13 ms·

Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

226 points by mathgenius 9y ago

wickawic 9y ago
The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo-location. On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a "conscious action" or an "unconscious motivation". This is a very Freudian concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind. The philosophical consciousness is much more holistic, but also very vague. You wouldn't think a tree has an Ego, but it might have some sort of existential awareness. It's cool to see the philosophy of consciousness intersect with neuroscience, since outsiders like me tend to think of these fields as at-odds.
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- simonh 9y ago
  Listening to Marvin Minsky on Closer To Truth on Youtube was a revelation for me. As in many philosophical debates, before you even start to begin to think about and communicate about a subject you have to get your terminology clear and accurate. Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could. This is a good primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27... Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...
ghthor 9y ago
Killer observations. I've been wondering if conscienceness is circular activity in the brain, such that while we are conscience there is a constant circle of activity, and upon sleep this circle stops. I suppose this article is saying that this is metacognigtion, but still circle all the way down.
roceasta 9y ago
This seems consistent with my experience that when I'm attending hard to a task I have no idea what it is like. >For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth. This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.
breckinloggins 9y ago
This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender. This is especially troubling when you consider that meta-consciousness sells easily to the general public as "the hard problem" (our thorough use of it seemingly being a large part of what makes humans different, after all), while it's likely that it's more of an engineering problem after you've figured out base consciousness. If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. Implementing recursive phenomenal access seems like an undergraduate research project after that. Yet it's most often the very thing we spend all our time focusing on. Frustrating. We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.
- tpeo 9y ago
  No new words are needed. What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again, using and re-using words under different meanings without ever bothering to either listen or read their predecessors properly, which only leads to feelings of ineffectualness and a strange sensation of déjà vu. When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers for the sake of attaching their names to a publication, then it will see some progress.
  - nlknz88 9y ago
    > What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again For a forum of smart people, dumb things get posted a lot. Making up new words is an organic feature of an individuals development. No one is under an obligation to do as you wish. Go work on it if it means that much to you. Stop expecting everyone else to get it done for you. > When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers You don't even know? Pretty bold assertion then. One would think the genius that is so willing to explain how everyone else is screwing it up would be better acquainted with the situation than "could" and "most likely"
justinpombrio 9y ago
I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms. The article asks this question: > Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious? Implicitly saying that "experience" and "consciousness" should be defined such that I experienced and was conscious of those sensations even though I was not aware of them. Thus, using the terminology of the article, I am currently conscious of a ton of things all at once: The feeling of my feet on the floor, my butt in the seat, my tongue in my mouth, the sound of my typing, and of the rattling behind me, and of the rumbling of the train, the vibrations of the train, the propioceptive feeling of the positions of my limbs, the slight but distinctive smell of mass transit. Is this right? Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?
- roceasta 9y ago
  Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was). I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)
- ars 9y ago
  > Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"? And is able to describe that thing, even if just to itself. Have you ever experienced in a dream, being able to do some wondrous thing - write music, feel a wall from a distance, whatever. In the dream you feel that ability. But when you wake up, while you remember dreaming about it, you can not actually make yourself re-experience it. (For example: Describe the song you wrote.) That's what the author claims is the difference between conscious and not conscious. (If I understood him correctly.) If you have conscious thought, you can cause your mind to experience any sensation you have already had. A non-conscious being can not do that, they can only experience what they experience right this moment.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
I've been involved in meta cognition research, but I am confused by the distinction being raised between consciousness and meta consciousness, as 'conciousness' seems to reduce to 'interact', as in particle A hits particle B, and so reduced seems to have no meaning.
hathawsh 9y ago
Expanding on the breathing example in the article, could we say there are at least three distinct systems in the brain that control breathing? They are: - Conscious breathing: I follow a chosen breathing pattern with no immediate awareness of the breathing process. - Meta-conscious breathing: I choose to be fully aware and in control of multiple aspects of breathing. I control my diaphragm and lips directly, I listen to and feel air passing, I consider how the position of my body affects breathing, etc. I also may choose an appropriate breathing pattern: deeper for hiking, more rhythmic for aerobic exercise, or slow for contemplation. After I have chosen a new pattern, that new pattern soon becomes conscious rather than meta-conscious; although the special breathing continues, I am no longer immediately aware of my new behavior. A change in activity reverts my conscious breathing behavior back to normal without any meta-conscious choice. - Unconscious breathing: What I do when I sleep. It's clearly different from conscious breathing because I may snore, and many people even suffer from sleep apnea, which means they momentarily stop breathing while sleeping. Neither snoring nor sleep apnea are part of the experience of breathing consciously, so unconscious breathing must be very different somehow. Am I using the terms correctly? Curiously, many activities like speaking, eating, and swimming interrupt normal breathing yet do not necessarily invoke any meta-conscious decision making. If I had to think about when to breathe every time I wanted to speak, my meta-conscious mind would be overloaded with that task alone and I would forget what I wanted to say.
- dahauns 9y ago
  From my gut I'd say there are two - your "conscious breathing" is actually the same as your unconscious breathing process: Both are done without awareness to it and are primarily modulated via the vegetative system (O2 receptors in the carotid, hering-breuer reflex and so on). The difference being that while you're awake you can consciously affect and correct your breathing (your "meta-conscious breathing"). When you're asleep, your body has to rely on it's other unconscious mechanisms to do that.
dwaltrip 9y ago
My interpretation of "meta-consciousness" as described by the article: It is simply a brief period of intent, focused replay/study of the experience that just occurred, while it is very fresh in the mind/short-term memory. One is closely reviewing what happened, looking at the experience from different angles, replaying it, etc. This could all happen in the span of a second or less. It is a matter of focus and proximity. It isn't a special layer of consciousness. It may seem qualitatively different, as the mental model of the experience is so deep & rich in the moments immediately during and after, if one is focusing closely. But I don't see the argument for this becoming some sort of "meta-consciousness". In short, the concepts of "consciousness" and "being conscious of [something]" are related, but they aren't the exact same thing.
- aarpmcgee 9y ago
  What if you're merely interpreting meta-consciousness according to the mode in which your mind currently operates?
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Come again?
dontreact 9y ago
I lost the thread in the first two paragraphs. Can anyone explain to me why it's so obvious infants are conscious? THis seems to be taken as a given for the rest of the article. Couldn't they be in a state similar to sleepwalking which seems not conscious to me? Perhaps consciousness flashes on as you have your first few "flashbulb memories".
- hasenj 9y ago
  Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    In my view, the two dynamics are incredibly intertwined. The sensation is largely made up of and intertwined with an understanding of what the sensation _means_. I'll try to give an example: Think of a complex modern art painting. It's much more difficult to perceive the colors used in the painting, as the boundaries between different parts and components of the painting are far less meaningful or distinguishable, compared to most objects we encounter. When you look around your kitchen, the sensations of color are nearly instantaneously associated with rich semantic information about the various objects. E.g. that red object is the "top" of the "peanut butter" "jar" that "I" "bought" "last week" (this is the tip of the semantic iceberg). This makes it easy to hold onto that perception -- it is able to quickly take root in a rich semantic soil that the brain has been developing over our entire lives. This doesn't happen with a messy, semantically-limited perception like looking at a modern art painting. Sure, we can focus very hard to isolate the different streaks and blurs and blobs of color, but it is noticeably more difficult. With an infant, as their semantic soil is very shallow compared to an adults (or even a young child), I imagine that their perception of the world is perhaps more like a modern art painting. Slowly, the colorful blurs and blob and smells and sounds take on meaning as the infant learns about the world and builds up an understanding of the complex patterns in life.
    - monktastic1 9y ago
xelxebar 9y ago
This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? At this point it mostly just seems like we define ourselves to have this "conscious" property and then circularly use that as a distinguishing characteristic of humans. How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?
- monktastic1 9y ago
  Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    I don't so much disagree as am confused by what people (including myself) mean with the word "consciousness". It also doen't seem like this is a discussion of pure qualia on the level of "Is the red you see the same as the one I see?" For one, I certainly judge you, Mr. Internet Person Monktastic1, as being conscious. And I can somewhat unpack that judgement into relatively empirical observations that can be cross-compared with someone else. This feels really similar to my judgement of you as possesing the trait "human". On a meta-discussion level, the rhetoric I usually encounter reminds me a lot of the Plato-Diogenes debate on the essence of "human". Can we really reduce the intuitive notion of consciousness to "featherless biped thougts" or some such? For those reasons, I suspect that the intuitive notion of "consciousness" is more a (fuzzy) collection expectations we have on lower level traits. Like, since you are able to engage in this conversation, I judge you as human and therefore this leads me to expect that you also have a functioning pancreas. On the surface though, language ability and pancreas possession don't have any obvious reason to be linked. Taking a bird's-eye view, I do hope that this discussion continues until the questions become sharp and precise enough to be called science instead of philosophy.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem? The cells that make us vomit? The bacterial colonies in our sinuses? I just think the answer to all of these questions when all is said and done will be yes. And we'll be sad how much life we killed because we didn't think it was conscious enough. And maybe if we're lucky when we die we get to watch our consciousness grow to include all things. Maybe that's why we have circuits in our brain that seem to respond that way to mushrooms. Maybe there's a genetic advantage to harboring the illusion that you are a separate consciousness, but it's just there to make you want to struggle to hold up your tiny corner of a collective consciousness.
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- thevardanian 9y ago
  No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.
  - sjeohp 9y ago
    No. the universe isn't math. The universe is matter. Math is a part of the universe. Therefore math is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less.
    - thevardanian 9y ago
      Math isn't anything but matter. Math is just another thought construct. A powerful thought construct, but a thought construct nonetheless. As a thought construct it too is material. The electronic impulses on you computer are no different than the ones in your brain. So yes. Math is also a material manifestation. Life is a material manifestation. Thought is a material manifestation. The problem is with you trying to separate yourself from matter, but the very thing you're using to create that separation is thought. It is the very thing you're trying to get away from, and so you cannot exist separate from thought by using thought. It is a futile and empty game.
marccantwell 9y ago
It is hard to take the author seriously, or as an authority, when he rejects materialism and states something like "Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness", and he believes in the afterlife.
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- nsxwolf 9y ago
  Why does that make the author hard to take seriously? Because of your bias toward materialism?
  - mehh 9y ago
    Complete lack of evidence to support his "belief" that sounds very much like supernatural religious magic.
  - Marazan 9y ago
    Well, when it comes to consciousness the alternative is dualism and dualism is the belief in magic. Given how discredited dualism is it is amazing how far people will go to deny hey are dualists whilst spouting all the arguements and beliefs of dualists.
    - goatlover 9y ago
      Dualism is the belief there is more than one fundamental substance in the world (mind & matter). There's nothing magical about that, it's just an ontological position. But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact.
      - Marazan 9y ago
        But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact. Yes, that is where the magic is.
hbarka 9y ago
"Reflection and introspection are programming facilities in the Java programming language that allow an object to discover information about itself and other objects at runtime." Sounds about similar.
Scarys 9y ago
This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me.
robg 9y ago
Like defining "athletic" or "smart" or even "stress" or "eating" - all go deeper than we think.
amelius 9y ago
I wonder what consciousness would be like if our brains had the size of our solar system. Would we be conscious if our neurons took on the order of minutes to communicate with each other?
- gus_massa 9y ago
  [Nitpicking alert] The giant squid have the fastest axons to try to coordinate their giant body. They use some tricks to make the transmission faster, so I'm not sure if you can use this speed inside a brain successfully. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon the speed is 25m/s, so in a minute you the signal could travel 1500m ~= 1mile.
creo 9y ago
Lets challenge this. What if baby can be born alive without having consciousness? It's not impossible since we can't detect consciousness. Maybe it occurs in some babies born with brain development problems, maybe not. Besides title says "Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think". Sounds clicky-baity and it assumes that reader is dumb.
- rullelito 9y ago
  There's nothing saying a fully functional human must have consciousness. It could just be that some people are machines acting on biologically coded rules, and that they don't have an inner experience of their self.
  - slfnflctd 9y ago
    It seems to me, though, that this would eventually come up in conversation. Much of human discourse is centered around the concept of individuals' inner experiences. The thought that someone who seems on the outside very similar to me could be completely missing the "inner experience of self" that I (think I) have certainly feels wrong-- it's deeply uncomfortable and rather frightening. Furthermore, espousing such an idea opens the door to those who would attempt to use it to discriminate (likely by applying existing bias with a flimsy illusion of accuracy). This one doesn't have much use to me beyond tangential thought experiments. It can be cited to justify terrible things in the hands of bigots, and I suspect it's fairly easily invalidated for all practical purposes.
- pixl97 9y ago
  If you don't have consciousness you cannot interact with the world around you in a 'human' manner. So yes, when we see minds that did not develop correctly we see what we consider animal like behavior, or no behavior at all.
beepboopbeep 9y ago
If consciousness is always present, but we don't show signs of it until ~5 months, maybe it's just that we need memories to understand the depths of our own thoughts? Like going from a 2D plane of the now to a 3D plane of the now, before, and after thus birthing more abstract thoughts such as cause and effect?
RoutinePlayer 9y ago
I find that any discussion of consciousness that doesn't build upon the work of so many other great thinkers (like Daniel Dennett, et al.) is usually a waste of time.
- cat199 9y ago
  and yet such 'great thinkers' are quick to 'not build upon the work' of religious thinkers throughout the ages, despite the fact that at this level, these topics lie solely in the realm of philosophy..
ramblerman 9y ago
This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'. If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.
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- the_af 9y ago
  Why would this be related to abortion? I don't see anything in the article mentioning human embryos, only newborns...
- dark_silicon 9y ago
  I'd encourage anyone to examine their conscience, read about the viability of babies born prematurely, and consider that even post-birth a baby is not self-sufficient. We don't have good criteria for what makes something alive or conscious, yet many draw an arbitrary line at birth. I'm not looking to continue this discussion, but I'm glad you're thinking about this.
  - imaginenore 9y ago
    "Self-sufficient" is not a good argument. Most people are not self-sufficient when it comes to survival on their own. Just look at the history - as soon as mass-produced food is cut off, famines kill hundreds of thousands, millions sometimes. I used to support abortion, but more and more I'm sliding towards being maybe against it, because (some of) the anti-abortion side arguments are logical too. No matter how you draw the line based on some argument, you can use the same logic to kill adults. That includes viability, lack of pain, etc. On the other hand, our technology is at the level where you can turn any cell in your body into sperm: https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sperm.html https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sp... So if you're against abortion based on the "viability", every time you scratch your nose, you commit genocide. It's a hard question.
- cat199 9y ago
ozy 9y ago
I have a theory. Any theory about consciousness that does not include learning is at best incomplete, but more likely just wrong. --- Our brains create models of the world. They are constantly predicting, making choices. And on surprise, looking back to see where it went wrong. On reward, reinforcing the behavior leading up to it. In a way, our brains are observers of our environment, our bodies, and itself.
musashizak 9y ago
Consciousness can esists also without the object of perception because is over the duality subject/object. In a room we have perception of the objects forma the light. But in a room empty of objects we can see the light because the light autoreveal her self. In an equal mode is the consciousness

226 points by mathgenius 9y ago

The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo-location. On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a "conscious action" or an "unconscious motivation". This is a very Freudian concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind. The philosophical consciousness is much more holistic, but also very vague. You wouldn't think a tree has an Ego, but it might have some sort of existential awareness. It's cool to see the philosophy of consciousness intersect with neuroscience, since outsiders like me tend to think of these fields as at-odds.

deleted 9y ago
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simonh 9y ago
Listening to Marvin Minsky on Closer To Truth on Youtube was a revelation for me. As in many philosophical debates, before you even start to begin to think about and communicate about a subject you have to get your terminology clear and accurate. Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could. This is a good primer on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27... Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt-Dlv&index=10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...

ghthor 9y ago

Killer observations. I've been wondering if conscienceness is circular activity in the brain, such that while we are conscience there is a constant circle of activity, and upon sleep this circle stops. I suppose this article is saying that this is metacognigtion, but still circle all the way down.

roceasta 9y ago

This seems consistent with my experience that when I'm attending hard to a task I have no idea what it is like. >For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth. This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.

breckinloggins 9y ago

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender. This is especially troubling when you consider that meta-consciousness sells easily to the general public as "the hard problem" (our thorough use of it seemingly being a large part of what makes humans different, after all), while it's likely that it's more of an engineering problem after you've figured out base consciousness. If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. Implementing recursive phenomenal access seems like an undergraduate research project after that. Yet it's most often the very thing we spend all our time focusing on. Frustrating. We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.

tpeo 9y ago
No new words are needed. What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again, using and re-using words under different meanings without ever bothering to either listen or read their predecessors properly, which only leads to feelings of ineffectualness and a strange sensation of déjà vu. When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers for the sake of attaching their names to a publication, then it will see some progress.
- nlknz88 9y ago
  > What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again For a forum of smart people, dumb things get posted a lot. Making up new words is an organic feature of an individuals development. No one is under an obligation to do as you wish. Go work on it if it means that much to you. Stop expecting everyone else to get it done for you. > When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers You don't even know? Pretty bold assertion then. One would think the genius that is so willing to explain how everyone else is screwing it up would be better acquainted with the situation than "could" and "most likely"

justinpombrio 9y ago

I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms. The article asks this question: > Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious? Implicitly saying that "experience" and "consciousness" should be defined such that I experienced and was conscious of those sensations even though I was not aware of them. Thus, using the terminology of the article, I am currently conscious of a ton of things all at once: The feeling of my feet on the floor, my butt in the seat, my tongue in my mouth, the sound of my typing, and of the rattling behind me, and of the rumbling of the train, the vibrations of the train, the propioceptive feeling of the positions of my limbs, the slight but distinctive smell of mass transit. Is this right? Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?

roceasta 9y ago
Point taken. One reading of the article is that meta-consciousness is the new consciousness (whatever that was). I think of consciousness as being 'what you are paying attention to and what it is like'. One problem with this is that when you're attending sufficiently strongly to something you can't actually notice what it is like; there isn't enough bandwidth free. Yet some of the associated ideas ('qualia') may linger in working memory for a more relaxed examination afterwards. Which proves that you were paying attention and that mental work was going on. (Perhaps it also shows that trying too hard is counter-productive due to lack of integration with the rest of the mind.)
ars 9y ago
> Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"? And is able to describe that thing, even if just to itself. Have you ever experienced in a dream, being able to do some wondrous thing - write music, feel a wall from a distance, whatever. In the dream you feel that ability. But when you wake up, while you remember dreaming about it, you can not actually make yourself re-experience it. (For example: Describe the song you wrote.) That's what the author claims is the difference between conscious and not conscious. (If I understood him correctly.) If you have conscious thought, you can cause your mind to experience any sensation you have already had. A non-conscious being can not do that, they can only experience what they experience right this moment.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

I've been involved in meta cognition research, but I am confused by the distinction being raised between consciousness and meta consciousness, as 'conciousness' seems to reduce to 'interact', as in particle A hits particle B, and so reduced seems to have no meaning.

hathawsh 9y ago

Expanding on the breathing example in the article, could we say there are at least three distinct systems in the brain that control breathing? They are: - Conscious breathing: I follow a chosen breathing pattern with no immediate awareness of the breathing process. - Meta-conscious breathing: I choose to be fully aware and in control of multiple aspects of breathing. I control my diaphragm and lips directly, I listen to and feel air passing, I consider how the position of my body affects breathing, etc. I also may choose an appropriate breathing pattern: deeper for hiking, more rhythmic for aerobic exercise, or slow for contemplation. After I have chosen a new pattern, that new pattern soon becomes conscious rather than meta-conscious; although the special breathing continues, I am no longer immediately aware of my new behavior. A change in activity reverts my conscious breathing behavior back to normal without any meta-conscious choice. - Unconscious breathing: What I do when I sleep. It's clearly different from conscious breathing because I may snore, and many people even suffer from sleep apnea, which means they momentarily stop breathing while sleeping. Neither snoring nor sleep apnea are part of the experience of breathing consciously, so unconscious breathing must be very different somehow. Am I using the terms correctly? Curiously, many activities like speaking, eating, and swimming interrupt normal breathing yet do not necessarily invoke any meta-conscious decision making. If I had to think about when to breathe every time I wanted to speak, my meta-conscious mind would be overloaded with that task alone and I would forget what I wanted to say.

dahauns 9y ago
From my gut I'd say there are two - your "conscious breathing" is actually the same as your unconscious breathing process: Both are done without awareness to it and are primarily modulated via the vegetative system (O2 receptors in the carotid, hering-breuer reflex and so on). The difference being that while you're awake you can consciously affect and correct your breathing (your "meta-conscious breathing"). When you're asleep, your body has to rely on it's other unconscious mechanisms to do that.

dwaltrip 9y ago

My interpretation of "meta-consciousness" as described by the article: It is simply a brief period of intent, focused replay/study of the experience that just occurred, while it is very fresh in the mind/short-term memory. One is closely reviewing what happened, looking at the experience from different angles, replaying it, etc. This could all happen in the span of a second or less. It is a matter of focus and proximity. It isn't a special layer of consciousness. It may seem qualitatively different, as the mental model of the experience is so deep & rich in the moments immediately during and after, if one is focusing closely. But I don't see the argument for this becoming some sort of "meta-consciousness". In short, the concepts of "consciousness" and "being conscious of [something]" are related, but they aren't the exact same thing.

aarpmcgee 9y ago
What if you're merely interpreting meta-consciousness according to the mode in which your mind currently operates?
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Come again?

dontreact 9y ago

I lost the thread in the first two paragraphs. Can anyone explain to me why it's so obvious infants are conscious? THis seems to be taken as a given for the rest of the article. Couldn't they be in a state similar to sleepwalking which seems not conscious to me? Perhaps consciousness flashes on as you have your first few "flashbulb memories".

hasenj 9y ago
Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  In my view, the two dynamics are incredibly intertwined. The sensation is largely made up of and intertwined with an understanding of what the sensation _means_. I'll try to give an example: Think of a complex modern art painting. It's much more difficult to perceive the colors used in the painting, as the boundaries between different parts and components of the painting are far less meaningful or distinguishable, compared to most objects we encounter. When you look around your kitchen, the sensations of color are nearly instantaneously associated with rich semantic information about the various objects. E.g. that red object is the "top" of the "peanut butter" "jar" that "I" "bought" "last week" (this is the tip of the semantic iceberg). This makes it easy to hold onto that perception -- it is able to quickly take root in a rich semantic soil that the brain has been developing over our entire lives. This doesn't happen with a messy, semantically-limited perception like looking at a modern art painting. Sure, we can focus very hard to isolate the different streaks and blurs and blobs of color, but it is noticeably more difficult. With an infant, as their semantic soil is very shallow compared to an adults (or even a young child), I imagine that their perception of the world is perhaps more like a modern art painting. Slowly, the colorful blurs and blob and smells and sounds take on meaning as the infant learns about the world and builds up an understanding of the complex patterns in life.
  - monktastic1 9y ago

xelxebar 9y ago

This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? At this point it mostly just seems like we define ourselves to have this "conscious" property and then circularly use that as a distinguishing characteristic of humans. How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?

monktastic1 9y ago
Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."
- xelxebar 9y ago
  I don't so much disagree as am confused by what people (including myself) mean with the word "consciousness". It also doen't seem like this is a discussion of pure qualia on the level of "Is the red you see the same as the one I see?" For one, I certainly judge you, Mr. Internet Person Monktastic1, as being conscious. And I can somewhat unpack that judgement into relatively empirical observations that can be cross-compared with someone else. This feels really similar to my judgement of you as possesing the trait "human". On a meta-discussion level, the rhetoric I usually encounter reminds me a lot of the Plato-Diogenes debate on the essence of "human". Can we really reduce the intuitive notion of consciousness to "featherless biped thougts" or some such? For those reasons, I suspect that the intuitive notion of "consciousness" is more a (fuzzy) collection expectations we have on lower level traits. Like, since you are able to engage in this conversation, I judge you as human and therefore this leads me to expect that you also have a functioning pancreas. On the surface though, language ability and pancreas possession don't have any obvious reason to be linked. Taking a bird's-eye view, I do hope that this discussion continues until the questions become sharp and precise enough to be called science instead of philosophy.

erikpukinskis 9y ago

My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem? The cells that make us vomit? The bacterial colonies in our sinuses? I just think the answer to all of these questions when all is said and done will be yes. And we'll be sad how much life we killed because we didn't think it was conscious enough. And maybe if we're lucky when we die we get to watch our consciousness grow to include all things. Maybe that's why we have circuits in our brain that seem to respond that way to mushrooms. Maybe there's a genetic advantage to harboring the illusion that you are a separate consciousness, but it's just there to make you want to struggle to hold up your tiny corner of a collective consciousness.

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thevardanian 9y ago
No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.
- sjeohp 9y ago
  No. the universe isn't math. The universe is matter. Math is a part of the universe. Therefore math is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less.
  - thevardanian 9y ago
    Math isn't anything but matter. Math is just another thought construct. A powerful thought construct, but a thought construct nonetheless. As a thought construct it too is material. The electronic impulses on you computer are no different than the ones in your brain. So yes. Math is also a material manifestation. Life is a material manifestation. Thought is a material manifestation. The problem is with you trying to separate yourself from matter, but the very thing you're using to create that separation is thought. It is the very thing you're trying to get away from, and so you cannot exist separate from thought by using thought. It is a futile and empty game.

marccantwell 9y ago

It is hard to take the author seriously, or as an authority, when he rejects materialism and states something like "Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness", and he believes in the afterlife.

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nsxwolf 9y ago
Why does that make the author hard to take seriously? Because of your bias toward materialism?
- mehh 9y ago
  Complete lack of evidence to support his "belief" that sounds very much like supernatural religious magic.
- Marazan 9y ago
  Well, when it comes to consciousness the alternative is dualism and dualism is the belief in magic. Given how discredited dualism is it is amazing how far people will go to deny hey are dualists whilst spouting all the arguements and beliefs of dualists.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Dualism is the belief there is more than one fundamental substance in the world (mind & matter). There's nothing magical about that, it's just an ontological position. But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact.
    - Marazan 9y ago
      But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact. Yes, that is where the magic is.

hbarka 9y ago

"Reflection and introspection are programming facilities in the Java programming language that allow an object to discover information about itself and other objects at runtime." Sounds about similar.

Scarys 9y ago

This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me.

robg 9y ago

Like defining "athletic" or "smart" or even "stress" or "eating" - all go deeper than we think.

amelius 9y ago

I wonder what consciousness would be like if our brains had the size of our solar system. Would we be conscious if our neurons took on the order of minutes to communicate with each other?

gus_massa 9y ago
[Nitpicking alert] The giant squid have the fastest axons to try to coordinate their giant body. They use some tricks to make the transmission faster, so I'm not sure if you can use this speed inside a brain successfully. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon the speed is 25m/s, so in a minute you the signal could travel 1500m ~= 1mile.

creo 9y ago

Lets challenge this. What if baby can be born alive without having consciousness? It's not impossible since we can't detect consciousness. Maybe it occurs in some babies born with brain development problems, maybe not. Besides title says "Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think". Sounds clicky-baity and it assumes that reader is dumb.

rullelito 9y ago
There's nothing saying a fully functional human must have consciousness. It could just be that some people are machines acting on biologically coded rules, and that they don't have an inner experience of their self.
- slfnflctd 9y ago
  It seems to me, though, that this would eventually come up in conversation. Much of human discourse is centered around the concept of individuals' inner experiences. The thought that someone who seems on the outside very similar to me could be completely missing the "inner experience of self" that I (think I) have certainly feels wrong-- it's deeply uncomfortable and rather frightening. Furthermore, espousing such an idea opens the door to those who would attempt to use it to discriminate (likely by applying existing bias with a flimsy illusion of accuracy). This one doesn't have much use to me beyond tangential thought experiments. It can be cited to justify terrible things in the hands of bigots, and I suspect it's fairly easily invalidated for all practical purposes.
pixl97 9y ago
If you don't have consciousness you cannot interact with the world around you in a 'human' manner. So yes, when we see minds that did not develop correctly we see what we consider animal like behavior, or no behavior at all.

beepboopbeep 9y ago

If consciousness is always present, but we don't show signs of it until ~5 months, maybe it's just that we need memories to understand the depths of our own thoughts? Like going from a 2D plane of the now to a 3D plane of the now, before, and after thus birthing more abstract thoughts such as cause and effect?

RoutinePlayer 9y ago

I find that any discussion of consciousness that doesn't build upon the work of so many other great thinkers (like Daniel Dennett, et al.) is usually a waste of time.

cat199 9y ago
and yet such 'great thinkers' are quick to 'not build upon the work' of religious thinkers throughout the ages, despite the fact that at this level, these topics lie solely in the realm of philosophy..

ramblerman 9y ago

This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'. If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.

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the_af 9y ago
Why would this be related to abortion? I don't see anything in the article mentioning human embryos, only newborns...
dark_silicon 9y ago
I'd encourage anyone to examine their conscience, read about the viability of babies born prematurely, and consider that even post-birth a baby is not self-sufficient. We don't have good criteria for what makes something alive or conscious, yet many draw an arbitrary line at birth. I'm not looking to continue this discussion, but I'm glad you're thinking about this.
- imaginenore 9y ago
  "Self-sufficient" is not a good argument. Most people are not self-sufficient when it comes to survival on their own. Just look at the history - as soon as mass-produced food is cut off, famines kill hundreds of thousands, millions sometimes. I used to support abortion, but more and more I'm sliding towards being maybe against it, because (some of) the anti-abortion side arguments are logical too. No matter how you draw the line based on some argument, you can use the same logic to kill adults. That includes viability, lack of pain, etc. On the other hand, our technology is at the level where you can turn any cell in your body into sperm: https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sperm.html https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sp... So if you're against abortion based on the "viability", every time you scratch your nose, you commit genocide. It's a hard question.
cat199 9y ago

ozy 9y ago

I have a theory. Any theory about consciousness that does not include learning is at best incomplete, but more likely just wrong. --- Our brains create models of the world. They are constantly predicting, making choices. And on surprise, looking back to see where it went wrong. On reward, reinforcing the behavior leading up to it. In a way, our brains are observers of our environment, our bodies, and itself.

musashizak 9y ago

Consciousness can esists also without the object of perception because is over the duality subject/object. In a room we have perception of the objects forma the light. But in a room empty of objects we can see the light because the light autoreveal her self. In an equal mode is the consciousness