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> Manzotti: However, the essential underlying idea here is simply that neurons produce consciousness. It’s as crude as that. We are simply asking the brain to d

> Manzotti: However, the essential underlying idea here is simply that neurons produce consciousness. It’s as crude as that. We are simply asking the brain to do what the soul once did. Of course, what neuroscience has actually shown is how neurons consume chemicals, absorb other chemicals and release them, produce and fire off electrical charges, and so on. In many situations such activities occur in strict relation to certain experiences we have. But then, so do the activities of many other cells in the body. And so do the external things we experience. This strikes me as disingenuous. Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre-frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again. I guess I'm missing the point Manzotti is driving at. Experience is something that needs to be accounted for. I can deny many things but I can't deny that I'm experiencing some thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions right now. Even if the self and experience is illusory there must be something causing that illusion to exist. If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience.

goatlover 9y ago
> If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience. Assuming physicalism is the case and not idealism, dualism, or some other metaphysics. If consciousness isn't the result of neuronal activity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physicalism is somehow false.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  Substituting a few words to get to a less polarizing and more obvious topic: If falling isn't the result of gravity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physics is somehow false. If it's not neurons, you're going to need extraordinary evidence!
  - goatlover 9y ago
    If it's not neurons, it may be that the foundation for understanding consciousness is wrong. Which would be assuming that some objective, abstracted view of the world can explain our subjective experiences. I'm not saying it's impossible. Who knows. But it remains a hard problem for now, at least.
- leepowers 9y ago
  To be pedantic - that would only show that consciousness is non-neuronal. Max Tegmark has this idea of "consciousness as a state of matter"[1] - that neurons aren't particularly special - what matters is are particular patterns. These consciousness patterns can be composed of neurons, but they could also be composed of computer circuits, or rain drops, or any other particles.[2] To be pragmatic - the absence of a physical cause for consciousness does not preclude any other causes. Whatever environment consciousness exists in that environment must have rules, laws, constants, and symmetries that define that environment. So all we're doing is trading the laws of the universe for the laws of some ethereal no-material realm or supernatural realm. We're not actually performing any useful work, we're just shuffling the problem around. The hard problem of consciousness, the questions of determinism and free will - these problems will challenge any consciousness that finds itself in a rule-bound system. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Tegmark's theory sounds similar to Chalmers, yet Chalmers calls himself a dualist.
westoncb 9y ago
> Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. One thing to consider with that is that only the brain is able to give answers about consciousness—i.e. it's producer of verbal content and thought,' so there could be no communication of it if something like consciousness were going on at other loci in the body. To get a better feel for how something like that might happen, I'd highly recommend checking out some research on split brain patients who's corpus callosums (callosi?) have been severed (this connects the two brain hemispheres). One of my favorite examples: split brain patient shown an instruction to go out through the front door only to one eye (each eye is connected to the opposite brain hemisphere)—specifically it's shown to the eye which connects it to the hemisphere not used for speaking. The split brain patient will get up and follow the instruction, walking toward the door. Then the researcher asks the patient, "what are you doing?" and cognitive dissonance resolves itself into some plausible but essentially bullshit answer like, "I was, umm, going home to get a Coke..." If you'd like to hear more, check out [0] Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness—the article is talking about the 'hard problem' of consciousness. So, the issue at hand is immediate subjective experience, not a self-reflective mechanism (simple versions of that could readily be coded up). > If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If our universe is likened to a board game with some finite set of rules, e.g. Monopoly, the 'physics' of this universe is fully determined by the rules of the game (even if there are non-deterministic aspects where you have to e.g. roll dice). The non-hard problem of consciousness is a question in this realm, like "can I sell one of my properties to another player?"; the hard problem is necessarily outside the scope of the rules; it's a question more like, "what is the molecular composition of a 'Chance' card?". The rules of Monopoly do not cover this. In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it. [0] Social Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga edit: I wrote 'not used for language' previously and changed it to 'not used for speaking,' which is an important distinction.
- glenstein 9y ago
  >One thing to consider with that is that only the brain is able to give answers about consciousness A conscious brain that advertises itself with communication certainly makes matters easier for us, however we can make reasonable inferences about consciousness in people and animals based on sophisticated behavior, not just communication. And if there is consciousness bound up in, say, a toenail, and it's not doing anything or communicating anything, not even doing some complicated information processing that it's keeping to itself, it's true that we might very well never discover it. But it's also true that we wouldn't have much reason for believing in any such form of consciousness given that it's completely unobservable. >Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness It sounds like you've got a dog in this one. That's fine; I do too. But I wouldn't say it's necessarily a conflation- some people's inclination to resolve the hard problem is to argue that it is best resolved, in some way or another, by mapping subjectivity onto biology. That's not enough, necessarily, you'll want some good philosophical reasons for thinking that that kind of explanation is capable of doing enough to give a satisfactory account of the hard problem. And that's certainly a matter of debate. But I wouldn't say it's a conflation, necessarily. >In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it. This sounds like an attempt to smuggle a preferred answer into the definition of the problem. It may be "about" some universal medium in which consciouness and lays of physics are equal participants, if yours is the right answer. But I think it's enough to say that what makes the hard problem a hard problem is the need to explain qualia, and getting it through to people that they need to take qualia seriously, and not just talk about physical correlations.
newsmania 9y ago
> If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience. Not necessarily. If you think about it, consciousness is not physical. My thoughts have no mass. My experience of the color red has no height or width. Why should we assume that something that is not physical must come from The physical world? I think the best argument is that neuron functioning correlates with thought. However, as we know, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. I think one big hurdle for understanding consciousness is that people still have a matter – only mindset. I think people need to recognize that consciousness is not material. Then they will begin to make progress on the fundamental question, which is how something that is not material can arise from matter, or whether it comes from another source.
- fossuser 9y ago
  I don't buy that at all. It seems much more likely that consciousness is an emergent property of a neural network with the right feedback mechanisms in place and probably with some close tie in with language. Poke someone in the brain and consciousness changes, take a tiny bit of LSD and consciousness changes - it's not a magical property.
- mikeash 9y ago
  Does a JPEG containing the color red have mass? Are JPEGs non-physical?
  - newsmania 9y ago
    I may not understand your point correctly, but I would say yes, they do. The JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD. This is different from my experience of the color red that I see on the screen. The color red is physical. It is a type of photon with a tiny mass and volume. However my experience of it has no mass.
    - fossuser 9y ago
      If you're willing to accept that a JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD then why isn't the experience of the color red an arrangement of neural impulses in the brain?
ColanR 9y ago
You're making assumptions that Manzotti didn't make in his analysis, and that aren't warranted, given the nature of this discussion. a) physicality is not presumed. i.e., Manzotti doesn't seem to assume that consciousness is even "visible to scientific instrumentation." b) you're conflating logical "thought" with "consciousness". (> Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre-frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again.) That's a gigantic assumption that is absolutely unwarranted.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
openfuture 9y ago
The way I see it you have three-ish scenarios. Consciousness first, e.g. what you call matter is just a thing made up by your consciousness. No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. Consciousness as a result of matter and ... The laws of physics are deterministic / rational / bounded / mathematics e.g. we are computers and consciousness is a computation. As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement that makes it a isomorphic projection to/from a identity for some "consciousness complexity class". The laws of physics are mystical, something may be special about us, free will, yada yada ... Then anything could make sense, lets go take ayahuasca!
- randallsquared 9y ago
  > As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement This doesn't seem right... computation requires causality. It's not enough that you can build a model complex enough to define a random sequence of states as equivalent to computing something; if any consciousness is computed thereby, it's the model rather than the random sequence of states that would be conscious, no? All this will be easier to reason about when consciousness is understood, assuming we ever get there.
  - openfuture 9y ago
    Well the assumption is physics being sufficiently mathematic to be able to calculate the next state making any movement a computation (albeit beyond our understanding)
- colordrops 9y ago
  > No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. We can wave it off, but it seems as important as other explanations. I have a fourth theory: The nature of reality is dualistic, and the mind simultaneously creates the physical world while the mind arises from the physical world, supporting each other in a feedback loop. It's a dualistic phenomenon similar to particle-antiparticle pairs that form at a black hole's event horizon. two sides of the same coin. Subjective experience is commonly thrown out the door but what if it is just as important as objective reality?
danans 9y ago
I think you are agreeing with his overall statement, that consciousness is not made of something beyond nature, but is of nature. He just made the claim that the natural basis of consciousness is not limited to neurons, even though it might be predominated by them. He is trying to say there are other natural places we can search for the components of consciousness without having to resort to the false convenience of some flavor of dualism, whether Cartesian or Chalmersian(?).
pokemongoaway 9y ago
Regardless of whether you have an arm or not, there is a perceiver of these sense phenomena. Where is this perceiver? :)
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  > Where is this perceiver? Shouldn't the one claiming the existence of the thing be the one to describe or identify it? What is this so-called "perceiver" that you reference and are sure exists?
  - pokemongoaway 9y ago
    I don't follow. You don't believe perception is happening? Or are you saying perception doesn't require separation - like a eye can see itself without a mirror?
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      I'm questioning the idea/nature of a singular, concrete identity, the "self", that is doing the perceiving. This "self", the thing that seems to be the perceiver, might not be what common knowledge describes it to be.
      - pokemongoaway 9y ago
        I'm not claiming there to be a self. I'm claiming that there's a hardened practice for seeing directly the lack of self. The knowing quality is not self. As soon as we speak of neurons, however, we have location in physical space - and therefore, some sort of "self."

goatlover 9y ago

> If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience. Assuming physicalism is the case and not idealism, dualism, or some other metaphysics. If consciousness isn't the result of neuronal activity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physicalism is somehow false.

killjoywashere 9y ago
Substituting a few words to get to a less polarizing and more obvious topic: If falling isn't the result of gravity, then that would be a good reason to suspect that physics is somehow false. If it's not neurons, you're going to need extraordinary evidence!
- goatlover 9y ago
  If it's not neurons, it may be that the foundation for understanding consciousness is wrong. Which would be assuming that some objective, abstracted view of the world can explain our subjective experiences. I'm not saying it's impossible. Who knows. But it remains a hard problem for now, at least.
leepowers 9y ago
To be pedantic - that would only show that consciousness is non-neuronal. Max Tegmark has this idea of "consciousness as a state of matter"[1] - that neurons aren't particularly special - what matters is are particular patterns. These consciousness patterns can be composed of neurons, but they could also be composed of computer circuits, or rain drops, or any other particles.[2] To be pragmatic - the absence of a physical cause for consciousness does not preclude any other causes. Whatever environment consciousness exists in that environment must have rules, laws, constants, and symmetries that define that environment. So all we're doing is trading the laws of the universe for the laws of some ethereal no-material realm or supernatural realm. We're not actually performing any useful work, we're just shuffling the problem around. The hard problem of consciousness, the questions of determinism and free will - these problems will challenge any consciousness that finds itself in a rule-bound system. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM
- goatlover 9y ago
  Tegmark's theory sounds similar to Chalmers, yet Chalmers calls himself a dualist.

westoncb 9y ago

> Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. One thing to consider with that is that only the brain is able to give answers about consciousness—i.e. it's producer of verbal content and thought,' so there could be no communication of it if something like consciousness were going on at other loci in the body. To get a better feel for how something like that might happen, I'd highly recommend checking out some research on split brain patients who's corpus callosums (callosi?) have been severed (this connects the two brain hemispheres). One of my favorite examples: split brain patient shown an instruction to go out through the front door only to one eye (each eye is connected to the opposite brain hemisphere)—specifically it's shown to the eye which connects it to the hemisphere not used for speaking. The split brain patient will get up and follow the instruction, walking toward the door. Then the researcher asks the patient, "what are you doing?" and cognitive dissonance resolves itself into some plausible but essentially bullshit answer like, "I was, umm, going home to get a Coke..." If you'd like to hear more, check out [0] Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness—the article is talking about the 'hard problem' of consciousness. So, the issue at hand is immediate subjective experience, not a self-reflective mechanism (simple versions of that could readily be coded up). > If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If our universe is likened to a board game with some finite set of rules, e.g. Monopoly, the 'physics' of this universe is fully determined by the rules of the game (even if there are non-deterministic aspects where you have to e.g. roll dice). The non-hard problem of consciousness is a question in this realm, like "can I sell one of my properties to another player?"; the hard problem is necessarily outside the scope of the rules; it's a question more like, "what is the molecular composition of a 'Chance' card?". The rules of Monopoly do not cover this. In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it. [0] Social Brain, Michael S. Gazzaniga edit: I wrote 'not used for language' previously and changed it to 'not used for speaking,' which is an important distinction.

glenstein 9y ago
>One thing to consider with that is that only the brain is able to give answers about consciousness A conscious brain that advertises itself with communication certainly makes matters easier for us, however we can make reasonable inferences about consciousness in people and animals based on sophisticated behavior, not just communication. And if there is consciousness bound up in, say, a toenail, and it's not doing anything or communicating anything, not even doing some complicated information processing that it's keeping to itself, it's true that we might very well never discover it. But it's also true that we wouldn't have much reason for believing in any such form of consciousness given that it's completely unobservable. >Also, to be clear here—since this conflation derails just about every discussion of consciousness It sounds like you've got a dog in this one. That's fine; I do too. But I wouldn't say it's necessarily a conflation- some people's inclination to resolve the hard problem is to argue that it is best resolved, in some way or another, by mapping subjectivity onto biology. That's not enough, necessarily, you'll want some good philosophical reasons for thinking that that kind of explanation is capable of doing enough to give a satisfactory account of the hard problem. And that's certainly a matter of debate. But I wouldn't say it's a conflation, necessarily. >In a similar manner I believe the 'hard problem' of consciousness is getting at what it means to be a part of the fabric of the universe, and the laws of physics are expressed through that medium, but no specific laws create it. This sounds like an attempt to smuggle a preferred answer into the definition of the problem. It may be "about" some universal medium in which consciouness and lays of physics are equal participants, if yours is the right answer. But I think it's enough to say that what makes the hard problem a hard problem is the need to explain qualia, and getting it through to people that they need to take qualia seriously, and not just talk about physical correlations.

newsmania 9y ago

> If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience. Not necessarily. If you think about it, consciousness is not physical. My thoughts have no mass. My experience of the color red has no height or width. Why should we assume that something that is not physical must come from The physical world? I think the best argument is that neuron functioning correlates with thought. However, as we know, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. I think one big hurdle for understanding consciousness is that people still have a matter – only mindset. I think people need to recognize that consciousness is not material. Then they will begin to make progress on the fundamental question, which is how something that is not material can arise from matter, or whether it comes from another source.

fossuser 9y ago
I don't buy that at all. It seems much more likely that consciousness is an emergent property of a neural network with the right feedback mechanisms in place and probably with some close tie in with language. Poke someone in the brain and consciousness changes, take a tiny bit of LSD and consciousness changes - it's not a magical property.
mikeash 9y ago
Does a JPEG containing the color red have mass? Are JPEGs non-physical?
- newsmania 9y ago
  I may not understand your point correctly, but I would say yes, they do. The JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD. This is different from my experience of the color red that I see on the screen. The color red is physical. It is a type of photon with a tiny mass and volume. However my experience of it has no mass.
  - fossuser 9y ago
    If you're willing to accept that a JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD then why isn't the experience of the color red an arrangement of neural impulses in the brain?

ColanR 9y ago

You're making assumptions that Manzotti didn't make in his analysis, and that aren't warranted, given the nature of this discussion. a) physicality is not presumed. i.e., Manzotti doesn't seem to assume that consciousness is even "visible to scientific instrumentation." b) you're conflating logical "thought" with "consciousness". (> Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre-frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again.) That's a gigantic assumption that is absolutely unwarranted.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

openfuture 9y ago

The way I see it you have three-ish scenarios. Consciousness first, e.g. what you call matter is just a thing made up by your consciousness. No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. Consciousness as a result of matter and ... The laws of physics are deterministic / rational / bounded / mathematics e.g. we are computers and consciousness is a computation. As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement that makes it a isomorphic projection to/from a identity for some "consciousness complexity class". The laws of physics are mystical, something may be special about us, free will, yada yada ... Then anything could make sense, lets go take ayahuasca!

randallsquared 9y ago
> As a result basically everything that moves is conscious (although not necessarily the same "level" of conscious) since that movement is a computation all that is needed is to define a language for that movement This doesn't seem right... computation requires causality. It's not enough that you can build a model complex enough to define a random sequence of states as equivalent to computing something; if any consciousness is computed thereby, it's the model rather than the random sequence of states that would be conscious, no? All this will be easier to reason about when consciousness is understood, assuming we ever get there.
- openfuture 9y ago
  Well the assumption is physics being sufficiently mathematic to be able to calculate the next state making any movement a computation (albeit beyond our understanding)
colordrops 9y ago
> No need to discuss this one since it's not really a useful axiom when we want to explain the phenomena from the point of view of a physical world. We can wave it off, but it seems as important as other explanations. I have a fourth theory: The nature of reality is dualistic, and the mind simultaneously creates the physical world while the mind arises from the physical world, supporting each other in a feedback loop. It's a dualistic phenomenon similar to particle-antiparticle pairs that form at a black hole's event horizon. two sides of the same coin. Subjective experience is commonly thrown out the door but what if it is just as important as objective reality?

danans 9y ago

I think you are agreeing with his overall statement, that consciousness is not made of something beyond nature, but is of nature. He just made the claim that the natural basis of consciousness is not limited to neurons, even though it might be predominated by them. He is trying to say there are other natural places we can search for the components of consciousness without having to resort to the false convenience of some flavor of dualism, whether Cartesian or Chalmersian(?).

pokemongoaway 9y ago

Regardless of whether you have an arm or not, there is a perceiver of these sense phenomena. Where is this perceiver? :)

dwaltrip 9y ago
> Where is this perceiver? Shouldn't the one claiming the existence of the thing be the one to describe or identify it? What is this so-called "perceiver" that you reference and are sure exists?
- pokemongoaway 9y ago
  I don't follow. You don't believe perception is happening? Or are you saying perception doesn't require separation - like a eye can see itself without a mirror?
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    I'm questioning the idea/nature of a singular, concrete identity, the "self", that is doing the perceiving. This "self", the thing that seems to be the perceiver, might not be what common knowledge describes it to be.
    - pokemongoaway 9y ago
      I'm not claiming there to be a self. I'm claiming that there's a hardened practice for seeing directly the lack of self. The knowing quality is not self. As soon as we speak of neurons, however, we have location in physical space - and therefore, some sort of "self."