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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], Aut

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.
  - amarte 6y ago
    "There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve." I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      > So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. The most plausible answer, in my opinion, is that our lack of knowledge about how our minds work means that we are free to imagine something that probably isn't so. Imagination is not a good enough guide to how things are to be the considered a basis of knowledge.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      That's a bit of a jump from no internal representation to no embodiment (whatever embodiment means in this context as that is pretty unclear to me)
      - amarte 6y ago
        I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment". I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas. When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.
glial 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. My own pet theory is very similar to yours: humans evolved consciousness in order to ‘observe’ our cognitive and emotional state, so that we can build models and apply them to reason about other people’s cognitive and emotional states. It’s hard to have ‘theory of mind’ about someone else when you don’t have access to your own mind to start with.
- laborat 6y ago
  FYI, there's a paper that claims exactly this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20658859/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20658859/
  - glial 6y ago
    Thanks!
jp555 6y ago
how will you test your belief?
- TheHideout 6y ago
  While not a test for the belief directly nor a test of consciousness, I would start with making a sufficiently advanced embodied reinforcement learning agent that can do each of these things on a super basic level, then test for emergent goal setting and seeking.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    That would be an interesting exercise in computer science, but wouldn't show us that you'd correctly determined the criteria for consciousness.
    - TheHideout 6y ago
      I absolutely agree. It might open some doors for further testing though.
mjangle1985 6y ago
Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind? I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.
- dbspin 6y ago
  As a former psychology student (lol) I have to point out that an epiphenominal mind is perhaps the least parsimonious thing imaginable. It's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood - some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals.
  - mjangle1985 6y ago
    >t's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. How so? >Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood That's not necessarily 'proof' of consciousness or free will. >some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals. Behaviorism isn't epiphenomenalism. I'm concerned you might not understand what epiphenomenalism is.
- abeppu 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness? My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop them?
  - mjangle1985 6y ago
    >then why should physical life develop them? The comparison I've always liked is the "steam whistle set off by a locomotive". The steam whistle has no causal efficacy on the locomotive but is a waste byproduct of a steam engine. Consciousness shouldn't have any causal effect on physical processes (assuming a strictly materialist framework), if it's explained as a byproduct of functioning physical processes it tends to deal with the issues 'consciousness' has that are in inherently in conflict with strict materialism.
steve76 6y ago
I can ground out to the Earth, zap your brain to keep you alive, and before I effectively kill you and clone you, the Sun would rise in the West. That's what's at stake here. --- --- --- Let's look at what exactly is an EM field: Heat transfers through: - conductive surfaces - convective mediums - radiation: clocks get to tick differently. Nature takes the easiest way, including clock tick cheat code. If you ever want to race the "grounding effect of Earth" in a 100 yard dash, the Earth gets to turn thuggish on you. Earth gets to stroll across the finish line and say to you "that's one second." That's special relativity. Coupled with the photoelectric effect and brownian motion we get a general principle that acts everywhere. Even so, if you want to be smart about it, Earth gets to go "alright, check the tape." The chemicals in that tape are bounded by uncertainty, and yeah, that was one second. That's what particles mean. Not some mystic bath or cloud of invisible dots. Things need to charge up internally before they do more externally. You have a start, you have an end, you have a particle. So if you're talking particles as a source of consciousness, you're talking locality. Before we talk consciousness, let's talk what's really different from one another. Heat is about as dumb and coarse and universal we can get. So if we ever pop something into existence, there's a model to say we just stopped a spinning coin that's been propagating through everything at "the fastest things can go before they are effectively two separate things." If I want to emit a matter wave or a chemical in orbit and ground out to that, or if I want to point a telescope at a black hole and measure the surface, there's no way anything wins over that. The sun's effectively a black hole because what humans did, and particles are popping in and out of existence. Questions of confidence? Bah. It's no limitation to the ability we have now, no uncharted regions to explore. It's confidence, a call to damn the torpedoes and get humans to the top of the cosmic food chain for once and for all.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
That doesn't sound right to me at all. To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still be capable of seeking goals, and of abstract thought. They would still have moral standing and personal dignity - it would be immoral to mistreat them, and we would consider that human rights still apply to them. We are deeply social animals, and this is integral to our sense of self as we usually see it, but I'm not convinced it's integral to consciousness. I have a similar objection to your second point. Lacking a sense of personal narrative and timeline would constitute a serious disability, but would not render a person unconscious. If you had total retrograde amnesia, you would still be conscious. I see the same problem with your third point. I'm confident that, under the right concoction of psychotropics, my mental function could be degraded to the point that I would be unable to reason effectively about my future, or to make decisions, while still keeping me conscious. Someone suffering something akin to shell-shock might be unresponsive, but still conscious.
- ci5er 6y ago
  Ha! Under the influence of certain psychotropics, your ability to do functional planning would be diminished, but the number of creatures that you thought worthy of your empathy might well grow. :-)
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  What would constitute "unconscious"? Having your performance degraded to the level of a chaotic, finite state machine? (Or is one of those also conscious?) Inability to pass the Turing test? (But then "unconscious" [???] machines can pass that.) Consciousness is such a meme.
- Teever 6y ago
  > To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. It sounds like you're describing psychopaths.
falseprofit 6y ago
This sounds similar to claims I've heard that consciousness arises from language. Taking a component of our cognition which is heavily intertwined with the rest of it and taking its ubiquity to imply some sort of primacy.
- deepnotderp 6y ago
  Have you ever had a thought you can't put into words? Some people do not even possess an internal monologue!
Lammy 6y ago
I like this a lot, plus it’s a trinity :p Please forgive me for Going There, but I believe [2] is also Original Sin, even in a secular definition as a generic source of evil perpetrated by humans against humans.

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.
- amarte 6y ago
  "There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve." I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some sense. Call them illusions or whatever, but I am and you are. So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. That seems to be the puzzling question to me -- that nothing has to be experienced, and yet things are being experienced.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    > So the problem is, if we can imagine the universe getting on exactly the same without those experiences, why is it such that I am and you are. The most plausible answer, in my opinion, is that our lack of knowledge about how our minds work means that we are free to imagine something that probably isn't so. Imagination is not a good enough guide to how things are to be the considered a basis of knowledge.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    That's a bit of a jump from no internal representation to no embodiment (whatever embodiment means in this context as that is pretty unclear to me)
    - amarte 6y ago
      I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment". I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas. When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.

glial 6y ago

Thanks for sharing. My own pet theory is very similar to yours: humans evolved consciousness in order to ‘observe’ our cognitive and emotional state, so that we can build models and apply them to reason about other people’s cognitive and emotional states. It’s hard to have ‘theory of mind’ about someone else when you don’t have access to your own mind to start with.

laborat 6y ago
FYI, there's a paper that claims exactly this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20658859/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20658859/
- glial 6y ago
  Thanks!

jp555 6y ago

how will you test your belief?

TheHideout 6y ago
While not a test for the belief directly nor a test of consciousness, I would start with making a sufficiently advanced embodied reinforcement learning agent that can do each of these things on a super basic level, then test for emergent goal setting and seeking.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  That would be an interesting exercise in computer science, but wouldn't show us that you'd correctly determined the criteria for consciousness.
  - TheHideout 6y ago
    I absolutely agree. It might open some doors for further testing though.

mjangle1985 6y ago

Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind? I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.

dbspin 6y ago
As a former psychology student (lol) I have to point out that an epiphenominal mind is perhaps the least parsimonious thing imaginable. It's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood - some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals.
- mjangle1985 6y ago
  >t's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. How so? >Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood That's not necessarily 'proof' of consciousness or free will. >some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals. Behaviorism isn't epiphenomenalism. I'm concerned you might not understand what epiphenomenalism is.
abeppu 6y ago
Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness? My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop them?
- mjangle1985 6y ago
  >then why should physical life develop them? The comparison I've always liked is the "steam whistle set off by a locomotive". The steam whistle has no causal efficacy on the locomotive but is a waste byproduct of a steam engine. Consciousness shouldn't have any causal effect on physical processes (assuming a strictly materialist framework), if it's explained as a byproduct of functioning physical processes it tends to deal with the issues 'consciousness' has that are in inherently in conflict with strict materialism.

steve76 6y ago

I can ground out to the Earth, zap your brain to keep you alive, and before I effectively kill you and clone you, the Sun would rise in the West. That's what's at stake here. --- --- --- Let's look at what exactly is an EM field: Heat transfers through: - conductive surfaces - convective mediums - radiation: clocks get to tick differently. Nature takes the easiest way, including clock tick cheat code. If you ever want to race the "grounding effect of Earth" in a 100 yard dash, the Earth gets to turn thuggish on you. Earth gets to stroll across the finish line and say to you "that's one second." That's special relativity. Coupled with the photoelectric effect and brownian motion we get a general principle that acts everywhere. Even so, if you want to be smart about it, Earth gets to go "alright, check the tape." The chemicals in that tape are bounded by uncertainty, and yeah, that was one second. That's what particles mean. Not some mystic bath or cloud of invisible dots. Things need to charge up internally before they do more externally. You have a start, you have an end, you have a particle. So if you're talking particles as a source of consciousness, you're talking locality. Before we talk consciousness, let's talk what's really different from one another. Heat is about as dumb and coarse and universal we can get. So if we ever pop something into existence, there's a model to say we just stopped a spinning coin that's been propagating through everything at "the fastest things can go before they are effectively two separate things." If I want to emit a matter wave or a chemical in orbit and ground out to that, or if I want to point a telescope at a black hole and measure the surface, there's no way anything wins over that. The sun's effectively a black hole because what humans did, and particles are popping in and out of existence. Questions of confidence? Bah. It's no limitation to the ability we have now, no uncharted regions to explore. It's confidence, a call to damn the torpedoes and get humans to the top of the cosmic food chain for once and for all.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

That doesn't sound right to me at all. To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still be capable of seeking goals, and of abstract thought. They would still have moral standing and personal dignity - it would be immoral to mistreat them, and we would consider that human rights still apply to them. We are deeply social animals, and this is integral to our sense of self as we usually see it, but I'm not convinced it's integral to consciousness. I have a similar objection to your second point. Lacking a sense of personal narrative and timeline would constitute a serious disability, but would not render a person unconscious. If you had total retrograde amnesia, you would still be conscious. I see the same problem with your third point. I'm confident that, under the right concoction of psychotropics, my mental function could be degraded to the point that I would be unable to reason effectively about my future, or to make decisions, while still keeping me conscious. Someone suffering something akin to shell-shock might be unresponsive, but still conscious.

ci5er 6y ago
Ha! Under the influence of certain psychotropics, your ability to do functional planning would be diminished, but the number of creatures that you thought worthy of your empathy might well grow. :-)
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
What would constitute "unconscious"? Having your performance degraded to the level of a chaotic, finite state machine? (Or is one of those also conscious?) Inability to pass the Turing test? (But then "unconscious" [???] machines can pass that.) Consciousness is such a meme.
Teever 6y ago
> To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. It sounds like you're describing psychopaths.

falseprofit 6y ago

This sounds similar to claims I've heard that consciousness arises from language. Taking a component of our cognition which is heavily intertwined with the rest of it and taking its ubiquity to imply some sort of primacy.

deepnotderp 6y ago
Have you ever had a thought you can't put into words? Some people do not even possess an internal monologue!

Lammy 6y ago

I like this a lot, plus it’s a trinity :p Please forgive me for Going There, but I believe [2] is also Original Sin, even in a secular definition as a generic source of evil perpetrated by humans against humans.