteel 10y ago
    I think you misunderstood my comment. I was not saying that mysticism is correct, but that there are matters that are beyond the understanding of the human mind, including natural science. As to natural science being the only road to truth, natural science is itself founded on human experience, and human experience is also the basis forms of truth, such as ethical and mathematical.
westoncb 10y ago
Regarding how talk therapy and meditation could have similar effects on the human brain to medication: we have cognitive subsystems whose behavior is is partially determined by our 'schemas' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)), and partially determined by something like coefficients that scale chemical responses to certain mental states arising. Talk therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy) work by modifying a patient's schemas. For example, suppose you have a schema for human relationships that effectively says "in any relationship there is a winner and a loser"; holding that belief is going to direct the patient's behavior (and interpretation of events) in ways that probably lead to unhappiness. So, by modifying the patient's view on that point (i.e. altering a schema of theirs), this cognitive subsystem that uses schemas to interpret events and decide behavior ends up behaving differently. Drugs (e.g. SSRIs) seem to effect something like the 'coefficients' I mention above—but potentially you could have similar net changes by modifying this cognitive subsystem's coefficients or the schema input it operates on. The importance of schemas in this kind of dynamic seems under-appreciated, though there's evidence of thinkers honing in on it from way back (William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, is basically a study of this cognitive subsystem I mention. More recently I noticed Carol Dweck discussing schemas as foundational to the theory behind her work on learning styles.) (P.S. I believe learning meditation is essentially non-discursive, totally experiential/empirical schema modification [your beliefs can be modified by arguments or new observations; CBT uses arguments, meditation observations], so that's how I see it relating to the rest of this.)
- xrmagnum 10y ago
  Learning Meditation is related to this, not because it brings new Schemas or modify existing ones but rather, because it trains to be more detached from them. After all, the very goal of the practice is to identify those schemas forming and letting them go.
  - westoncb 10y ago
    I agree with that, but the process of /learning/ meditation specifically (which is largely done by practicing) works at least partially through schema modification. For instance, you probably have schemas relating to the importance of addressing thoughts as they come up. If you believe your thoughts are super important, you are very attached to them; if you take a view that they are these wispy non-essential things that one may delve into or not, you are more detached.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
The article starts out noting that talk therapy combats depression. It contrasts this with the fact that prozac and other SSRIs also combat depression. SSRI's being chemicals added to the human brain, are "physical." But somehow, talk therapy is "non-physical". That's where the article lost me. Isn't two people talking a physical activity? There are two physical people, sound waves moving between them, neurons firing in their brains. It's even observable by outsiders.
- westoncb 10y ago
  I think the difficulty the author is pointing out is that it seems odd we would could obtain similar modifications to brain state by chemicals and speech. The issue is highlighted if you consider a hypothetical analogous situation that we never observe: imagine if we could become literally drunk just by hearing a certain sequence of words.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Anecdotal evidence: A friend of mine managed to get high by just imagining himself smoking weed. He believes, though, that this would not have been possible if he hadn't smoked actual weed before.
  - qu4z-2 10y ago
    But plenty of words can have huge impacts on mental state. Is that odd? "Your significant other was just involved in a serious car accident and is in critical condition." Or consider attending a (good) stand-up comedy act. That situation can put you in a very different mental state even without the use of alcohol or other drugs (although people do often combine the two).
    - westoncb 10y ago
      Right. The tricky thing is having words and chemicals lead you to precisely the SAME state.
      - 10y ago
vinceguidry 10y ago
> It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.” There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens. Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of asphalt has real consequences for the world around us. There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us. Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non-physical. You can compare ideas to each other. One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non-physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical than physical. If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing over reality, but are only debating semantics.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Are there non-physical things? I doubt it. Let's take the road. Obviously the mass of the road itself (the object) is physical and has physical characteristics like its components, the chemical composition of its components, the elements in the chemicals, the particles and forces in the atoms of the elements, etc. Now let's take the idea of a road. Where does that idea actually reside? In the brains of living beings, which are themselves physical. Ideas are information, and information is physical. You need energy to create and maintain it, and it can be quantified in terms of the entropy spent to create it. It is a persistent pattern of mass/energy. The "world of information" only seems infinite to us because we are so inefficient at working with it outside each of our own minds. Think of the incredible amount of mass and energy that must be expended to create a road, or even a book, or even an SD card. By contrast, our 8 lb. lump of brain stores and returns vast quantities of information with seemingly no effort on our part. But of course thinking does require physical effort. An inert human, thinking in a chair, still requires food.
westoncb 10y ago
I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is that it works like this: Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You didn't really imagine that you /are/ the sphere, you imagined you were a sort of disembodied human spirit residing within the sphere. Now, really imagine your total existence is /being/ the material constituting the sphere. Can you imagine that being the sphere in this way is very, very different than interacting with it externally as a human? The hard problem is trying to explain how our total experience at any moment could be as it is, when we also know that it is in some sense created by the neurons in our brains. How can a clump of twisted neurons be the same thing as the feeling of warmth or the perception of the color blue? My solution is that our experience (in the above sense) is how it is to actually /be/ a neuron aggregate. Additionally, I think the problem is so hard because it doesn't involve a system that exists /within/ the material universe; instead it's an aspect of the whole thing itself. This is analogous to how we shouldn't expect the rules of Monopoly to be useful in describing the physical constituents of, e.g., paper Monopoly money. We shouldn't expect the notions of 'system,' 'consistency,' 'causality,' 'time,' etc. to apply to the nature of the universe itself just because they are good for describing things within it.
- sebastianconcpt 10y ago
  Very nice reasoning. It still doesn't explain how a paramesium, without neurons (so no neuron aggregate there), can experience (a sub-human) consciousness. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU
  - westoncb 10y ago
    Sure it does: the sub-human conscious experience of a paramecium is what it's like to /be/ the part of the universe comprising the paramecium. Although that part of the universe is as much a paramecium as the part that's human is human, so I don't think what's going on there is 'sub' human. That said, there's less complexity there, so it seems like being that part of the universe would be less 'interesting'--but then again, that's just a human value judgement and probably similarly irrelevant to the universe and paramecia. Neurons aren't central to what I'm talking about; I'm just applying something like a variant of the panpsychic hypothesis to the human situation.
sebastianconcpt 10y ago
The mind is not Consciousness. Mind is behavior. A Philosophical Zombie has behavior and a mind. An AI will have some sort of automata mind. But that's not Qualia. Consciousness is necessarily something else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? I never liked the philosophical zombie argument. I haven't yet been able to realistically imagine such an entity.
  - balfirevic 10y ago
    The funniest part is that, since his behavior is indistinguishable from his non-zombie variant, Philosophical Zombie will write long papers about how they have qualia but Philosophical Zombies don't.
    - sebastianconcpt 10y ago
      Indeed, that's mind-boggling. The only alternative is to start valuing more self-experience. You know you are experiencing qualia and that you are not a philosophical zombie but you can't prove that others aren't. At least not so far. :)
  - sebastianconcpt 10y ago
    How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? It's a great question that still mixes the idea of intelligence with Consciousness. A Paramecium can discern where's the food, how to run away from an unpleasant spot and stop all activity when anesthetics are present and resuming while its effect is gone. It can do all that and it does not have brain-cells, nor a lot of intelligence and still the experiment shows that it can stop and re-start like all other conscious beings. Is not self aware, but we cannot prove that it isn't experiencing its own little qualia.
mirimir 10y ago
> Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. Hoffstadter argues that there are multiple levels of simulation. > The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.” Understanding what this instance of Firefox is doing from imaging and signal tapping would arguably be nontrivial. Especially without very much about the software. Right?
visarga 10y ago
> “the body is made of things, and things don’t have thoughts.” Ha! I could say the opposite. The body is not made of magical stuff, just plain matter. And it has consciousness, it feels like something to be alive. So, consciousness cannot be but the result of matter arranged in space. Let's make an analogy. Say you have a car on the road. It is free to move. Then come many more cars. Suddenly, the road is gridlocked. Is "being gridlocked" a property of the single car? Is it a property that only appears when multiple cars are in a certain relationship? Where does "being gridlocked" reside, in the car, in the road, in the other cars? http://biser3a.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg http://biser3a.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg I believe that emergent properties can and do occur. The new properties emerge from the complex structure of causal relations that exists between simpler elements. This complex web is "stuff" that adds to, and changes, the simple elements of which the system is formed. In other words, the emergent system is made of its constituent parts plus the internal structure, and this internal structure is a property of space and time. Similarly, matter itself might be insentient, but matter arranged in special patterns in space and time is conscious, thus consciousness comes from the properties of space-time, not just from the constituent matter of the body. The space-time arrangement is the software, the atoms of the body are the hardware. They work together to generate consciousness.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Of course "being gridlocked" is a property residing in the individual cars. It just becomes measurable only when you pile up a lot of them in one place. ;)
IsaacL 10y ago
The article discusses a professor who hypothesises that consciousness is simply an illusion the brain creates for itself. But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness', so this explanation is meaningless. https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/0985640618 https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/09856... This is the book I recommend to anyone genuinely interested in the nature of consciousness.
- marxidad 10y ago
  I don't think Ayn Rand's Objectivism is useful for knowing anything about consciousness.
  - warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
    Or for any other purpose, actually.
- warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
  "But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness'" Of course you can. What you see is just a model the brain constructs based on visual input. The brain squares up corners, sees depth in converging lines. You can hardly see at all outside your focus point, but the brain makes you think you do. You have a blind spot in each of your eyes but the brain fills in the spaces based on the surrounding images so you don't notice it. None of these effects are the least bit dependent upon consciousness. It is conceivable that consciousness is just the brain's model of itself, and since the brain can construct these models without the need for consciousness, the argument is not circular.
EddieSpeaks 10y ago
This article lost me at David Chalmers
- warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
  That's just cognitive dissonance kicking in. I had no problem with Chalmers, but had my own dissonant moments beginning with panpsychism. Why anyone would give credence to such ludicrous, unfalsifiable theories is beyond me.

115 points by pavs 10y ago

One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether our brains have more than one consciousness arising from it and we are just one of them. In split-brain experiments, it's shown that two independent consciousnesses can exist in the same skull, since they have been physically cut from each other. The predominant assumption is that when both hemispheres are connected, only a unified consciousness arises. Tononi says that in any composite system of consciousness, the component consciousnesses are suppressed and only the highest-level one is active. But what if they're still active and have their own subjective experiences? We won't necessarily see it in other people just as split-brain patients seem like one person until you scrutinize them. And that all consciousnesses will have access to the same memories sort of muddies it up a bit, but it still accounts for different phenomena, including unconscious thoughts, desires, and behaviours; and changes in personality.

xena 10y ago
Here is a perfect read for you then: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/
- marxidad 10y ago
  Thanks! Apparently, there's a subreddit for cultivating these other sentient agents in a way that you are conscious of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/

vbit 10y ago

The argument that we are machines made of meat and so machines made of any other substance may be conscious too is a remarkably weak one to me (a lay person, not a consciousness or AI researcher). Isn't any arbitrary region in space a machine? Because it has physical inputs, physical outputs can some kind of physical computation within? An elevator is a machine but so is the building with many elevators. A city with many buildings, cars, people etc. (all the physical space and things in it withing the bounds of the city) is another machine. Is a city conscious? Clearly it is more complex than an individual brain? From a slightly different angle - why does my consciousness stop at the limits of my body while the physical chain of reactions extends smoothly well beyond it, and infinitely into the universe?

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. Oooh. That's a little problematic. Because you have to wonder how far that sort of simulation has to go to be of any use. If they mind has an image of itself, then wont' the image have an image of itself, and so on ad infinitum? Is that physically possible? If it isn't and so the mind doesn't have that infinitely recursive image of itself, won't then its perception of itself be inaccurate? And if it's inaccurate, how useful is it after all? Specifically, how well can the mind use its image of itself to influence itself if it doesn't know itself very well? I mean, we're in angel-dancing on pin-heads territory here. Maybe not state facts about how the mind works with such absolutely conviction when all we have is speculation? Just a thought, like.

taliesinb 10y ago

Michael Graziano's Attention Schemata Theory is in my opinion a pretty convincing way of thinking about consciousness. Here's a talk he gave about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE. (warning: includes wacky ventriloquist act)

bytefactory 10y ago

The article mentions the brilliant Scott Aaronson, who's written a couple of articles on the subject: 1. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 2. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951 I'll admit that 85% of what he said flew way over my head, but the 15% I did grok was quite interesting.

azeirah 10y ago

The most interesting problem out there :) Would it help to perhaps, instead of philosophizing, guessing and mathing, to try and look at things that definitely do influence consciousness (birth, death, alcohol, sleep, others) and experiment from there? No matter how far removed it is from answers, at least you can get some arguably measurable datapoints, compared to guesswork that's a big win!

delecti 10y ago
> alcohol Alcohol has an effect on the brain, which then results in effects on consciousness. It might seem like a pedantic difference, but we don't really have a solid grasp on how the brain results in consciousness, so I would imagine that investigating alcohol>consciousness has so many confounding variables involved is so complicated that we might not benefit from it. Of course I'm certainly not under the impression that my college psych 101 class makes me any sort of expert, and I might be being far too pessimistic.
- azeirah 10y ago
  Seeing you took one psychology 101 class that makes you more of an expert than me :p I'm more of a consciousness enthousiast.. I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it. Experiment with your own consciousness, it's the only one that's provably observable to you. Based on this assumed truth, you can ask others to do the same. Following the alternative path of experimenting with our own consciousness, I come up with questions like these, very fun to think about.. but I don't know what I can do with it. I'm no neuroscientist, or even a scientist at all. Are any of them actionable? What would it take to add another qualia space to our every-day experience (and with qualia spaces I mean the range of qualia experienced that are linked to any sensory experience, all possible observed images fall into one qualia space.) Would it take another sensor attached to our body? Adaptations to our brain? Are the ones we have (vision, sound, smell, touch, internal feelings, emotions, heat, thought) all the qualia spaces there are? Imagine a volume slider for your hearing. You know that louder sounds in the outside world means a louder experience of sound in your mind. What is the mind's volume limit? Is there even a volume limit? Can we reach it with by producing sound waves? Assuming the limit is far higher than whatever we have ever experienced in our every-day lives, what would it do to a person to hear a sound that is so much louder? So much to think about!

azeirah 10y ago

For anyone interested in this, I can highly recommend Giulio Tononi's book "phi". Part fictional, part art, part science. Pleasure to read while being an informative introduction to his findings about consciousness

melchebo 10y ago
Seemingly the only relevant reply in this comment section. That said, the article is kind of vague and has a few big misunderstandings unrelated to Tononi's Phi and Information Integration Theory. Phi is basically a complexity metric that tries to put a number on the effect of memory in a system. I'm unsure wether this has any relation to 'consciousness', but it's at least interesting to measure effects of having a low or high Phi. For example functional programming languages favor a low Phi. Everything is defined by the input, memoization is possible (sort of what you call 'mocks' in other programming languages). There are no side-effects (memory of past events elsewhere), or at least they have to be invoked explicitly as 'unsafe' operations. Also, code that calculates Phi: https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples.py https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples...

scotttt 10y ago

Interesting, but I'm not sure how you can summarize the cutting edge of ideas about consciousness without mentioning Daniel Dennett

woodandsteel 10y ago

This is one case of the larger issue of the limits of human knowledge. According to some versions of mysticism, it is possible to unify completely with the universe so nothing in it is beyond our knowledge. However, if you stick with the methods of the natural sciences, it seems there must be limits. For instance, if you explain an observed phenomena in terms of an underlying law, then you have the question of why that law is so. If you explain the law as due to a deeper law, then you in turn must ask why that law is so. It seems pretty clear that, going down in levels like this, eventually you would have to reach a point where you would say "That's just the way it is, we don't know why" Now with respect to consciousness, the question is whether we can explain it through some more fundamental, knowable features of reality. Many think you can, and are striving to do so. Others, like the noted philosopher Colin McGinn, say no, this is a question we will never be able to answer. In particular, he argues the human mind was designed to understand many sorts of things, but this is beyond its abilities. I tend to think he is right.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
The truth is the opposite, and always has proven to be: the natural sciences are the only way to acquire real understanding, while every form of mysticism by which "nothing is beyond us" ends up being us fooling ourselves again.
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  I think you misunderstood my comment. I was not saying that mysticism is correct, but that there are matters that are beyond the understanding of the human mind, including natural science. As to natural science being the only road to truth, natural science is itself founded on human experience, and human experience is also the basis forms of truth, such as ethical and mathematical.

westoncb 10y ago

Regarding how talk therapy and meditation could have similar effects on the human brain to medication: we have cognitive subsystems whose behavior is is partially determined by our 'schemas' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)), and partially determined by something like coefficients that scale chemical responses to certain mental states arising. Talk therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy) work by modifying a patient's schemas. For example, suppose you have a schema for human relationships that effectively says "in any relationship there is a winner and a loser"; holding that belief is going to direct the patient's behavior (and interpretation of events) in ways that probably lead to unhappiness. So, by modifying the patient's view on that point (i.e. altering a schema of theirs), this cognitive subsystem that uses schemas to interpret events and decide behavior ends up behaving differently. Drugs (e.g. SSRIs) seem to effect something like the 'coefficients' I mention above—but potentially you could have similar net changes by modifying this cognitive subsystem's coefficients or the schema input it operates on. The importance of schemas in this kind of dynamic seems under-appreciated, though there's evidence of thinkers honing in on it from way back (William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, is basically a study of this cognitive subsystem I mention. More recently I noticed Carol Dweck discussing schemas as foundational to the theory behind her work on learning styles.) (P.S. I believe learning meditation is essentially non-discursive, totally experiential/empirical schema modification [your beliefs can be modified by arguments or new observations; CBT uses arguments, meditation observations], so that's how I see it relating to the rest of this.)

xrmagnum 10y ago
Learning Meditation is related to this, not because it brings new Schemas or modify existing ones but rather, because it trains to be more detached from them. After all, the very goal of the practice is to identify those schemas forming and letting them go.
- westoncb 10y ago
  I agree with that, but the process of /learning/ meditation specifically (which is largely done by practicing) works at least partially through schema modification. For instance, you probably have schemas relating to the importance of addressing thoughts as they come up. If you believe your thoughts are super important, you are very attached to them; if you take a view that they are these wispy non-essential things that one may delve into or not, you are more detached.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

The article starts out noting that talk therapy combats depression. It contrasts this with the fact that prozac and other SSRIs also combat depression. SSRI's being chemicals added to the human brain, are "physical." But somehow, talk therapy is "non-physical". That's where the article lost me. Isn't two people talking a physical activity? There are two physical people, sound waves moving between them, neurons firing in their brains. It's even observable by outsiders.

westoncb 10y ago
I think the difficulty the author is pointing out is that it seems odd we would could obtain similar modifications to brain state by chemicals and speech. The issue is highlighted if you consider a hypothetical analogous situation that we never observe: imagine if we could become literally drunk just by hearing a certain sequence of words.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Anecdotal evidence: A friend of mine managed to get high by just imagining himself smoking weed. He believes, though, that this would not have been possible if he hadn't smoked actual weed before.
- qu4z-2 10y ago
  But plenty of words can have huge impacts on mental state. Is that odd? "Your significant other was just involved in a serious car accident and is in critical condition." Or consider attending a (good) stand-up comedy act. That situation can put you in a very different mental state even without the use of alcohol or other drugs (although people do often combine the two).
  - westoncb 10y ago
    Right. The tricky thing is having words and chemicals lead you to precisely the SAME state.
    - 10y ago

vinceguidry 10y ago

> It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.” There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens. Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of asphalt has real consequences for the world around us. There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us. Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non-physical. You can compare ideas to each other. One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non-physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical than physical. If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing over reality, but are only debating semantics.

snowwrestler 10y ago
Are there non-physical things? I doubt it. Let's take the road. Obviously the mass of the road itself (the object) is physical and has physical characteristics like its components, the chemical composition of its components, the elements in the chemicals, the particles and forces in the atoms of the elements, etc. Now let's take the idea of a road. Where does that idea actually reside? In the brains of living beings, which are themselves physical. Ideas are information, and information is physical. You need energy to create and maintain it, and it can be quantified in terms of the entropy spent to create it. It is a persistent pattern of mass/energy. The "world of information" only seems infinite to us because we are so inefficient at working with it outside each of our own minds. Think of the incredible amount of mass and energy that must be expended to create a road, or even a book, or even an SD card. By contrast, our 8 lb. lump of brain stores and returns vast quantities of information with seemingly no effort on our part. But of course thinking does require physical effort. An inert human, thinking in a chair, still requires food.

westoncb 10y ago

I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is that it works like this: Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You didn't really imagine that you /are/ the sphere, you imagined you were a sort of disembodied human spirit residing within the sphere. Now, really imagine your total existence is /being/ the material constituting the sphere. Can you imagine that being the sphere in this way is very, very different than interacting with it externally as a human? The hard problem is trying to explain how our total experience at any moment could be as it is, when we also know that it is in some sense created by the neurons in our brains. How can a clump of twisted neurons be the same thing as the feeling of warmth or the perception of the color blue? My solution is that our experience (in the above sense) is how it is to actually /be/ a neuron aggregate. Additionally, I think the problem is so hard because it doesn't involve a system that exists /within/ the material universe; instead it's an aspect of the whole thing itself. This is analogous to how we shouldn't expect the rules of Monopoly to be useful in describing the physical constituents of, e.g., paper Monopoly money. We shouldn't expect the notions of 'system,' 'consistency,' 'causality,' 'time,' etc. to apply to the nature of the universe itself just because they are good for describing things within it.

sebastianconcpt 10y ago
Very nice reasoning. It still doesn't explain how a paramesium, without neurons (so no neuron aggregate there), can experience (a sub-human) consciousness. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU
- westoncb 10y ago
  Sure it does: the sub-human conscious experience of a paramecium is what it's like to /be/ the part of the universe comprising the paramecium. Although that part of the universe is as much a paramecium as the part that's human is human, so I don't think what's going on there is 'sub' human. That said, there's less complexity there, so it seems like being that part of the universe would be less 'interesting'--but then again, that's just a human value judgement and probably similarly irrelevant to the universe and paramecia. Neurons aren't central to what I'm talking about; I'm just applying something like a variant of the panpsychic hypothesis to the human situation.

sebastianconcpt 10y ago

The mind is not Consciousness. Mind is behavior. A Philosophical Zombie has behavior and a mind. An AI will have some sort of automata mind. But that's not Qualia. Consciousness is necessarily something else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

dwaltrip 10y ago
How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? I never liked the philosophical zombie argument. I haven't yet been able to realistically imagine such an entity.
- balfirevic 10y ago
  The funniest part is that, since his behavior is indistinguishable from his non-zombie variant, Philosophical Zombie will write long papers about how they have qualia but Philosophical Zombies don't.
  - sebastianconcpt 10y ago
    Indeed, that's mind-boggling. The only alternative is to start valuing more self-experience. You know you are experiencing qualia and that you are not a philosophical zombie but you can't prove that others aren't. At least not so far. :)
- sebastianconcpt 10y ago
  How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? It's a great question that still mixes the idea of intelligence with Consciousness. A Paramecium can discern where's the food, how to run away from an unpleasant spot and stop all activity when anesthetics are present and resuming while its effect is gone. It can do all that and it does not have brain-cells, nor a lot of intelligence and still the experiment shows that it can stop and re-start like all other conscious beings. Is not self aware, but we cannot prove that it isn't experiencing its own little qualia.

mirimir 10y ago

> Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. Hoffstadter argues that there are multiple levels of simulation. > The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play, “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described. Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff that doesn’t show up in a scan.” Understanding what this instance of Firefox is doing from imaging and signal tapping would arguably be nontrivial. Especially without very much about the software. Right?

visarga 10y ago

> “the body is made of things, and things don’t have thoughts.” Ha! I could say the opposite. The body is not made of magical stuff, just plain matter. And it has consciousness, it feels like something to be alive. So, consciousness cannot be but the result of matter arranged in space. Let's make an analogy. Say you have a car on the road. It is free to move. Then come many more cars. Suddenly, the road is gridlocked. Is "being gridlocked" a property of the single car? Is it a property that only appears when multiple cars are in a certain relationship? Where does "being gridlocked" reside, in the car, in the road, in the other cars? http://biser3a.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg http://biser3a.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg I believe that emergent properties can and do occur. The new properties emerge from the complex structure of causal relations that exists between simpler elements. This complex web is "stuff" that adds to, and changes, the simple elements of which the system is formed. In other words, the emergent system is made of its constituent parts plus the internal structure, and this internal structure is a property of space and time. Similarly, matter itself might be insentient, but matter arranged in special patterns in space and time is conscious, thus consciousness comes from the properties of space-time, not just from the constituent matter of the body. The space-time arrangement is the software, the atoms of the body are the hardware. They work together to generate consciousness.

majewsky 10y ago
Of course "being gridlocked" is a property residing in the individual cars. It just becomes measurable only when you pile up a lot of them in one place. ;)

IsaacL 10y ago

The article discusses a professor who hypothesises that consciousness is simply an illusion the brain creates for itself. But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness', so this explanation is meaningless. https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/0985640618 https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-Binswanger/dp/09856... This is the book I recommend to anyone genuinely interested in the nature of consciousness.

marxidad 10y ago
I don't think Ayn Rand's Objectivism is useful for knowing anything about consciousness.
- warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
  Or for any other purpose, actually.
warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
"But you can't explain the concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness'" Of course you can. What you see is just a model the brain constructs based on visual input. The brain squares up corners, sees depth in converging lines. You can hardly see at all outside your focus point, but the brain makes you think you do. You have a blind spot in each of your eyes but the brain fills in the spaces based on the surrounding images so you don't notice it. None of these effects are the least bit dependent upon consciousness. It is conceivable that consciousness is just the brain's model of itself, and since the brain can construct these models without the need for consciousness, the argument is not circular.

EddieSpeaks 10y ago

This article lost me at David Chalmers

warmfuzzykitten 10y ago
That's just cognitive dissonance kicking in. I had no problem with Chalmers, but had my own dissonant moments beginning with panpsychism. Why anyone would give credence to such ludicrous, unfalsifiable theories is beyond me.