9 ms·

Key Consciousness Connections Uncovered

99 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

soderfoo 3y ago
Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness, correct? My science literacy is lacking. Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study, but any brain research pretty fascinating.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  One can be awake and still not be conscious
- rytill 3y ago
  Why do you find self-awareness to be the more fascinating area of study? It makes complete sense that something could be self-aware if it could be aware of anything at all. What more do you need to research/understand about self-awareness? It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else). A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
  - DEADMINCE 2y ago
    Awareness is just the basic state of most animal life, it has to be for it to function. It isn't particularly more interesting than a venus fly trap. Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible. How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
    - rytill 2y ago
      Because while self-awareness may be fertile ground for interesting emergent behavior, it is not mysterious. There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”. We basically know what’s going on at the ground level. Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. And since all that exists in our lives is our collection of sentient experiences of reality, this is a pretty big ethical question.
      - DEADMINCE 2y ago
        I think you have that mixed around. Basic awareness/consciousness/awareness is not especially notable or exciting, it's incredibly common and many aspects are well understood. Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood. > There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”. Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it. > Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.
        rytill 2y ago
        > You’re using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox I don’t think so - see https://chatgpt.com/share/507ca1a4-43a3-4b30-afaf-08273ed54dcd https://chatgpt.com/share/507ca1a4-43a3-4b30-afaf-08273ed54d... (I just tried once) This is of course not meant as proof or knowledge of any kind, but just that the way I’m using the words is what the “average” of how people in books and on the internet would use those words. I don’t understand how “evolution and brain development” cause sensations to arise. What part of our biology is the part directly producing sentience experience? How would you explain why we experience anything instead of nothing? Can we replicate it in a non-biological system?
- b800h 3y ago
  Yep. It does frustrate me that they use the term this way.
  - nicklecompte 3y ago
    In the past we used the word "sentience" for this, but sci-fi confused "sentience" with "sapience," and now we have four terms that are meaningless, causing pointless arguments because different people interpret them in different ways. - consciousness - sentience - self-awareness - sapience (It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
    - glenstein 3y ago
      I'm okay to live and let live and not litigate differences here as long as usage is meaningful and contributes to precision (although it would be perfectly fair to insist that's exactly what's being lost here). I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- groestl 3y ago
  Obligatory book recommendation in that regard "I Am a Strange Loop", by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
  - DEADMINCE 2y ago
    > The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness Well, most animals have awareness, but not self-awareness. > there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation. That doesn't seem to be true at all. The idea of a self is very testable.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation. I don't think this is correct. Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way. But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
    - denton-scratch 3y ago
      > But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter). I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions). It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas. Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction. [0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
- Symmetry 3y ago
  Right, and not qualia either. I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness. Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can. I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
  - glenstein 3y ago
    Right, and I think the key here is that we should be ready to see key elements we believe are necessary for conscious to be distributed across numerous systems, rather than uncovering a singular unitary thing. And so it's not a matter of "oh, this study only found XXX but it didn't find consciousness". But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
    - Symmetry 3y ago
      That's true, but its also true that some connections might be reasonably said to be key for sensory information to find its way into working memory so I wouldn't dismiss the title.
- glenstein 3y ago
  >Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality. I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.
- taneq 3y ago
  That’s my reading, arousal/somnolence as opposed to being insensate vs. sentience.
librasteve 3y ago
afaict this is novel research that has found a “default application loop(?)” in our brains that is associated with being awake … and differs from goal oriented states - i have wondered if/when such an inner loop would be found since it is quite easy to turn consciousness on/off (sleep, anaesthetics, drugs ymmv) and then fMRI can be used to find differentiated activity patterns. This is pretty good evidence that Panpsychism is bollocks, if you needed it.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  My own concern is more about how Dualists can justify their metaphysics, and where does consciousness stops when considering less complex systems than humans. (Also aggregations of systems, like a country !)
- loafer-project 3y ago
  Interesting find on the "default application loop," but it hardly debunks panpsychism. Panpsychism suggests that all matter has proto-conscious traits, not just brain-like consciousness. The brain patterns we're identifying with fMRI are just how human consciousness manifests, based on our specific neural setups. This doesn't necessarily exclude other forms of consciousness inherent in different forms of matter, which might be beyond our current detection capabilities. Let's not conflate our present understanding of human consciousness with the broader, philosophical nature of consciousness itself.
  - tasty_freeze 3y ago
    Panpsychism is as necessary to explain consciousness. Why can't it (and qualia) just be emergent behaviors? We might as well posit pancandleness in order to explain the candleness of candles. Without such a thing, why call a candle a candle? It would merely be just a temporary arrangement of molecules.
    - anon291 2y ago
      Being a candle is different than the sensation that one is a candle. Indeed, yes, i think it's reasonable to posit, that, if such a sensation exists, then all things would feel it in some way, depending on how much of a candle you are.
gilbetron 3y ago
A great book on this topic is Consciousness and the Brain ( https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes-Thoughts/dp/0143126261/ https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes... ) It really shows how a lot of who we are is unconscious and happening without us being aware.
- xjay 3y ago
  See also: The Elephant in the Brain [1] > The main thesis of the book is that we are very often not aware of our real reasons for most of our behaviours. Our behaviors are optimised for living in a social group and very often, from the point of view of natural selection, it is useful if we are not consciously aware of our real motivations. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain
  - Crontab 3y ago
    That’s sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing this.
- hvs 3y ago
  A related book that I found interesting is "The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger [1]. He's a philosopher but also brings in current (for 2010) neuroscience research into the study of consciousness and the feeling of a "self". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...
- yboris 3y ago
  My favorite is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
_akhe 3y ago
It's always exciting when new correlates are discovered, but this doesn't really uncover anything about consciousness per se. At least not as classified by David Chalmers and others who use the term The Hard Problem of Consciousness - which seems to show that consciousness is impossible to understand in our current paradigm. Understand meaning - to the point we could reproduce it. The Hard Problem is contrasted with the so-called Easy Problems - which are still very hard to solve, and many of them still aren't - but they are ultimately of a class of solvable problems, like neural correlates, the role of dopaminergic pathways, and so-on. These everyday neurological findings are needed to make progress toward understanding the brain, but they don't really have anything to do with consciousness. Some definitions: let intelligence mean the acquisition and understanding of knowledge let self mean who you refer to when you say "I" or "me" let consciousness mean raw sensations/happenings: *the aroma of coffee*, *the taste of chocolate*, *the sound of a drop of water* Intelligence and selfhood fall under the Easy Problems - both philosophically and neurologically. We have machines that for all intents and purposes are intelligent. Even though it's not perfect, we know what kind of problem that is and how to solve it mechanistically. While nobody has invented a true "self" yet, if we ever find out exactly what conscious experiences are, scaffolding those experiences with self/identity becomes an organizational task (an Easy Problem). Still a very hard one involving neural correlates, cortical pathways, etc. from which we may derive new algorithms and paradigms, but ultimately solvable. So that leaves the mystery of raw experiences ("the aroma of coffee") which do not seem solvable in any scientific sense. You could say that a digital camera that detects faces in its viewfinder is intelligent, but it doesn't "see" the face, we know that it only unconsciously "detects" the face. So a mystery arises when we examine the human eye, because we see basically the same hardware as the camera: Lens (lens), sensor (retina), wire (optic nerve), chip (visual cortex). Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing. I applaud all progress toward understanding the brain, and sometimes wonder why the whole of humanity are not all focused on solving problems like death and aging (by way of solving consciousness), as it seems like pretty much the most important possible thing to all of us! Favorites on the topic: Donald Hoffman, John Searle, David Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris.
- 3y ago

99 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness, correct? My science literacy is lacking. Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study, but any brain research pretty fascinating.

m3kw9 3y ago
One can be awake and still not be conscious
rytill 3y ago
Why do you find self-awareness to be the more fascinating area of study? It makes complete sense that something could be self-aware if it could be aware of anything at all. What more do you need to research/understand about self-awareness? It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else). A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  Awareness is just the basic state of most animal life, it has to be for it to function. It isn't particularly more interesting than a venus fly trap. Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible. How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
  - rytill 2y ago
    Because while self-awareness may be fertile ground for interesting emergent behavior, it is not mysterious. There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”. We basically know what’s going on at the ground level. Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. And since all that exists in our lives is our collection of sentient experiences of reality, this is a pretty big ethical question.
    - DEADMINCE 2y ago
      I think you have that mixed around. Basic awareness/consciousness/awareness is not especially notable or exciting, it's incredibly common and many aspects are well understood. Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood. > There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”. Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it. > Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.
      - rytill 2y ago
        > You’re using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox I don’t think so - see https://chatgpt.com/share/507ca1a4-43a3-4b30-afaf-08273ed54dcd https://chatgpt.com/share/507ca1a4-43a3-4b30-afaf-08273ed54d... (I just tried once) This is of course not meant as proof or knowledge of any kind, but just that the way I’m using the words is what the “average” of how people in books and on the internet would use those words. I don’t understand how “evolution and brain development” cause sensations to arise. What part of our biology is the part directly producing sentience experience? How would you explain why we experience anything instead of nothing? Can we replicate it in a non-biological system?
b800h 3y ago
Yep. It does frustrate me that they use the term this way.
- nicklecompte 3y ago
  In the past we used the word "sentience" for this, but sci-fi confused "sentience" with "sapience," and now we have four terms that are meaningless, causing pointless arguments because different people interpret them in different ways. - consciousness - sentience - self-awareness - sapience (It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
  - glenstein 3y ago
    I'm okay to live and let live and not litigate differences here as long as usage is meaningful and contributes to precision (although it would be perfectly fair to insist that's exactly what's being lost here). I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
groestl 3y ago
Obligatory book recommendation in that regard "I Am a Strange Loop", by Douglas R. Hofstadter
denton-scratch 3y ago
> Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
- DEADMINCE 2y ago
  > The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness Well, most animals have awareness, but not self-awareness. > there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation. That doesn't seem to be true at all. The idea of a self is very testable.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation. I don't think this is correct. Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way. But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter). I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions). It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas. Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction. [0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
Symmetry 3y ago
Right, and not qualia either. I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness. Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can. I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
- glenstein 3y ago
  Right, and I think the key here is that we should be ready to see key elements we believe are necessary for conscious to be distributed across numerous systems, rather than uncovering a singular unitary thing. And so it's not a matter of "oh, this study only found XXX but it didn't find consciousness". But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
  - Symmetry 3y ago
    That's true, but its also true that some connections might be reasonably said to be key for sensory information to find its way into working memory so I wouldn't dismiss the title.
glenstein 3y ago
>Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality. I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.
taneq 3y ago
That’s my reading, arousal/somnolence as opposed to being insensate vs. sentience.

librasteve 3y ago

afaict this is novel research that has found a “default application loop(?)” in our brains that is associated with being awake … and differs from goal oriented states - i have wondered if/when such an inner loop would be found since it is quite easy to turn consciousness on/off (sleep, anaesthetics, drugs ymmv) and then fMRI can be used to find differentiated activity patterns. This is pretty good evidence that Panpsychism is bollocks, if you needed it.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
My own concern is more about how Dualists can justify their metaphysics, and where does consciousness stops when considering less complex systems than humans. (Also aggregations of systems, like a country !)
loafer-project 3y ago
Interesting find on the "default application loop," but it hardly debunks panpsychism. Panpsychism suggests that all matter has proto-conscious traits, not just brain-like consciousness. The brain patterns we're identifying with fMRI are just how human consciousness manifests, based on our specific neural setups. This doesn't necessarily exclude other forms of consciousness inherent in different forms of matter, which might be beyond our current detection capabilities. Let's not conflate our present understanding of human consciousness with the broader, philosophical nature of consciousness itself.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  Panpsychism is as necessary to explain consciousness. Why can't it (and qualia) just be emergent behaviors? We might as well posit pancandleness in order to explain the candleness of candles. Without such a thing, why call a candle a candle? It would merely be just a temporary arrangement of molecules.
  - anon291 2y ago
    Being a candle is different than the sensation that one is a candle. Indeed, yes, i think it's reasonable to posit, that, if such a sensation exists, then all things would feel it in some way, depending on how much of a candle you are.

gilbetron 3y ago

A great book on this topic is Consciousness and the Brain ( https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes-Thoughts/dp/0143126261/ https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes... ) It really shows how a lot of who we are is unconscious and happening without us being aware.

xjay 3y ago
See also: The Elephant in the Brain [1] > The main thesis of the book is that we are very often not aware of our real reasons for most of our behaviours. Our behaviors are optimised for living in a social group and very often, from the point of view of natural selection, it is useful if we are not consciously aware of our real motivations. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain
- Crontab 3y ago
  That’s sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing this.
hvs 3y ago
A related book that I found interesting is "The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger [1]. He's a philosopher but also brings in current (for 2010) neuroscience research into the study of consciousness and the feeling of a "self". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...
yboris 3y ago
My favorite is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

_akhe 3y ago

It's always exciting when new correlates are discovered, but this doesn't really uncover anything about consciousness per se. At least not as classified by David Chalmers and others who use the term The Hard Problem of Consciousness - which seems to show that consciousness is impossible to understand in our current paradigm. Understand meaning - to the point we could reproduce it. The Hard Problem is contrasted with the so-called Easy Problems - which are still very hard to solve, and many of them still aren't - but they are ultimately of a class of solvable problems, like neural correlates, the role of dopaminergic pathways, and so-on. These everyday neurological findings are needed to make progress toward understanding the brain, but they don't really have anything to do with consciousness. Some definitions: let intelligence mean the acquisition and understanding of knowledge let self mean who you refer to when you say "I" or "me" let consciousness mean raw sensations/happenings: *the aroma of coffee*, *the taste of chocolate*, *the sound of a drop of water* Intelligence and selfhood fall under the Easy Problems - both philosophically and neurologically. We have machines that for all intents and purposes are intelligent. Even though it's not perfect, we know what kind of problem that is and how to solve it mechanistically. While nobody has invented a true "self" yet, if we ever find out exactly what conscious experiences are, scaffolding those experiences with self/identity becomes an organizational task (an Easy Problem). Still a very hard one involving neural correlates, cortical pathways, etc. from which we may derive new algorithms and paradigms, but ultimately solvable. So that leaves the mystery of raw experiences ("the aroma of coffee") which do not seem solvable in any scientific sense. You could say that a digital camera that detects faces in its viewfinder is intelligent, but it doesn't "see" the face, we know that it only unconsciously "detects" the face. So a mystery arises when we examine the human eye, because we see basically the same hardware as the camera: Lens (lens), sensor (retina), wire (optic nerve), chip (visual cortex). Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing. I applaud all progress toward understanding the brain, and sometimes wonder why the whole of humanity are not all focused on solving problems like death and aging (by way of solving consciousness), as it seems like pretty much the most important possible thing to all of us! Favorites on the topic: Donald Hoffman, John Searle, David Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris.

3y ago