Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation.
Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.
And what is wrong with 'it emerges from neural activity'?
really, it is quite an adequate solution for a species with our current level of philosophical and scientific understanding.
That doesn't mean it is right, and doesn't discount potentially other options such as something that, despite my own strong scientific background, I have a fondness for through buddhism and meditation - and which is mentioned in the original article - that there is just one consciousness we all share in.
despite my fondness for this, the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex neural network is supported by the evidence that shows that damage to the brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness.
Therefore, the idea that consciousness in LIFE doesn't require the brain, or vice versa, is simply mysticism and denying the truth that we all experience
I agree with you that consciousness is quite a mystery, but in terms of the ultimate mystery I feel very strongly that the question of life, consciousness and why there is something instead of nothing is a question that goes together and that they are all intricately linked
And what is wrong with 'it emerges from neural activity'?
Nothing terribly wrong, but consider this:
a) images on the television emerge from electrical activity in the television set;
b) break the television and the the images cease.
If we didn't already know that televisions receive signals, we might suppose that one day, after our science had progressed far enough, we might understand how televisions produce all that endless content.
This is the best comment I've seen in this thread. It illustrates the key point IMO, which is that pretending like you have all of the relevant information precludes you from understanding the real cause of the phenomenon you're observing. Having a closed mind should never be celebrated as a rational thing to do even if it means not accepting the dogma du jour.
But we can agree that the images on the TV screen are caused by the configuration of physical matter making up the TV, just like our consciousness is caused by the physical matter making up our brain.
Granted, people have subjective (i.e. feel-happy) reasons to throw out Occam's razor and suppose we have e.g. an eternal soul, but the search for the soul-receiver in the brain will just give you fits (not so bold prediction: they'll never find it, because it doesn't exist).
If we connect electrodes (or use non-invasive potential and current measurement techniques), we can reverse engineer the functionality. We see that electrons hit the screen. Where do they come from? The emitter. What controls its voltage? The amplifier. What are the inputs to it?
We can see that there is a measurable signal coming to the television through the wire. There is nothing supernatural or even quantum level stuff going on.
I am aware of this line of reasoning, but it contains a subtle problem: there is no way to measure consciousness. We assume a correlation between consciousness and human-like intelligent behaviour. We assume that we are unconscious when in deep sleep, for example, but we have no way of knowing for sure. It could just be that we are not recording any memories for later reference. Long story short, no, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that damage to brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness -- only of intelligent behaviour.
It turns out that it is precisely the claim that consciousness emerges from the brain -- given our present state of knowledge -- that is mysticism. The only possible scientific position here is to say "I don't know".
I commented elsewhere, linking to Integrated information theory[1] but it's relevant here also because you claim theres no way to measure consciousness, but as soon as you accept a formal definition of consciousness like IIT than there is a way to measure it, at least hypothetically. So this is a fallacy preserving the immeasurability of consciousness as a side effect of rejecting any specific formal definition of it as incomplete [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
Some problems.
Why is there any reason to assume that intelligent behaviour and consciousness aren't the same thing?
If a vegetative human with next to no brain function is going to be considered conscious for all intents and purposes according to what you have written above, then you are suggesting that consciousness resides somewhere else, perhaps as an artefact of 'living'.
In my more deeply reflective moments I've sometimes thought that maybe even very simpl chemical reactions, such as the conversion of carbon compounds to carbon dioxide and water, may be a form of consciousness - basically, consciousness exists where there are energy gradients and is thus deeply tied with entropy and thermodynamics.
So, that could be true, but that is different from the meaning of being human, and of having a conscious existence that is rich with relationships with friends, activities and memories, plans etc... Consciousness without memory would not be productive in our present incantations as humans- a conscious being without memory would have no language, no concept of how to act, or why, so if such an entity exists, or exists when we sleep, could you really call it conscious? What wouldn't be observing? What would it be comparing and contrasting its experiences to?
I said before that, for a species of our current level of philosophical and scientific understanding, the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal activity seems appropriate, even if it isn't complete.
It is not true that this is mysticism, because in order to suggest they consciousness doesn't correlate with intelligent behaviour, you are actively claiming things that we don't know and have no proof of in order to suggest that consciousness is something other, and intelligence a subset of.
As a species we generally agree that consciousness is a property possessed by things with neural networks, and the more complex the neural network, corrected for body size, the more advanced the level of consciousness and level of self awareness. So intelligence is basically included in this definition, and although we can't really measure either well, we do know that it is the activity of neurons that leads to one, and despite the oft-pointed out incompleteness of this layer of definitions, it is both supported by available evidence and not so much of a problem, given that these are enormous questions that civilisation shall likely struggle to fully understand for as long as there are humans about to think on it
> there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that damage to brain will impair an entity's level of consciousness
There is loads of evidence from studying states that alter the brain.
For example, damage to certain parts of the brain produces hemispatial neglect. The person loses awareness of not just one half of the universe but the concept of that half. This is not consistent with an incorporeal soul, which would continue to make judgements about the full universe albeit with hemispatial blindness.
Then there are dissociative states, as with some migraine auras, where some aspect of self-awareness is lost, leaving the person with the sense that they are watching their own actions in the third person, but with otherwise intact behavior.
There are the dissociative anesthetics like nitrous oxide and ketamine, which create a solipsistic disconnection from the outside world without abolishing self awareness.
The memory function can become disconnected while consciousnes remains, as with some sleep disorders and drugs.
There are delirious states, seen in illness and with some drugs, where the person is conscious but experiencing imagination on the same footing as reality.
The corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the cerebrum can be severed, leaving each side with an independent partially-disconnected consciousness.
In a few sentences you brought more of value to the table than that entire article. I'm all for alternate theories, but the wilder the theory, the more evidence is required. At the very least a thorough look at the existing evidence and how it can be better explained under the banner of the new theory is required.
Saying it emerges from neural activity doesn't explain the mechanism; it's merely the result of something we don't understand.
So neurons fire and we see this pattern of activity in a state of wakefulness etc, etc... well, okay but WHY?
I would say it will never be explained until we can recreate a consciousness artificially, and since it's next to impossible to experience another's consciousness, it might be an unsolvable problem.
> I would say it will never be explained until we can recreate a consciousness artificially
Even then it would probably end up being an emergent phenomena not necessarily understanble. As in you can simulate a brain perhaps in the distant future and well you have consciousness by some metrics we choose to measure it. So what? We put these bits of code in, we ran this training input set on it, and now consciousness comes out of the other end, we won't necessarily understand how and what it is.
>We see ones and zeroes go into our ALU and the result is an operating system. Okay, but WHY?
>Or, we see two molecules joining... and the result is a human baby! Okay, but WHY?
Right, but we can answer those questions. We can explain how the high-level OS is written in lower-level primitives, how these correspond to machine instructions, and how those correspond to electrical impulses. You wouldn't say "oh yeah, an OS is just electrical pulses firing, there's nothing you don't already understand here", or "oh, you understand basic organic chemistry, now you understand all animals".
I'm not saying there's anything mystical to it, but there's this great big chunk that we don't understand yet, and saying "oh it's all electrical impulses" doesn't really shed any light on that.
> Saying it emerges from neural activity doesn't explain the mechanism; it's merely the result of something we don't understand.
You make an interesting point, however I think the case could be made that consciousness emerging from neural activity could be the result of emergence.
> There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion.
I could be wrong, but as an European my understanding is that there are people in the States who actually believe in non-science things like Adam and Eve and all that, so that when you begin to say that maybe Science doesn't or can't have all the answers (for example just the other day I was thinking "hey, has anyone proved that mathematical induction is really intellectually honest? or was Hume actually right and it's all make-believe?") you're immediately tagged as "a lunatic guy who believes the Earth is 6,000 years old" by Science-loving American redditors (HN is a little bit more forgiving), doesn't matter that I may be an agnostic and that I'm amazed that things like "God" are brought into a discussion which tries to make sense of the things around us.
It would also help if people would have a little more knowledge of the history of Science itself, this way they'd know about guys like La Mettrie or the French positivists who lived in the 19th century, meaning this discussion has happened many times before.
> I don't see how providing antagonizing labels based on nationality helps your argument at all.
I completely understand what paganel said: nationality and culture play an important role here. There are cultures or subcultures that accept that we can be completely wrong in our assertions (are we just dreaming?), or they are based on mysticism, or they are relativists, or they are scientific.
There are prejudices against you in the scientific environment if you have doubts about things like God or consciousness.
>(for example just the other day I was thinking "hey, has anyone proved that mathematical induction is really intellectually honest? or was Hume actually right and it's all make-believe?")
Mathematical induction is different from the type of induction that Hume was concerned with, and it's just as sound as any other method of mathematical proof.
I'm guessing the post you replied to really meant to talk about "inductive reasoning" and not mathematical induction. Regarding the former, it is a well known open question within the philosophy of science, regarding how valid inductive reasoning is.[1]
Well, there is Gulio Tononi's Information Integration Theory (http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.long, see also Christof Koch's summary in SciAm at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-theory-of...). Personally, I don't find it particularly compelling at present, since the claims made are much stronger than the evidence to support them and I'm not entirely sure I believe the assumptions necessary to test the theory empirically. But it's out there.
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He has a theory of consciousness explained in a book called the feeling of what happens. The somatic marker hypothesis is a bit more than 'it emerges from neural activity' At the very minimum the book debunks a good number of otherwise plausible sounding theories. Damasio in that book also does a fantastic job of removing any mysticism from the exercise ... He's trying to explain what each of us recognize as conciousness in other animals. E.g. Many people think their dogs are concious without also holding mystical beliefs.
It's perfectly reasonable to define consciousness as "that which emerges from neural activity" if your model is able to describe that emergent behavior.[0]
This is not the same as describing what it "feels like" from the inside. From your comment, I infer that you are rejecting the explanatory powers of neuroscience because you are expecting it to speak to the "feels like" question.
I disagree, it is only possible at the moment to define _intelligence_ as "that which emerges from neural activity". There is not evidence whatsoever that consciousness emerges from neural activity. This is just a type of religious dogma in disguise. Think about it. Thanks for the link.
Video game characters aren't consciously autonomous though.
There's always the reductive argument of "Well, we could be running in a computer simulation and when you die here you're perfectly recreated in another simulated universe."
>Video game characters aren't consciously autonomous though.
What distinction are you claiming exists between your own subjective experience and that of a video game character? (follow-up question: why do you believe this?)
>We are only brains. If your brain gets squished, you don't really care because you'll cease to exist in this light cone.
I agree with you. However, we both have to give serious consideration to the objection that our brains are a necessary but not sufficient condition of consciousness.
We do not know, as of yet, that our brains are not merely some sort of wireless router for some higher existential consciousness. I don't think it is, but intellectual integrity demands that it's seriously considered.
A wireless router that evolved through a process of natural selection from simple, not conscious single-celled (and simpler) life-forms? That seems a bit far-fetched don't you think?
How do you know that there are no other components besides the brain that cause there to be subjective experience? One might very well suspect that there is something more, considering that no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience.
Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it. While your memories and feelings are in the body, your subjective experience of them may not be.
no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience.
This isn't a one time affair. Every human carries DNA explaining exactly how to create more intelligent conscious creatures. It doesn't take "special conditions." It happens in squalor, mud huts, ice, desert, famine, over excess—everywhere. We are self-replacing nanomachines looking like individual discrete entities on a macro scale.
Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it.
Nope. Not possible. You are entirely your brain. Nothing more, nothing less.
> You are entirely your brain. Nothing more, nothing less.
Clearly I am only a portion of my brain since if you remove some of it I am still me. But then, if you start killing the neurons in my brain one by one, at what point do I stop being me?
Nope. Not possible. You are entirely your brain. Nothing more, nothing less.
You cannot reasonably claim to know this. Of course, your parent comment cannot know that "no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience" either, as long as he only has access to his own subjective experience.
How does your soul observe and affect your body? (I'm assuming you mean a two-way path there; "observing your body and being affected by it" would be one-way, and would be problematic. "A difference that makes no difference", and all.)
Can this connection be distorted or interrupted? What are the effects of doing so?
If you accept that a drug-induced solipsistic, out-of-body effect[1] is an alteration of subjective experience, are you then going to argue that "While your memories, feelings, and subjective experience are in the body, your X may not be." What would X be?
Imagine looking out the window and seeing stuff that is happening outside. If the window gets foggy, you don't experience everything that's happening outside the window. That doesn't disprove that you are observing stuff outside the window.
On the other hand, having "uncaused effects" has been found in quantum mechanics, but it's too much of a leap to suppose that your consciousness controls your body through quantum mechanical probability. Although there's something eerie about the waveform collapse having to do with conscious observers.
Yes - from the subjective perspective of Schrodinger's cat. Yes - from the subjective perspective of the detector. From the outside we observe the cat's state becoming entangled with that of the radioactive sample, but from the cat's perspective it made the observation, collapsed the state, and either died or didn't.
It's exactly the same for us, making the observation - from our perspective we observed one result or the other, collapsing the wavefunction. But to an outside observer we entangled our own state with that of the cat and the sample, and we're in a superposition of (observed cat dead, observed cat alive) - and will be until they observe us, at which point our wavefunction will collapse to one or the other. And so on.
I'm thinking that consciousness, as it stands right now, is associated with a lot of things that should and ought to be reduced to mere sensation.
Consciousness is associated with thought, emotion, and sensation. Yet as neuroscience progresses, I think we will eventually functionalize thought, emotion, and sensation as biological processes.
Some may argue that our mental processes are fundamentally differently perceived from our external senses. But as a human being, we have internal sensations as well. We can feel internal pain and stomachaches. These have a fundamentally different sensation from the sensations that can be externally induced in us. Extrapolating further, we can say that thinking and feeling and other mental activity are mere sensations of the consciousness induced by the brain.
Before physics, there was a large role for divinities in the world. Gods and the Abrahamic God ruled Nature and Fortune, the parts of the world that we do not understand. But as human beings gained mastery and confidence over the external world, the domain of divinities shrank and shrank. We now attribute causes of phenomena to the natural world, rather than divinities; divinities used to be the natural law of the universe, today they have to be content with the supernatural.
Regardless of the philosophical justifications of consciousness, I see it going the way of divinities. The popularity of consciousness will wane as mental functions and mental states and cognition are understood. Societies will begin to use neuroscientific explanations to justify perception and behavior that provide actionable innovation and correction instead of attributing them to black-box consciousness.
When that happens, the idea of consciousness will, I think, seem as absurd as divinities.
It is a reasonable position I think. Given the progress with understanding many other things, it is reasonable to expect progress here - bearing in mind the incredible complexity of the brain.
If philosophers were going to solve this problem they would have done so already, given that they have been at it for 2500 years or so with no real signs of progress.
Science on the other hand has made enormous progress in understanding living things. Recall for example that only 100 years ago many or most people adhered to "vitalism" ie the view that living things contained an "elan vital" which distinguished them from inorganic matter. Enter biochemistry.
As consciousness is tamed by scientific material reductionism, would you expect 'free will' to become as absurd a notion 100 years from now as 'elan vital' seems to us?
Consciousness is a mystery only to those that cannot define what it is.
What is the origin of awareness itself? It is the very activities one is aware of. The activities produce energy which we call consciousness. The dimension that the consciousness can see is determined by the quality of the very activities.
Consciousness is thus not solely generated by neurological activities.
Before denying this because of your first impression, please confirm if what I'm saying is true or not, and whether it is confirmed by all evidence or if there is in fact any evidence which contradicts it. What I've said here doesn't come from my thoughts or ideas.
I tend to agree with the general tone of what you're saying, but have a problem with "The activities produce energy which we call consciousness". Either you are using the word "energy" in the regular sense or as a metaphor for something else. If it's the former, we're missing some physics. if it's the latter, you're still sweeping the problem under the rug.
I don't think the physics is missing - it should be all there, according to my confirmation. There are numerous examples around us. Waves propagate themselves owing to the very energy inside of them. Gravity is energy that is produced by the activities of everything in the world - the stress energy tensor says the same thing, but people don't seem to really recognize what it means.
I don't understand what you're saying. Pretend like I am idiot and explain it to me in simple terms.
1. Can you define consciousness? Or is consciousness = awareness? Is that what you meant?
2. You ask "What is the origin of awareness itself?". I really don't understand this question. What is awareness? I can't even comprehend what you mean when you ask "what is the origin of [it]?". Colloquially, physical things have "origins", which is to say that at some point some physical thing was "created" or "crafted". My intuitive idea of awareness is that it is an experience, it's not something physical.
1. Yes, consciousness is just awareness. Your mind is where all your thoughts and judgements are. Your body acts from your mind and your mind is generated by your consciousness.
2. The 'origin' of a phenomenon refers the causes that generate the phenomenon. In math, as well as philosophy, the question is the origin of the answer. I'll give you an example. Where does the light from a lightbulb come from? Does it come from the bulb or does it come from the electricity itself? The bulb is simply the object which converts the electrical energy to EM radiation, not the origin of the light itself. Where does the electricity come from? The activities of the generator. So, mind is like light and consciousness is like an electrical wave.
3. Awareness of a fact means that you see a fact. It means that you receive the fact as it is. The dichotomy between experiential and physical things is illusory. It's simply that you experience the physical things from your own perspective, which is formulated by everything that has happened to you and everything you have done in the past - all of which were originated by activities as well. If we compare to a physical object, your consciousness is like the driver of a car (where your body is like the car), and when you are driving a car you can see through the windshield and you can feel feedback through the steering wheel. Hope this makes sense.
This is not so easy to understand at first listen so please feel free to ask me continuous questions as I can help you to make your understanding more concrete.
As far as I know, light is defined precisely in physics. The light from a light bulb comes from electricity traveling through a highly resistive wire. The particle interactions generate photons.
"The bulb is simply the object which converts the electrical energy to EM radiation, not the origin of the light itself."
If you were to ignore the particle interactions, then yes, the light originates from the light bulb. It certainly does not originate from electricity. Where the electricity comes from is irrelevant.
"It means that you receive the fact as it is."
I have no idea what that means.
"The dichotomy between experiential and physical things is illusory. It's simply that you experience the physical things from your own perspective,"
Oh, I know.
I still don't think you defined awareness precisely enough.
One of the things we can be aware of is our own thoughts. If you count that as another "sense", is your statement still true? (Any neuroscientists out there: is it gibberish to consider awareness of your own thinking as a type of sensory input?)
I don't see anyone pretending that we know consciousness.
However, we are in the process of understanding, and there has yet to be any proof or indication that that process will end before we conquer that knowledge. Given what we already know, and that we're in the infancy of real research in this area, there's every reason to believe that we're going to solve this mystery in the near future.
And it's intellectually cowardice to pretend otherwise.
I didn't say we will never understand it, although it is certainly a possibility. One might argue that Godel's incompleteness theorems suggest a reality where some things are unknowable.
I guess that depends on what you believe Mathematics to be. Is it a representation of reality itself (maybe the ultimate reality) or is it just a human construct? I don't know.
It's a theorem that starts off with some assumptions, and gives you some implications. It does not say anything as general as "some things are unknowable in mathematics".
Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.