18 ms·

Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

106 points by dnetesn 6y ago

bserge 6y ago
Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and the subconscious in the brain. It's like the "I" is an impostor taking over the body. Theories and writings around the "soul" have been around since the dawn of civilization. Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke?
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique. This explains, for example, the complexity of language. But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our role in society, the benefits we gain from pro-social behaviour, etc Basically, without an "I" there's no "we".
  - naringas 6y ago
    > Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims [...] makes us unique. counter-example: thermites, ants, bees.
    - CarelessExpert 6y ago
      Good point! I feel what humanity is capable of is on a whole other level, though, as we combine collective action with shared goals, novelty/intelligence, etc. But I won't claim that's a well articulated argument.
    - svachalek 6y ago
      These insects are pre-coded to fill a certain niche in their society. A human is born into a role to some degree but can use intelligence to change that role as well. This requires some ability to reason about the self, and to some extent being able to reason about the self improves the ability to reason about others. I often see the question asked as "what if there was something that behaved just like you, but without consciousness, isn't it just as evolutionarily fit?" But it presupposes that such a creature could exist, and a creature that behaves like a conscious one without consciousness seems like a bizarrely inefficient solution to me.
- everdrive 6y ago
  >Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Yeah, I think it's as simple as you start modeling entities in the world around you, for making predictions when deciding on behavior, then include a self in that model. Start simple, "there's delicious food lodged between those fingers and if the fingers relax the food will fall to the ground, falling food is bad, don't relax those fingers", then add depth. Eventually you reach a point where you also model peer animal entities ("if food falls because fingers relax, that guy will take it") and from there it's only a very small steps to also model a "self" to go with all those "others". That's basic consciousness. At this point you are only a few linguistic principles away from diving into philosophy.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > why did consciousness arise? What was the need? It may be just a property of matter. If you set up matter in certain way, it gains consciousness. And that certain way is needed for intelligence. Maybe another good question is can intelligence exist without consciousness ?
  - iamthepieman 6y ago
    The book Blindsight by Peter Watts addresses this in a sci-fi context.
  - ShellfishMeme 6y ago
    I would rather assume that basic consciousness is a property of a certain kind of computation over time that keeps state in a way that allows you to experience the events of the world as a continuous process and track your state in it over time. Of course one could say that the way that is implemented for us is using matter. Then again one could argue that all matter is just a manifestation of a huge amount of computation. So we are just computers built on a substrate of manifested computation, and we built even more computers ourselves that way. Thus I'd argue that anything that can compute and keep state can have consciousness. How intelligence fits into this all, I am not sure.
- jariel 6y ago
  The 'self conscious I' can make logical inferences about the future and decisions about one's own wellbeing that are sometimes at odds with our lower impulses which govern most of our behaviour, and that's mostly it I think. 'Hunger' is something that has been with us for 200 million years of evolution. 'Emotions' since the dawn of Mammals roughly. Developed cognition to the degree where we can even try to very conscientiously adapt our behaviour towards achieving goals - this is a very new thing. I think it makes a lot of sense that we 'really want to eat that cupcake, but also try not to'.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  Apparently be models are improved by adding a kind of attention to them. I thought that was a good way to think of it.
- ordu 6y ago
  > Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious. But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
  - 323454 6y ago
    Have a read of Blindsight by Peter Watts, it has an interesting take on this very idea. An alien species with advanced intelligence but not consciousness takes our attempts to communicate with it as an attack, intended to cause it to waste valuable resources on decoding our low information chatter. The implication is that consciousness is empty of content, merely supposed to be the relay from my subconscious processes that do the driving to other individuals corresponding processes. Our over-developed conscious behaviors are thus viewed as a kind of computer virus by other lifeforms.
    - deepnotderp 6y ago
      Blindsight is also the name of a phenomenon that provides some evidence for the fascinating hypothesis that cognition and consciousness are at least to some degree, separate.
- rzodkiew 6y ago
  It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future. Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.
- burnte 6y ago
  > Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert. We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of being hungry and sleepy, etc. It also takes care of basic memory storage and emotional imprinting. It's the oldest brain, evolved as a simple logic operator, where it evaluates an input, and then triggers a response. Hungry? Look for food. Scared? Run. Etc. It learns and stores memories too. I nearly got eaten when I went over there, scary, tag that place memory with a bad feeling. Then we have a more advanced mammalian cognition level, where more advanced behaviors came from, more complex memory indexing making the reptile brain more useful for long term storage and more nuanced learning. Daytime over there is fine, night can be scary. Oh, that scary thing over there is actually safe, but let's be careful there anyway. More advanced social interactions, forming packs and such with social hierarchies. Now we also have a more advanced logical component and pattern matching ability. A rustling of that specific type of bush tends to mean there's a lion in there. When I see dark clouds, I should find shelter because water might fall. I can take this stick and push it in this anthill to get ants, or I can take this other stick and knock down fruit I can't reach. Rocks from over here chip really well when I bang them together the right way, and I can use the result to cut things. Now we see high order logical cognition emerge. That leads to a part of the brain that helps coordinate the other parts of the brain leading to the ability for abstract thought, symbolic thought, and internal monologue for enhanced creative thinking. This part of the brain is what we think of as "us", our "mind" but it's just a part. Other parts aren't as verbal. That's why sometimes ideas "just come to you", and something you can't quite recall is on the tip of your tongue, another part of the brain was working independently, and pushed that information over to your forebrain, or your forebrain remembers a trigger for a memory, but the memory part isn't quite picking up on the index cue. It's why we "sleep on things", or go for walks and need time to think, we're letting our various parts work independently so they can not worry about communicating with each other for a bit and focus. It's why you get "in the zone" when you're really productive, and it's even why we go on "autopilot" and get home but don't remember the drive, our forebrain shuts up for a bit, or is naval gazing and the other parts took over the drive. I'm not saying these are the only parts, but ever since reading Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" and learning evolutionary physiology it's a concept that made a lot of sense. I don't think it's all as subdivided or mindless as Minsky think, but I REALLY think is over all concept is dead on. In short, consciousness doesn't arise FROM anything, consciousness is what the brain is doing. It's not a side effect, it's the main one. We just think it's special and different from animal cognition because we have language. We think and feel just like dogs and cats and elephants, just in a more complex fashion.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  >Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Think of it in terms of salience. Why do we need multiple levels of salience, such that some signals are intrinsically more important than others to the bearer of those signals? The answer is that once organisms were able to move under their own power, there needed to be a mechanism for the organism to have an intrinsic interest in its own well-being. A plant doesn't move under its own (intentional) power. It has no power to move itself into a damaging state nor move itself out of one. An intrinsic salience to its bodily integrity would serve no purpose. But once organisms were able to move based on goal-directed behavior, say to seek out food, it needs to have an interest in its bodily integrity such that it doesn't intentionally move into a damaging state. An intrinsic salience to nociceptive signals, i.e. the suffering of pain, gives organisms an innate interest in its bodily integrity. To evolve the same behavioral patterns without pain's intrinsic suffering quality would require evolving an organism that had an innate comprehension of why it is important to avoid damaging states, i.e. declarative representations of value which would require complex intelligence to co-evolve. Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension. I sense the signature of Dan Dennett. An interesting read for the curious: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe...
    - hackinthebochs 6y ago
      Indeed. He is always good for pithy quotes.
- djmips 6y ago
  > "Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke? " This suggests a common bias that you feel like the human species is the only one on this planet that has attained consciousness. Many other species are conscious, sentient, we just happen to the one that have gone into space. Regardless of it's a fluke or not it's clearly an advantage used by many species on the earth.
- lokimedes 6y ago
  Even as a physicist (sorry) I can see a clear evolutionary utility of consciousness. If all organisms as a rule are guided towards an optimal state (survival, reproduction, etc.) based on sensory input and a learned world model, then the second order evolutionary trait that would help an organism the most is executive access to the optimizer itself or the ability to synthesize a phase space of possibilities through imagination/dreaming. Both of these aspects may be what we call consciousness.
  - lukeplato 6y ago
    This was really well stated. Are you actively doing any work on this theory?
- p1necone 6y ago
  Why are you assuming that humans are the only conscious animals?
- op03 6y ago
  Language is probably a prereq. You can't be in great battles with yourself without language arising. So where ever language arises, Consciousness of some sort follows. Ants I doubt have great self control problems cause language hardware is primitive.
- boxed 6y ago
  Like always it would be better to start with trying to define what the word consciousness even means BEFORE such speculation.
bondarchuk 6y ago
Another nice article trying to drum up support for the idea of a soul (yes, in the religious sense), in this Templeton Foundation-supported magazine.
- falseprofit 6y ago
  I didn't get that impression from the article, which doesn't mention the idea of a soul once. Care to explain?
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Agreed, it just doubletalk, like calling Creationism "guided evolution".
TheHideout 6y ago
Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contribute to who you are, and that you are a physical being that can think in-situ as well as plan your physical actions in the future. I'm favoriting this link and will try to return to it after my dissertation is done for reflection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
- DennisP 6y ago
  There are actually two problems, that people often mix up. One is how we get a sense of self, which I think is what you're talking about. Another is how qualia, like the perception of color, arise at all. Nobody seems to have any idea how that happens; we have no way to map some arrangement of atoms to a perception and prove from first principles that one leads to another.
  - falseprofit 6y ago
    And the second problem (the hard one) is the one the linked article is focused on.
  - captainmuon 6y ago
    Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow. There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can perceive how we percieve. Naturally you then can wonder: Why/how does this stimuli lead to this internal state? But if the states were different, you would be wondering about those states. And you only wonder about it, because you can due to reflection.
argomo 6y ago
Yes, let's move the soul from being an emergent property of the staggeringly complex arrangement of billions of neurons to their electromagnetic byproducts. It's cool because instead of grappling with the consequences of material reality we can satisfy our dualists instincts by ascribing consciousness to mystic energy despite it being equally mechanistic in the eyes of modern science. I want to see the college debate where the negative position fires a HERF gun and asks the audience if they feel like they just lost their souls. (Given our mobile phone addictions, many might say yes.)
- FrameworkFred 6y ago
  ^This...exactly. This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    The issue is you can't manipulate the EM fields in exclusion to neural activity as they are intrinsically linked to one another.
  - musingsole 6y ago
    Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...) is a very real thing that has been used for inducing behavioral modification effects.
    - RhodoYolo 6y ago
      HAHA this is why i love HN. Seems as though, given this wiki page that this has been an ongoing field of study for a while. Everyone seems to be dismissing this as out of pocket. I don't see why both action potentials, electromagnetic waves and whatever phenomenon we discover next can't be all contributing factors to consciousness?
Santosh83 6y ago
Do we have an unambiguous, universally accepted definition for consciousness?
- djmips 6y ago
  No, and it's clear from many of the comments that there is an all to common bias that only human's are conscious which is absurd.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > it's clear from many of the comments that there is an all to common bias that only human's are conscious Few people today think that animals are incapable of suffering.
deleted 6y ago
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yk42bb 6y ago
Since the brain can communicate between both hemispheres without a corpus callosum[0] I think it is obvious that our brain does interact with itself via electromagnetic fields. [0]: https://www.kurzweilai.net/unexplained-communication-between-brain-hemispheres-without-corpus-callosum https://www.kurzweilai.net/unexplained-communication-between...
- ncmncm 6y ago
  The corpus callosum is not the only nerve connection between hemispheres. It is just the easiest to cut, and the least consequential.
hackinthebochs 6y ago
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.
- kazinator 6y ago
  That seems like useless hair splitting. It's similar to pondering whether, in the cell of a DRAM chip, it is the electric field of the stored charge that is representing the 1 or 0 meaning, or whether it is the presence or absence of electron particles which is doing the representing.
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    In the case of the DRAM chip, the only relevant feature is its functional behavior. The stored charge and its electric field are isomorphic, i.e. have the same functional properties. So the difference is meaningless. But the question of what constitutes consciousness isn't merely about functional equivalence. If we took away the brain but left the dynamics of the electromagnetic field in tact, would there still be consciousness? Or vice-versa? The distinction I point out points to different answers to this question. This is a relevant philosophical difference, although no practical difference.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Nonsense. Your DNA is made of atoms. Those are parts. Your cells are made of proteins and fats. Those are parts. Your computer is made of transistors and wires. Those are parts. Cities are made of people, buildings, and streets. Those are parts.
ncmncm 6y ago
It is a travesty that this guy is a department head somewhere, with serious responsibilities for, at least, students, and pushing this BS. Might EM fields and waves have a role in brain operations? Sure. Does that have anything at all to do with us perceiving our own cognition? Absolutely no way! Cars have (1) spark plugs that emit radio pulses, and (2) a radio in the dash panel. Therefore, spark plug E-M pulses control traffic flow? No. The biggest mystery about consciousness is that anybody thinks there is anything at all mysterious about it.
- virmundi 6y ago
  Can you prove that conscious is an emergent property of the bio-chemical brain? If you can, there is a sweet noble waiting for you. Otherwise it’s speculation on your part.
  - abellerose 6y ago
    Nobody has proven consciousness is even real. It’s like people assuming they have free will.
    - sixothree 6y ago
      Unless atoms have free will then everything that will be has always been, right?
      - ncmncm 6y ago
        Really? "Will be" and "has been" presume time. If you admit time, then no. If you don't admit time, then the statement is meaningless.
    - kozd 6y ago
      You have direct access to your own subjective experience. Do you deny that it is like something to be you?
      - 6y ago
rolph 6y ago
the paradigm with consciousness is that there is a "thing" that has experiences, at the basest level an _experience_ of thought parallel to the _process_ of thought. to wit this is decartes "thinking thing" that gives rise to cogito ergo sum.
deleted 6y ago
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barrenko 6y ago
Religion solved this one long ago. I don't understand why no one is looking at that.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  Haha good one
- anthk 6y ago
  Religion solved this in the same way the legend of Icarus solved the problem of human flight.
yters 6y ago
First person consciousness is just a fundamentally different thing than any third person property of reality such as matter or energy or electricity. These sorts of ideas are just category errors, like trying to determine what number 1 tastes like.
tpoacher 6y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines says: "No."
vmception 6y ago
My untested hypothesis is that fungi trigger an otherwise vestigial sense that allows us to perceive an energy that we have a symbiotic relationship with The nature of the symbiotic relationship is not known, and the capabilities of this relationship have not been explored
Animats 6y ago
Probably not, or humans would be much more sensitive to RF interference.
- peterbmarks 6y ago
  Exactly. If this theory was correct an MRI would knock people unconscious very quickly you'd think.
sjg007 6y ago
I thought the current consensus was quantum?
micksabox 6y ago
I would be thrilled to hear somebody's theory of consciousness that takes into account the following axioms: 1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff. 2. Consciousness affects matter. The water crystal experiments by Masaru Emoto(b) are the simplest and least fringe example. Project love, hate, anger, etc. to water results in changes to the crystal structure of water when frozen. I tried to keep it as non-fringey and simple as possible. If you consider these, it leads to the framework that consciousness is not emergent from the physical brain but is instead a field or carrier-wave from somewhere else and brains act like antenna receivers. References a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project b. https://mitte.co/2019/10/14/the-curious-study-of-water-consciousness/ https://mitte.co/2019/10/14/the-curious-study-of-water-consc...
- ajkjk 6y ago
  Sure, but... why would you consider them?
- bulletsvshumans 6y ago
  "Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community.[9][17] In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them prone to manipulation or human error influencing the findings.[9][18] Biochemist and Director of Microscopy at University College Cork William Reville wrote, "It is very unlikely that there is any reality behind Emoto's claims."[9] Reville noted the lack of scientific publication and pointed out that anyone who could demonstrate such a phenomenon would become immediately famous and probably wealthy.[9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto#Scientific_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto#Scientific_critic...
- RhodoYolo 6y ago
  Those two axioms would make a fantastic sci-fi novel. The second one isn't that interesting to me philosophically, but your first questions gives rise to so many questions about human nature, free will, etc. Also, it would give credence to the theory that we are just one giant super consciousness. it'd also have the added affect of making the concept of war super brutal.
superkuh 6y ago
No. There's no evidence for that. There's an incredible mountain of evidence supporting the idea that neuronal action potentials are. The currents in neurons aren't even in the direction of the action potential propagation. They're perpendicular to it and only over a handful of tens of nanometers. Yes, the substrate of our macroscopic reality is dominated by electromagnetics but the brain isn't a very conductive place.
- RhodoYolo 6y ago
  but it begs the question; why? Obviously there is a biological necessity for these forms of propagation. I remember reading an old neuroscience textbook that said glial cells were purely support cells but they are finding a-lot of emergent phenomenon there as well.
  - phs318u 6y ago
    Not finding an obvious "use" for something doesn't mean it doesn't have one. Especially when that thing has survived millions of years of evolutionary pressure to preserve useful stuff and cull useless stuff. Remember "junk DNA"? Turns out it wasn't junk. Anybody calling "useless" any of the outputs of nature's exquisite forge is likely to be proven wrong.

106 points by dnetesn 6y ago

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and the subconscious in the brain. It's like the "I" is an impostor taking over the body. Theories and writings around the "soul" have been around since the dawn of civilization. Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke?

CarelessExpert 6y ago
Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique. This explains, for example, the complexity of language. But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our role in society, the benefits we gain from pro-social behaviour, etc Basically, without an "I" there's no "we".
- naringas 6y ago
  > Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims [...] makes us unique. counter-example: thermites, ants, bees.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    Good point! I feel what humanity is capable of is on a whole other level, though, as we combine collective action with shared goals, novelty/intelligence, etc. But I won't claim that's a well articulated argument.
  - svachalek 6y ago
    These insects are pre-coded to fill a certain niche in their society. A human is born into a role to some degree but can use intelligence to change that role as well. This requires some ability to reason about the self, and to some extent being able to reason about the self improves the ability to reason about others. I often see the question asked as "what if there was something that behaved just like you, but without consciousness, isn't it just as evolutionarily fit?" But it presupposes that such a creature could exist, and a creature that behaves like a conscious one without consciousness seems like a bizarrely inefficient solution to me.
everdrive 6y ago
>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex
- usrusr 6y ago
  Yeah, I think it's as simple as you start modeling entities in the world around you, for making predictions when deciding on behavior, then include a self in that model. Start simple, "there's delicious food lodged between those fingers and if the fingers relax the food will fall to the ground, falling food is bad, don't relax those fingers", then add depth. Eventually you reach a point where you also model peer animal entities ("if food falls because fingers relax, that guy will take it") and from there it's only a very small steps to also model a "self" to go with all those "others". That's basic consciousness. At this point you are only a few linguistic principles away from diving into philosophy.
Hokusai 6y ago
> why did consciousness arise? What was the need? It may be just a property of matter. If you set up matter in certain way, it gains consciousness. And that certain way is needed for intelligence. Maybe another good question is can intelligence exist without consciousness ?
- iamthepieman 6y ago
  The book Blindsight by Peter Watts addresses this in a sci-fi context.
- ShellfishMeme 6y ago
  I would rather assume that basic consciousness is a property of a certain kind of computation over time that keeps state in a way that allows you to experience the events of the world as a continuous process and track your state in it over time. Of course one could say that the way that is implemented for us is using matter. Then again one could argue that all matter is just a manifestation of a huge amount of computation. So we are just computers built on a substrate of manifested computation, and we built even more computers ourselves that way. Thus I'd argue that anything that can compute and keep state can have consciousness. How intelligence fits into this all, I am not sure.
jariel 6y ago
The 'self conscious I' can make logical inferences about the future and decisions about one's own wellbeing that are sometimes at odds with our lower impulses which govern most of our behaviour, and that's mostly it I think. 'Hunger' is something that has been with us for 200 million years of evolution. 'Emotions' since the dawn of Mammals roughly. Developed cognition to the degree where we can even try to very conscientiously adapt our behaviour towards achieving goals - this is a very new thing. I think it makes a lot of sense that we 'really want to eat that cupcake, but also try not to'.
lordnacho 6y ago
Apparently be models are improved by adding a kind of attention to them. I thought that was a good way to think of it.
ordu 6y ago
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious. But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states. [1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
- 323454 6y ago
  Have a read of Blindsight by Peter Watts, it has an interesting take on this very idea. An alien species with advanced intelligence but not consciousness takes our attempts to communicate with it as an attack, intended to cause it to waste valuable resources on decoding our low information chatter. The implication is that consciousness is empty of content, merely supposed to be the relay from my subconscious processes that do the driving to other individuals corresponding processes. Our over-developed conscious behaviors are thus viewed as a kind of computer virus by other lifeforms.
  - deepnotderp 6y ago
    Blindsight is also the name of a phenomenon that provides some evidence for the fascinating hypothesis that cognition and consciousness are at least to some degree, separate.
rzodkiew 6y ago
It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future. Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.
burnte 6y ago
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert. We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of being hungry and sleepy, etc. It also takes care of basic memory storage and emotional imprinting. It's the oldest brain, evolved as a simple logic operator, where it evaluates an input, and then triggers a response. Hungry? Look for food. Scared? Run. Etc. It learns and stores memories too. I nearly got eaten when I went over there, scary, tag that place memory with a bad feeling. Then we have a more advanced mammalian cognition level, where more advanced behaviors came from, more complex memory indexing making the reptile brain more useful for long term storage and more nuanced learning. Daytime over there is fine, night can be scary. Oh, that scary thing over there is actually safe, but let's be careful there anyway. More advanced social interactions, forming packs and such with social hierarchies. Now we also have a more advanced logical component and pattern matching ability. A rustling of that specific type of bush tends to mean there's a lion in there. When I see dark clouds, I should find shelter because water might fall. I can take this stick and push it in this anthill to get ants, or I can take this other stick and knock down fruit I can't reach. Rocks from over here chip really well when I bang them together the right way, and I can use the result to cut things. Now we see high order logical cognition emerge. That leads to a part of the brain that helps coordinate the other parts of the brain leading to the ability for abstract thought, symbolic thought, and internal monologue for enhanced creative thinking. This part of the brain is what we think of as "us", our "mind" but it's just a part. Other parts aren't as verbal. That's why sometimes ideas "just come to you", and something you can't quite recall is on the tip of your tongue, another part of the brain was working independently, and pushed that information over to your forebrain, or your forebrain remembers a trigger for a memory, but the memory part isn't quite picking up on the index cue. It's why we "sleep on things", or go for walks and need time to think, we're letting our various parts work independently so they can not worry about communicating with each other for a bit and focus. It's why you get "in the zone" when you're really productive, and it's even why we go on "autopilot" and get home but don't remember the drive, our forebrain shuts up for a bit, or is naval gazing and the other parts took over the drive. I'm not saying these are the only parts, but ever since reading Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" and learning evolutionary physiology it's a concept that made a lot of sense. I don't think it's all as subdivided or mindless as Minsky think, but I REALLY think is over all concept is dead on. In short, consciousness doesn't arise FROM anything, consciousness is what the brain is doing. It's not a side effect, it's the main one. We just think it's special and different from animal cognition because we have language. We think and feel just like dogs and cats and elephants, just in a more complex fashion.
hackinthebochs 6y ago
>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Think of it in terms of salience. Why do we need multiple levels of salience, such that some signals are intrinsically more important than others to the bearer of those signals? The answer is that once organisms were able to move under their own power, there needed to be a mechanism for the organism to have an intrinsic interest in its own well-being. A plant doesn't move under its own (intentional) power. It has no power to move itself into a damaging state nor move itself out of one. An intrinsic salience to its bodily integrity would serve no purpose. But once organisms were able to move based on goal-directed behavior, say to seek out food, it needs to have an interest in its bodily integrity such that it doesn't intentionally move into a damaging state. An intrinsic salience to nociceptive signals, i.e. the suffering of pain, gives organisms an innate interest in its bodily integrity. To evolve the same behavioral patterns without pain's intrinsic suffering quality would require evolving an organism that had an innate comprehension of why it is important to avoid damaging states, i.e. declarative representations of value which would require complex intelligence to co-evolve. Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension. I sense the signature of Dan Dennett. An interesting read for the curious: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe...
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    Indeed. He is always good for pithy quotes.
djmips 6y ago
> "Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke? " This suggests a common bias that you feel like the human species is the only one on this planet that has attained consciousness. Many other species are conscious, sentient, we just happen to the one that have gone into space. Regardless of it's a fluke or not it's clearly an advantage used by many species on the earth.
lokimedes 6y ago
Even as a physicist (sorry) I can see a clear evolutionary utility of consciousness. If all organisms as a rule are guided towards an optimal state (survival, reproduction, etc.) based on sensory input and a learned world model, then the second order evolutionary trait that would help an organism the most is executive access to the optimizer itself or the ability to synthesize a phase space of possibilities through imagination/dreaming. Both of these aspects may be what we call consciousness.
- lukeplato 6y ago
  This was really well stated. Are you actively doing any work on this theory?
p1necone 6y ago
Why are you assuming that humans are the only conscious animals?
op03 6y ago
Language is probably a prereq. You can't be in great battles with yourself without language arising. So where ever language arises, Consciousness of some sort follows. Ants I doubt have great self control problems cause language hardware is primitive.
boxed 6y ago
Like always it would be better to start with trying to define what the word consciousness even means BEFORE such speculation.

bondarchuk 6y ago

Another nice article trying to drum up support for the idea of a soul (yes, in the religious sense), in this Templeton Foundation-supported magazine.

falseprofit 6y ago
I didn't get that impression from the article, which doesn't mention the idea of a soul once. Care to explain?
ncmncm 6y ago
Agreed, it just doubletalk, like calling Creationism "guided evolution".

TheHideout 6y ago

Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contribute to who you are, and that you are a physical being that can think in-situ as well as plan your physical actions in the future. I'm favoriting this link and will try to return to it after my dissertation is done for reflection. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition

DennisP 6y ago
There are actually two problems, that people often mix up. One is how we get a sense of self, which I think is what you're talking about. Another is how qualia, like the perception of color, arise at all. Nobody seems to have any idea how that happens; we have no way to map some arrangement of atoms to a perception and prove from first principles that one leads to another.
- falseprofit 6y ago
  And the second problem (the hard one) is the one the linked article is focused on.
- captainmuon 6y ago
  Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow. There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can perceive how we percieve. Naturally you then can wonder: Why/how does this stimuli lead to this internal state? But if the states were different, you would be wondering about those states. And you only wonder about it, because you can due to reflection.

argomo 6y ago

Yes, let's move the soul from being an emergent property of the staggeringly complex arrangement of billions of neurons to their electromagnetic byproducts. It's cool because instead of grappling with the consequences of material reality we can satisfy our dualists instincts by ascribing consciousness to mystic energy despite it being equally mechanistic in the eyes of modern science. I want to see the college debate where the negative position fires a HERF gun and asks the audience if they feel like they just lost their souls. (Given our mobile phone addictions, many might say yes.)

FrameworkFred 6y ago
^This...exactly. This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  The issue is you can't manipulate the EM fields in exclusion to neural activity as they are intrinsically linked to one another.
- musingsole 6y ago
  Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulat...) is a very real thing that has been used for inducing behavioral modification effects.
  - RhodoYolo 6y ago
    HAHA this is why i love HN. Seems as though, given this wiki page that this has been an ongoing field of study for a while. Everyone seems to be dismissing this as out of pocket. I don't see why both action potentials, electromagnetic waves and whatever phenomenon we discover next can't be all contributing factors to consciousness?

Santosh83 6y ago

Do we have an unambiguous, universally accepted definition for consciousness?

djmips 6y ago
No, and it's clear from many of the comments that there is an all to common bias that only human's are conscious which is absurd.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > it's clear from many of the comments that there is an all to common bias that only human's are conscious Few people today think that animals are incapable of suffering.

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yk42bb 6y ago

Since the brain can communicate between both hemispheres without a corpus callosum[0] I think it is obvious that our brain does interact with itself via electromagnetic fields. [0]: https://www.kurzweilai.net/unexplained-communication-between-brain-hemispheres-without-corpus-callosum https://www.kurzweilai.net/unexplained-communication-between...

ncmncm 6y ago
The corpus callosum is not the only nerve connection between hemispheres. It is just the easiest to cut, and the least consequential.

hackinthebochs 6y ago

A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.

kazinator 6y ago
That seems like useless hair splitting. It's similar to pondering whether, in the cell of a DRAM chip, it is the electric field of the stored charge that is representing the 1 or 0 meaning, or whether it is the presence or absence of electron particles which is doing the representing.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  In the case of the DRAM chip, the only relevant feature is its functional behavior. The stored charge and its electric field are isomorphic, i.e. have the same functional properties. So the difference is meaningless. But the question of what constitutes consciousness isn't merely about functional equivalence. If we took away the brain but left the dynamics of the electromagnetic field in tact, would there still be consciousness? Or vice-versa? The distinction I point out points to different answers to this question. This is a relevant philosophical difference, although no practical difference.
ncmncm 6y ago
Nonsense. Your DNA is made of atoms. Those are parts. Your cells are made of proteins and fats. Those are parts. Your computer is made of transistors and wires. Those are parts. Cities are made of people, buildings, and streets. Those are parts.

ncmncm 6y ago

It is a travesty that this guy is a department head somewhere, with serious responsibilities for, at least, students, and pushing this BS. Might EM fields and waves have a role in brain operations? Sure. Does that have anything at all to do with us perceiving our own cognition? Absolutely no way! Cars have (1) spark plugs that emit radio pulses, and (2) a radio in the dash panel. Therefore, spark plug E-M pulses control traffic flow? No. The biggest mystery about consciousness is that anybody thinks there is anything at all mysterious about it.

virmundi 6y ago
Can you prove that conscious is an emergent property of the bio-chemical brain? If you can, there is a sweet noble waiting for you. Otherwise it’s speculation on your part.
- abellerose 6y ago
  Nobody has proven consciousness is even real. It’s like people assuming they have free will.
  - sixothree 6y ago
    Unless atoms have free will then everything that will be has always been, right?
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      Really? "Will be" and "has been" presume time. If you admit time, then no. If you don't admit time, then the statement is meaningless.
  - kozd 6y ago
    You have direct access to your own subjective experience. Do you deny that it is like something to be you?
    - 6y ago

rolph 6y ago

the paradigm with consciousness is that there is a "thing" that has experiences, at the basest level an _experience_ of thought parallel to the _process_ of thought. to wit this is decartes "thinking thing" that gives rise to cogito ergo sum.

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barrenko 6y ago

Religion solved this one long ago. I don't understand why no one is looking at that.

hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
Haha good one
anthk 6y ago
Religion solved this in the same way the legend of Icarus solved the problem of human flight.

yters 6y ago

First person consciousness is just a fundamentally different thing than any third person property of reality such as matter or energy or electricity. These sorts of ideas are just category errors, like trying to determine what number 1 tastes like.

tpoacher 6y ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines says: "No."

vmception 6y ago

My untested hypothesis is that fungi trigger an otherwise vestigial sense that allows us to perceive an energy that we have a symbiotic relationship with The nature of the symbiotic relationship is not known, and the capabilities of this relationship have not been explored

Animats 6y ago

Probably not, or humans would be much more sensitive to RF interference.

peterbmarks 6y ago
Exactly. If this theory was correct an MRI would knock people unconscious very quickly you'd think.

sjg007 6y ago

I thought the current consensus was quantum?

micksabox 6y ago

I would be thrilled to hear somebody's theory of consciousness that takes into account the following axioms: 1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff. 2. Consciousness affects matter. The water crystal experiments by Masaru Emoto(b) are the simplest and least fringe example. Project love, hate, anger, etc. to water results in changes to the crystal structure of water when frozen. I tried to keep it as non-fringey and simple as possible. If you consider these, it leads to the framework that consciousness is not emergent from the physical brain but is instead a field or carrier-wave from somewhere else and brains act like antenna receivers. References a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project b. https://mitte.co/2019/10/14/the-curious-study-of-water-consciousness/ https://mitte.co/2019/10/14/the-curious-study-of-water-consc...

ajkjk 6y ago
Sure, but... why would you consider them?
bulletsvshumans 6y ago
"Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community.[9][17] In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them prone to manipulation or human error influencing the findings.[9][18] Biochemist and Director of Microscopy at University College Cork William Reville wrote, "It is very unlikely that there is any reality behind Emoto's claims."[9] Reville noted the lack of scientific publication and pointed out that anyone who could demonstrate such a phenomenon would become immediately famous and probably wealthy.[9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto#Scientific_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto#Scientific_critic...
RhodoYolo 6y ago
Those two axioms would make a fantastic sci-fi novel. The second one isn't that interesting to me philosophically, but your first questions gives rise to so many questions about human nature, free will, etc. Also, it would give credence to the theory that we are just one giant super consciousness. it'd also have the added affect of making the concept of war super brutal.

superkuh 6y ago

No. There's no evidence for that. There's an incredible mountain of evidence supporting the idea that neuronal action potentials are. The currents in neurons aren't even in the direction of the action potential propagation. They're perpendicular to it and only over a handful of tens of nanometers. Yes, the substrate of our macroscopic reality is dominated by electromagnetics but the brain isn't a very conductive place.

RhodoYolo 6y ago
but it begs the question; why? Obviously there is a biological necessity for these forms of propagation. I remember reading an old neuroscience textbook that said glial cells were purely support cells but they are finding a-lot of emergent phenomenon there as well.
- phs318u 6y ago
  Not finding an obvious "use" for something doesn't mean it doesn't have one. Especially when that thing has survived millions of years of evolutionary pressure to preserve useful stuff and cull useless stuff. Remember "junk DNA"? Turns out it wasn't junk. Anybody calling "useless" any of the outputs of nature's exquisite forge is likely to be proven wrong.