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The brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. The probes currently available to science- fMRI and GSR - are both gross measures of cortica

The brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. The probes currently available to science- fMRI and GSR - are both gross measures of cortical electrical activity. They're enough to start to explore apparent structural and (gross) electrical correlation between brain areas and (gross) alterations in "consciousness", in this case unconsciousness invoked via propofol and ketamine. Fair enough. However, it irritates me when I hear scientists loosely throw the word "consciousness" into these studies and here's why. In these studies, consciousness is always implicitly defined operationally as the electrical activity in some identified networks- DAT and DSM and front-parietal and sensory motor etc.. But the concept of consciousness has another life in philosophy where in works by people like Patricia Churchland and others, it references something more subtle- the mystery of why there should be anything we call experience at all. Experience itself doesn't seem to be necessary to the working of any machine, including our brains. We don't think our TVs have any experiences despite (being capable of) accurately representing all human visual experiences. The reason we don't think they experience what they're displaying is because we know how they work and we know there's no ghost in the machine. Adding on "experiences" to an explanation of how TVs work is gratuitous and unnecessary. But that's not the case with humans-just the opposite. Experience is absolutely foundational. Descartes tried to boil his world down to what he could know with absolute certainty and arrived at his famous "Cogito ergo sum" formulation, but actually, he skipped a step; that step is simply- "There is experience". Experience is perfectly gratuitous to any explanation of brain activity since all that activity, like an electrical storm, could take place in exactly the same way without it. We (our brains) could be, and most scientists believe are, very complicated, but purely mechanical machines. They could be exactly as they are with no more awareness- not to say feedback loops- than a blender. But that account leaves the problem of experience or consciousness completely untouched. That would be O.K. except we know we have it. The mystery of consciousness is not totally defined by questions like of "can I make you unconscious or conscious?" or "can I cause you to have this or that illusory experience by stimulating your brain?". The mystery of consciousness is why is there anything like experience at all ? So whenever I read a paper that makes some confident assertion about consciousness, it gets under my skin. It's electrical activity and perhaps human behavior and speech they are actually examining, not consciousness. I hear these papers gratingly assuming the consequent with respect to the biggest mystery there is. They are implicitly saying "this is consciousness, this pattern of electrical activity in the brain and here is what we have discovered about consciousness". That's one perspective, but to philosophers, both academic and non-academic, it's a form of punting on the real question. Consciousness is to brain science what AGI is to AI. Researchers just love to make assertions and grand predictions. Actually the correlation between the two is closer than that since strong AI claims that consciousness can be captured in a computer; Kurtzweil and his Singularity concept is in this school of thought. He and people like him claim that not only does experience arise as a direct result of brain activity but any substrate- including general purpose computer platforms- will similarly give rise to the same experiences if only they are programmed in a particular way, specifically, if the computations are functionally equivalent to the brain's computations. Are badly programmed computers therefore experiencing chaos? Well, why not? Are simpler computers, like a thermostat which "experiences" temperature changes, also somehow dimly conscious? If that seems like a straw man argument to you, you should know Marvin Minsky bought it and so do a lot of other scientists whether they realize it or not. All of this is just a non-starer to people like me. You don't get to skip a step because it keeps your theory neat or provides you the promise of immortality because you uploaded your "you" to a machine. Consciousness, understood in this way, is a genuine mystery which for now at least I don't think we have the conceptual tools to even define much less make pronouncements about.

sofal 6y ago
I think we're a long way from a good understanding of how consciousness works, but I also think a lot of people are going to subscribe to a sort of consciousness-of-the-gaps idea no matter how much progress is made in understanding the actual mechanisms. Even if we fully understood and and could reproduce it, there would be scores of people who would flat out refuse to see the evidence and would simply assert that the ineffable "experience" does not exist within beings for which they don't want to acknowledge it. The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all. I think if you want to put forth a hypothesis that there is some ghostly ineffable part of consciousness called "experience" that cannot ever be touched or measured by scientific means, then you have a self-defeating argument that cannot be supported. You might as well go full solipsism. There's nothing stopping you. Consciousness is a genuine mystery at this point, but I think some people will still see it that way even if we solve it, and this is clearer to me every time I see people trash any kind of effort or progress made by science in understanding the brain, claiming that it is not in fact progress at all.
- axguscbklp 6y ago
  On the other hand, I think that many people are emotionally invested in believing that science must be capable of solving the hard problem of consciousness even though there is no reason to assume that science is. It is perfectly possible that the hard problem of consciousness is in principle and forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation.
- david_w 6y ago
  "The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all." This is a good point and makes the problem interesting in an additional way. We (I) assume something like p-zombies exist in non-human consciousness, dogs and cats for example. It's like something to be a dog. How far down do we want to go ? Frogs? I'll bite; it's like something to be a frog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8IY2eTBqd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8IY2eTBqd8 But here's a counter to the p-zombies argument, OK? The p-zombies argument is usually taken to mean there comes a point where what has been created is so indistinguishable from "real" people, ala Ex Machina, that arguing over it is a form of ideologically motivated perversion. Let me turn that round and say that the p-zombie argument is (accidentally) making the following strong claim- it is impossible to build a machine which in every way acts human but has no experience. That's a very very strong claim on this universe. I wouldn't take the bet, because someone's going to do it. But if someone is going to do it, how can we tell when they have or they haven't? The Turing Test is outdated (as I see it) and anyway already passed for some judges ( re: ELIZA). To me, this circles back to the original problem. We can't distinguish between the high probability that someone can eventually create an actual zombie and "real" experience-having artificial intelligence, and why is that ? The issue is just another form of the basic problem- we don't have the conceptual framework to get our minds around what experience is. Our basic assumptions may be off. Instead of quarks et.al. being the basic building blocks of matter and matter of brains and brains of consciouness, some people take experience to be the most basic building block of the universe. This was my conclusion and I thought it would just brand me as an eccentric so I never pushed it, but now I see it's being kicked around by people with careers. Another assumption is that experience/consciousness is comprehensible to the level of scientific causality/reality we're aiming at, (let's just shorthand it to "ultimate reality"), because there are separate, distinct things in the first place. But what if separate things is not a fact about ultimate reality? What if they're more like a hardwired perceptual compulsion we can't escape? Then we might very well find truly insoluable mysteries on the foundational tier of our conceptual scaffolding, because none of the "things" we think about are real in the first place. Things which don't exist, don't have to "add up". So this would mean our minds and ultimate reality are just not made for each other, even as that reality directly impinges on our personal daily lives in ways we can and do readily experience and talk about. It seems like the most far fetched and deflating hypothesis possible, but consider we'd merely be joining the rest of the animal kingdom in this regards.

sofal 6y ago

I think we're a long way from a good understanding of how consciousness works, but I also think a lot of people are going to subscribe to a sort of consciousness-of-the-gaps idea no matter how much progress is made in understanding the actual mechanisms. Even if we fully understood and and could reproduce it, there would be scores of people who would flat out refuse to see the evidence and would simply assert that the ineffable "experience" does not exist within beings for which they don't want to acknowledge it. The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all. I think if you want to put forth a hypothesis that there is some ghostly ineffable part of consciousness called "experience" that cannot ever be touched or measured by scientific means, then you have a self-defeating argument that cannot be supported. You might as well go full solipsism. There's nothing stopping you. Consciousness is a genuine mystery at this point, but I think some people will still see it that way even if we solve it, and this is clearer to me every time I see people trash any kind of effort or progress made by science in understanding the brain, claiming that it is not in fact progress at all.

axguscbklp 6y ago
On the other hand, I think that many people are emotionally invested in believing that science must be capable of solving the hard problem of consciousness even though there is no reason to assume that science is. It is perfectly possible that the hard problem of consciousness is in principle and forever beyond the reach of scientific investigation.
david_w 6y ago
"The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all." This is a good point and makes the problem interesting in an additional way. We (I) assume something like p-zombies exist in non-human consciousness, dogs and cats for example. It's like something to be a dog. How far down do we want to go ? Frogs? I'll bite; it's like something to be a frog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8IY2eTBqd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8IY2eTBqd8 But here's a counter to the p-zombies argument, OK? The p-zombies argument is usually taken to mean there comes a point where what has been created is so indistinguishable from "real" people, ala Ex Machina, that arguing over it is a form of ideologically motivated perversion. Let me turn that round and say that the p-zombie argument is (accidentally) making the following strong claim- it is impossible to build a machine which in every way acts human but has no experience. That's a very very strong claim on this universe. I wouldn't take the bet, because someone's going to do it. But if someone is going to do it, how can we tell when they have or they haven't? The Turing Test is outdated (as I see it) and anyway already passed for some judges ( re: ELIZA). To me, this circles back to the original problem. We can't distinguish between the high probability that someone can eventually create an actual zombie and "real" experience-having artificial intelligence, and why is that ? The issue is just another form of the basic problem- we don't have the conceptual framework to get our minds around what experience is. Our basic assumptions may be off. Instead of quarks et.al. being the basic building blocks of matter and matter of brains and brains of consciouness, some people take experience to be the most basic building block of the universe. This was my conclusion and I thought it would just brand me as an eccentric so I never pushed it, but now I see it's being kicked around by people with careers. Another assumption is that experience/consciousness is comprehensible to the level of scientific causality/reality we're aiming at, (let's just shorthand it to "ultimate reality"), because there are separate, distinct things in the first place. But what if separate things is not a fact about ultimate reality? What if they're more like a hardwired perceptual compulsion we can't escape? Then we might very well find truly insoluable mysteries on the foundational tier of our conceptual scaffolding, because none of the "things" we think about are real in the first place. Things which don't exist, don't have to "add up". So this would mean our minds and ultimate reality are just not made for each other, even as that reality directly impinges on our personal daily lives in ways we can and do readily experience and talk about. It seems like the most far fetched and deflating hypothesis possible, but consider we'd merely be joining the rest of the animal kingdom in this regards.