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I have a Ph.D in Cognitive Neuroscience, and my dissertation was on the neurophysiological correlates of consciousness [0]. I can assure you that Philosophy of

I have a Ph.D in Cognitive Neuroscience, and my dissertation was on the neurophysiological correlates of consciousness [0]. I can assure you that Philosophy of Mind is part of the curriculum. About a third of my dissertation deals with Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle, and others. The general consensus among my peers is that philosophy is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Studying philosophy of mind is regarded as the only way to ensure the empirical questions we're asking even make sense, or that our discoveries are non-trivial. It bears repeating: the cognitive neuroscientists I frequented have a deep respect and genuine interest in philosophy. [0] Specifically: I presented evidence that attention was a causal mechanism in conscious access. We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.

SamBam 6y ago
> We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention. That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?
- omginternets 6y ago
  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148504 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Here's a pure psychophysics study we performed. It gets at the essence of the mechanism without forcing you to wade through pages of fMRI-related esoterica. I'm happy to answer any questions :)
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    That's a cool experiment, and a well-written article, thanks! I've had a tiny bit of experience dealing with the visual system in a related but distant field (the feedback loops of visual accommodation and vergence and conflicts that can emerge with stereoscopic 3d - and I wish I had understood and done actually insightful things..). This left me wondering about the important place of vision-based experiments in the theories of perception as well as consciousness. What are your thoughts about that subject? For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well, or is that something that we have a harder time grasping or even formulating (due to a certain bias towards vision) ? edit: I've read the other comment about the double-take so in this case there seems to be some ways to test that out on other senses, but my question still holds when talking about the overall field and the prevalence of vision in this kind fo research
    - omginternets 6y ago
      > For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well [...]? Yes, very much so! I believe there is less bias towards vision than you think. Once you have a paradigm that works in vision, replicating it in other sensory modalities is generally low-hanging fruit for subsequent publication. I didn't get the sense that consciousness research was terribly biased towards vision. The fields of audition and haptics are alive and thriving. Here's an experiment I did with MEG in the auditory domain: http://www.unicog.org/publications/Marti%20Thibault%20Dehaene%202014%20PLoSone_%20Extraction%20of%20regularities%20varies%20with%20context.pdf http://www.unicog.org/publications/Marti%20Thibault%20Dehaen...
      - cmehdy 6y ago
        It's probably the projection of my own bias there, thanks for your perspective! (and for the link)
        omginternets 6y ago
        In all fairness, there probably is some bias towards vision. More exactly, there is bias towards things that are easy to study. Vision and audition are easy to study because screens and speakers are widely available. Touch and proprioception are harder, but still common. Smell and taste are rare. So your point is far from crazy. However, there is sufficient multi-modal evidence that I don't think our current theories of access consciousness are mere visual artifacts.
- User23 6y ago
  My wife does this to me. She'll be talking about something and I'm not listening but I make semi-plausible automatic responses. Sometimes she catches on that I wasn't paying attention and calls me out on it. At that point the last 6-7 seconds of speech pops into my mind like magic and I can pay attention to it and respond. Sadly sometimes that's not enough to deduce what she was talking about.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    Yes! We informally referred to this as the "double-take phenomenon", and our hunch is that this is exactly what is going on. During my Ph.D, I would often spot this on my way to the lab. I would be seated in the subway early in the morning, and suddenly realize that the name of a station had just been announced, but that I hadn't heard it. Then, it was suddenly like I had heard it -- as if the trace sensory signal in auditory cortex had been isolated and amplified by my attentional system, before it fully dissipated. It was (and still is) super cool.
    - SamBam 6y ago
      Probably quite a separate phenomenon, but if I wake when it's still night and I want to know what time it is, I'll often blink my eyes open for a tiny fraction of a second to see the glowing alarm clock. I often don't know what time it is until I "read" the time from my memory. (It's either my memory or the after-image on my retina.)
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Sounds like inattentive ADHD or auditory processing disorder, where symptoms like this are typical. Unless you are thoughtfully meaning to give plausible responses instead of pay attention, then nvm!
    - omginternets 6y ago
      Please don't throw around diagnoses like that. You're not wrong, but the hallmark of psychiatric disorders is usually degree, not nature. Everybody checks out from time to time; ADHD people just do it more. You are not equipped to make that call, here.
pieter_mj 6y ago
People like Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle were/are stuck in the framework that tries to explain (while it provides no explanation at all) consciousness as an emergent property of a complex enough computation (by neurons). So Dennett, Hofstadter, Edelman et al, while really smart, will never get an inch closer to a true explanation. The mechanism by which general anesthetics temporarily and partially/fully disables consciousness should provide a nice hint in which direction a true explanation should go. There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes even a step further and states that the theory needs a non-computational component. (see Orch Or : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... ) In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already.
- omginternets 6y ago
  >There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Eesh, this again ... There has never been a proposed (serious, testable, much less supported) mechanism by which quantum mechanics could explain consciousness. This argument always boils down to "phenomenology happens in the mysterious place". Quantum mechanics is the 21st century pituitary gland. >In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already. We are all convinced that quantum-mechanical phenomena can take place in microtubules. That debate is settled, but here's the thing: that was never really the issue. The issue was -- again -- that none of these theories explain how phenomenology emerges from quantum mechanics. All they say is "it does". EDIT: >People like Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle were/are stuck in the framework that tries to explain (while it provides no explanation at all) consciousness as an emergent property of a complex enough computation (by neurons). This, however, is a statement on which we agree. This is why most consciousness researchers set their sites lower: they aim to explain access consciousness, and take no position on phenomenology. In other words, we're displaying humility by asserting knowledge of the easy problem, not the hard one.
titzer 6y ago
What do you think about people like Chalmers who obstinately refuse even the idea of neural correlates of conscious is even a thing, preferring to just assert that the hard problem is hard, full stop?
- bobthechef 6y ago
  Some philosophical rumination on what we might call "neurobabble" [0]. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble...
- omginternets 6y ago
  >What do you think about people like Chalmers If I'm being facetious, I don't :P More seriously, my reading of Chalmers is not that neural correlates of consciousness don't exist per se, it's rather that 1. So-called "access consciousness" (i.e. consciousness in the sense of "I am conscious of X") is distinct from phenomenological consciousness (contrary to what Dennett thinks). 2. Further, access consciousness has very little to do with phenomenological consciousness, to the point that calling it "consciousness" is a misnomer. 3. Therefore, neural correlates of access consciousness will never give us insight into phenomenology. I think my position is that of most people in the field. I'm agnostic. Or more exactly, damned if I know what I think about that. I find it hard to believe -- as Dennett claims -- that once we've explained everything about neural correlates of (access) consciousness, that there will be nothing left to explain. I also find it hard to believe Chalmers' story that neural correlates have nothing to teach us about about phenomenology. But my arguments ultimately appeal to an interpretation of scientific data in the context of my own experience, so it's really a gut feeling of "neither seems quite right". Given this, my stance is basically "I don't research hard problems; I research easy problems". Access consciousness -- whatever that is -- is interesting and useful to study. I choose that. (N.B.: most of this should be written in the past tense, as I have now moved to a different field!)
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    Terminology doesn't change anything, assume everything is about phenomenological consciousness. According to Chalmers brain doesn't differentiate between access consciousness and phenomenological consciousness, because the zombie concludes that he has phenomenological consciousness based on analysis of access consciousness.
bobthechef 6y ago
Perhaps this rather suggests that whatever the self-assessment of neuroscientists, the quality of philosophical education is rather poor.
- omginternets 6y ago
  >the quality of philosophical education is rather poor Where? In the USA? Indubitably. In France? Definitely not.
  - imbnwa 6y ago
    Becaues the Education system in America is designed to be gamed at all levels, from students to teachers to school board admins, not for anyone to actually be given life-enriching value.

SamBam 6y ago

> We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention. That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?

omginternets 6y ago
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148504 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Here's a pure psychophysics study we performed. It gets at the essence of the mechanism without forcing you to wade through pages of fMRI-related esoterica. I'm happy to answer any questions :)
- cmehdy 6y ago
  That's a cool experiment, and a well-written article, thanks! I've had a tiny bit of experience dealing with the visual system in a related but distant field (the feedback loops of visual accommodation and vergence and conflicts that can emerge with stereoscopic 3d - and I wish I had understood and done actually insightful things..). This left me wondering about the important place of vision-based experiments in the theories of perception as well as consciousness. What are your thoughts about that subject? For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well, or is that something that we have a harder time grasping or even formulating (due to a certain bias towards vision) ? edit: I've read the other comment about the double-take so in this case there seems to be some ways to test that out on other senses, but my question still holds when talking about the overall field and the prevalence of vision in this kind fo research
  - omginternets 6y ago
    > For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well [...]? Yes, very much so! I believe there is less bias towards vision than you think. Once you have a paradigm that works in vision, replicating it in other sensory modalities is generally low-hanging fruit for subsequent publication. I didn't get the sense that consciousness research was terribly biased towards vision. The fields of audition and haptics are alive and thriving. Here's an experiment I did with MEG in the auditory domain: http://www.unicog.org/publications/Marti%20Thibault%20Dehaene%202014%20PLoSone_%20Extraction%20of%20regularities%20varies%20with%20context.pdf http://www.unicog.org/publications/Marti%20Thibault%20Dehaen...
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      It's probably the projection of my own bias there, thanks for your perspective! (and for the link)
      - omginternets 6y ago
        In all fairness, there probably is some bias towards vision. More exactly, there is bias towards things that are easy to study. Vision and audition are easy to study because screens and speakers are widely available. Touch and proprioception are harder, but still common. Smell and taste are rare. So your point is far from crazy. However, there is sufficient multi-modal evidence that I don't think our current theories of access consciousness are mere visual artifacts.
User23 6y ago
My wife does this to me. She'll be talking about something and I'm not listening but I make semi-plausible automatic responses. Sometimes she catches on that I wasn't paying attention and calls me out on it. At that point the last 6-7 seconds of speech pops into my mind like magic and I can pay attention to it and respond. Sadly sometimes that's not enough to deduce what she was talking about.
- omginternets 6y ago
  Yes! We informally referred to this as the "double-take phenomenon", and our hunch is that this is exactly what is going on. During my Ph.D, I would often spot this on my way to the lab. I would be seated in the subway early in the morning, and suddenly realize that the name of a station had just been announced, but that I hadn't heard it. Then, it was suddenly like I had heard it -- as if the trace sensory signal in auditory cortex had been isolated and amplified by my attentional system, before it fully dissipated. It was (and still is) super cool.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Probably quite a separate phenomenon, but if I wake when it's still night and I want to know what time it is, I'll often blink my eyes open for a tiny fraction of a second to see the glowing alarm clock. I often don't know what time it is until I "read" the time from my memory. (It's either my memory or the after-image on my retina.)
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Sounds like inattentive ADHD or auditory processing disorder, where symptoms like this are typical. Unless you are thoughtfully meaning to give plausible responses instead of pay attention, then nvm!
  - omginternets 6y ago
    Please don't throw around diagnoses like that. You're not wrong, but the hallmark of psychiatric disorders is usually degree, not nature. Everybody checks out from time to time; ADHD people just do it more. You are not equipped to make that call, here.

pieter_mj 6y ago

People like Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle were/are stuck in the framework that tries to explain (while it provides no explanation at all) consciousness as an emergent property of a complex enough computation (by neurons). So Dennett, Hofstadter, Edelman et al, while really smart, will never get an inch closer to a true explanation. The mechanism by which general anesthetics temporarily and partially/fully disables consciousness should provide a nice hint in which direction a true explanation should go. There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes even a step further and states that the theory needs a non-computational component. (see Orch Or : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... ) In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already.

omginternets 6y ago
>There is no doubt imo that the theory will be based on quantum mechanics. Eesh, this again ... There has never been a proposed (serious, testable, much less supported) mechanism by which quantum mechanics could explain consciousness. This argument always boils down to "phenomenology happens in the mysterious place". Quantum mechanics is the 21st century pituitary gland. >In any case, I'm still waiting on an Einsteinian admission from most scientists that it is "their biggest mistake" to consider that a "warm, wet and noisy" environment like the brain cannot host the necessary quantum phenomena. In the current state of affairs, they have been proven wrong already. We are all convinced that quantum-mechanical phenomena can take place in microtubules. That debate is settled, but here's the thing: that was never really the issue. The issue was -- again -- that none of these theories explain how phenomenology emerges from quantum mechanics. All they say is "it does". EDIT: >People like Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle were/are stuck in the framework that tries to explain (while it provides no explanation at all) consciousness as an emergent property of a complex enough computation (by neurons). This, however, is a statement on which we agree. This is why most consciousness researchers set their sites lower: they aim to explain access consciousness, and take no position on phenomenology. In other words, we're displaying humility by asserting knowledge of the easy problem, not the hard one.

titzer 6y ago

What do you think about people like Chalmers who obstinately refuse even the idea of neural correlates of conscious is even a thing, preferring to just assert that the hard problem is hard, full stop?

bobthechef 6y ago
Some philosophical rumination on what we might call "neurobabble" [0]. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble...
omginternets 6y ago
>What do you think about people like Chalmers If I'm being facetious, I don't :P More seriously, my reading of Chalmers is not that neural correlates of consciousness don't exist per se, it's rather that 1. So-called "access consciousness" (i.e. consciousness in the sense of "I am conscious of X") is distinct from phenomenological consciousness (contrary to what Dennett thinks). 2. Further, access consciousness has very little to do with phenomenological consciousness, to the point that calling it "consciousness" is a misnomer. 3. Therefore, neural correlates of access consciousness will never give us insight into phenomenology. I think my position is that of most people in the field. I'm agnostic. Or more exactly, damned if I know what I think about that. I find it hard to believe -- as Dennett claims -- that once we've explained everything about neural correlates of (access) consciousness, that there will be nothing left to explain. I also find it hard to believe Chalmers' story that neural correlates have nothing to teach us about about phenomenology. But my arguments ultimately appeal to an interpretation of scientific data in the context of my own experience, so it's really a gut feeling of "neither seems quite right". Given this, my stance is basically "I don't research hard problems; I research easy problems". Access consciousness -- whatever that is -- is interesting and useful to study. I choose that. (N.B.: most of this should be written in the past tense, as I have now moved to a different field!)
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Terminology doesn't change anything, assume everything is about phenomenological consciousness. According to Chalmers brain doesn't differentiate between access consciousness and phenomenological consciousness, because the zombie concludes that he has phenomenological consciousness based on analysis of access consciousness.

bobthechef 6y ago

Perhaps this rather suggests that whatever the self-assessment of neuroscientists, the quality of philosophical education is rather poor.

omginternets 6y ago
>the quality of philosophical education is rather poor Where? In the USA? Indubitably. In France? Definitely not.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  Becaues the Education system in America is designed to be gamed at all levels, from students to teachers to school board admins, not for anyone to actually be given life-enriching value.