Logically speaking consciousness being "produced" from neurons doesn't any sense whatsoever. It sounds magical. What is it that is being produced? Why is not produced in other dynamic systems, e.g. a car engine? Is it complexity which produces consciousness? Or is it some substrate? Is it a function being computed which is necessary for this production?
Can a sophisticated car engine be conscious? Can a Ferris wheel be conscious? I can definitely map various bits of computation to a car engine and a Ferris wheel. If you need organic matter to have consciousness, can an extremely complex car engine made of organic matter be conscious?
One can brush aside all these rigorous questions, like almost all neuroscientists, and adopt a fideistic attitude that basically stipulates a materialistic view.
Please read more about the hard problem of consciousness [1]. There will be lots of people who will disagree, but the materialistic view of the mind has lots of cracks in it [2]. One needn't even look at [2], as so far no one has given a non-gibberish answer to [1] which doesn't appeal to one or other common fallacy.
I once did some reading about this so I'm curious for more information (since you seem to know what you're talking about).
This is probably a stupid question (my favorite kind): Are there good arguments for why a car engine isn't conscious? Isn't it just the "other minds" problem in a different form?
The main argument against it would be the theory that consciousness is something we tap into. Completely unproven, but it has a certain elegance to it. There is actually some precedent for this as an argument. Back in ancient Greece the third of the three arguments in favor of the earth being spherical was that it would be the perfect shape for it to be.
As it stands, it's completely unknown why subatomic particles have precisely the mass and charges they need in order for matter to exist, even though the chances of that are supposedly trillions and trillions against one. Perhaps because matter is designed to tap into consciousness, and the more evolved the matter the more complex the slice of consciousness it can capture. That would be my working theory at least.
You are right. It is sort of similar to the "other minds" problem. There are no ironclad arguments against a car engine not being conscious, though it seems obvious. You can have more fun of this sort reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
The SEP article below is probably the best I can find right now which talks about almost all viewpoints.
There is an extremely good and entertaining argument in Penrose's book Shadows of the Mind against consciousness being computational (but the book has quite a good number of flaws in its other arguments).
From a reductionist and materialistic physical standpoint we only have fundamental particles and the forces in the universe. None of these seem to be related to consciousness. It is seems magical to say that these particles then interact in complex ways to produce something fundamentally new.
David Chalmers [1], the guy who came up with the hard problem, has written a lot on this.
Thanks! I'll ask one more question while I have your attention.
The first thing I searched for on that SEP page was "Popper", because my "how do we know a car engine is not conscious" stems from trying to apply falsifiability to my intuitive notions. What I take from "other minds" is that other people's consciousness is not falsifiable; taken to its natural conclusion, it seems to me that the non-consciousness of an engine is also non-falsifiable. Which is actually pretty cool, to a philosophical simpleton such as myself :-)
So my question is: is there something I can read that specifically links concepts of consciousness to Popper-derived falsifiability ideas?
Yes. You are spot on. I am not able to find readable survey-type articles other than the Wikipedia article on solipsism, but the idea you described is kind of folk-knowledge among really good philosophers of mind.
It tackles a lot of the philosophical problems around consciousness. I haven't read the whole thing because it's very technical and not always the best written, but what I've read is kind of interesting.
When I was a kid, I used to have very vivid dreams or hallucinations whenever I suffered from high fever. Nearly always the same dream, very frightening - very real to me when I was having them. What was amazing is that the dream was weird: I remember me being small. Too small for my mind - it was as if I (as in the thinker/narrator) was where the mind was and the rest of the body was so small that I couldn't fit it. My mind was floating around my head, like an aura or a chakra. The feeling, some part of it I have lost by now, was truly disturbing. The surroundings where white - marble I think. And there were huge white pillar, 100 times my size - and they were falling. And they wouldn't break when they do - they would simply fall without noise, without rubble. I was always scared to death, always running. The dream was short and sometimes I would have my parents with me in my dream. Although they were my size, I don't feel any emotion or have a though about their size, just my own.
A couple of times, I would feel that my limbs are getting bigger and bigger, while my head (possibly my mind) remains the same. I was observing it just outside my head. Not too far away, possibly from my own eyes but outside my head as my mind though still at the same position, has disconnected itself from the head. I knew I was in bed, I was arguing my own self about the feeling being unrealistic. But I remember I couldn't reason out, I felt as if I will be crushed by my own body - slowly and painfully. There is no physical pain that I could feel, just an intense fear of that it will come.
I don't think that these were near death experiences - possibly just hallucinations. Unfortunately, they were so real to me that to this day, I am in a way, still scared of them. On the other hand, I want them back because they were so real and so scary - because at no living moment in the rest of my life have I felt a similar emotion, a real fear of that magnitude. I am sharing this because I cannot believe that a psychological/mental experience can be more real than what I had felt; that NDEs is more real - that they need afterlife.
Religious theory is amazingly complete with scope to explain everything, may be with inconsistencies but still everything. Existence of God would explain everything - because he is omnipotent. The power of religion on the other hand is reducing because after so many years of scientific experiments we are able to experimentally verify alternative theories that explain much of what was unexplained before. We don't need God for minuscule things, not anymore. As of NDE today, sure physiological and psychological theories cannot explain everything about NDEs, but I believe that they will in future.
I think the parent should not have mentioned NDE, they are an interesting phenomenon, but they don't proof anything. His main argument is something else.
Windows is not produced by your computer; Windows runs on your computer they are separate concepts. The mind is a vary similar thing, it's an emergent property all the little pieces are individually understandable, it's not there until those peaces work together.
You mind works the same way. Apply a little voltage to this part of someone's brain and they are now having an out of body experience. It's just like a hardware interrupt in that it has meanings on several levels including the physical (QM) in all it's glory as well as the subjective. But, if you cut out that little area of someone's head and apply the same voltage it's not meaningful to suggest that those cells are having an out of body experience. In that context the experience is both the cascade that happens and the cells that are part of that cascade.
Yes, I have skimmed through it. It is a nicely written book, but I think the main premise is wrong. A more nuanced book is Penrose's Shadows of the Mind. It is more rigorous and has a good overview of physics and computer science, but some of its arguments have flaws.
If you're interested in the 'cracks' with regards to NDEs, definitely read The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman. That book, along with a few Terence McKenna lectures, will destroy any last vestiges of a materialistic worldview.
(To learn more about Terence McKenna, start with these:
It's always healthy to be versed with the opposing viewpoint, so I'd suggest reading How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker for a well articulated and evidenced materialistic thesis.
Actually, it would be a breaking news for people who subscribe to mind-matter dualism. There are quite a lot of them, for instance followers of many Christian religions.
The overwhelming majority of people accept that drugs can temporarily alter someones personality and brain trauma can interfere with memory and or function. The fact that many of these same people also believe in a soul setups an odd sort of cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, for most neuroscientists results like this are far closer to conformation using an interesting technique than truly groundbreaking research.
I am not religious, but I feel something is not adding up in this purely scientific view of the world. I never tried to explain this thought to anyone else, because it's damn hard to explain. I will give it a try:
As far as science goes (or I understand it) the brain is just a neural network, which gets activated based on inputs and produces some outputs, like a computer does. Neurons can also self-activate, but that is not really the point. The point is consciousness would not be required for that. When look around me I see things. If my brain would just do input/output, there would be no need for me to see anything. I would just act without seeing/hearing/feeling consciously. I don't claim I have any idea about anything, but I feel like something is not adding up here on a fundamental level. I don't even know if other people experience the same thing or if they do indeed just act on inputs and have no idea what I am talking about.
I wonder if what I said made any sense to anyone and if any philosophers were considering the same thing.
Your thinking of a basic classifier Neural net from an AI class. But, that's a poor analogy for anything more complex than reflexes. We have both short and long term memory, and we can do planning. A really simple way to thank about short term memory is to have a single neuron in a feed back loop. Basically it's output leads to it's input and it can be switched on and off. Of course real neurons have far more than just 3 connections and tend to work in fairly large networks, but it's gives you an idea of how you can have a short term memory you keep cycling though the lyrics of some song and it's 'stuck in your head'.
Long term memory is a physical change in the layout of a neural network. Spend long enough walking around a new city and there is an abstract but physical map that's actually stored in the layout of neurons in your head. At the same time pieces of that layout represent locations on the map and how they connect to other locations. Think of an entrance to a parking lot and you might have a fairly static picture of the location linked to the choice of where that will take you if you go there. (So short term memory is now a neuron that cycles, a network that picks which target network to activate, and a network that represents something, plus feedback to turn on and off the targeting.)
So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions. When you say Apple to your self your actually activating neurons that keep cycling Apple over and over. Picture yourself tossing a ball and your thinking thinking about starting the cascade of muscle memory that causes you to through something while picking the perimeters of where you want the ball to end up and how hard you want to to hit the target, and possibly the position you need to be in to actually be able to through the ball. You can play around with the outcomes of if I do this that will happen by checking what neural net's predict the outcome will be. Chess is a great analogy for this, players don't think about moves as picking a piece up and moving it somewhere else, but what it means when the piece is in a new location. Though experience, education, or just thinking about things you can even train these neural networks to get better at those predictions.
Of course the actual implementation of these things is horribly complex, and many of the specifics are not all completely understood / studied. Also, chemicals play a major role, there are actual chemicals that represent things like pleasure in the brain. EX: Cocaine mimics the mostly hard coded chemical reward response for things like having sex by blocking the dopamine reuptake transporters. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1704
PS: Still I hope this simplified model helps you understand what's going on.
So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions.
No, it's not! (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness). Artificial NNs can also model memory (see Hopfield networks). However, I just used them as an analogy. Maybe Zombies work better for you and the Philosophical Zombie Wikipedia page does a better job of explaining the idea (thanks again xyzzyz).
Perhaps if I reword that a little you might understand what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness is the subjective experience of the ability to think about things and processes as abstractions. Apple, Airplane, Alphabet, Algebra, Balance, Self, or Obama they all exist as arrangements and connections of neurons in your brain. When a song is stuck in your head that's a physical thing that's happening to a some neurons in your head. But, so is everything else your thinking about.
These networks also connect to and build off of other abstractions so ((((peanut) + butter) + Jelly) + Sandwich) is built from more than one of these networks. Try and think of a pile of peanut butter next to some grape jelly. No problem it's brown next to purple.
Now try and do that for peanut butter next to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Most people feel something odd happen on the second one because they are reusing the peanut butter network for both of those. For me, I can't focus on their colors at the same time.
Getting back to Consciousness, it's turning on these abstractions by choice. I want to think about Apple so I activate the Apple network and suddenly experience Apple. And it's the same network as if I had just read the word or saw a physical Apple. Language also get's mapped to this which is part of why philosophers think about thinks like platonic ideals yes there is an ideal Chair it exists and it's the Chair classifier in your head.
You might like Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop. He examines consciousness as a recursive feedback loop. The book has some hokey tangents, but I think it's a good presentation. btw, this book is much more accessible that Hofstadter's GEB. :)
Thanks. From the WP article it sounds like his ideas are somehow related to mine, but that he is viewing it from a completely different angle. Very interesting.
Thanks. This is what I am talking about (I think). I have a hard time understanding the counter-arguments though, without any background in philosophy beyond Plato. I will try again when I am less tired.
Are you talking about the self-awareness and introspection you perceive yourself as having?
Maybe, depends how you fill in those words. I guess you could write a computer program that has self-awareness, in the sense that it is able to talk about itself. That is not what I meant.
Does it help if you view your consciousness as both being produced by the brain, and used as an input - i.e. a key part of a feedback system?
I'd even say that this is what most likely is going on, but it opens a completely different can of worms, with questions like: Does the part responsible for the consciousness (let's call it soul for lack of a better word) survive after you die? This realization tipped the scale for me from "No, that is just wishful thinking." to "I have no clue, but it is slightly more likely that it does, than that it does not.".
It's very annoying that I can barely talk about this without using words, which have been claimed by people, who hold believes I consider completely irrational.
"The fact that many of these same people also believe in a soul setups an odd sort of cognitive dissonance."
There's no cognitive dissonance if you believe that the brain influences consciousness but aren't committed to the idea that the brain is the source of consciousness. E.g. you could believe that the brain is a reducing valve, a la Huxley, and there is no cognitive dissonance there at all.
When one's core beliefs have no basis in logic or objective reality, it's simple to maintain consistency. All that's needed is the invention of some new concept to explain the discrepancy.
The world created in days -> but a "day" could be a million years.
Evolutionary theory -> but <creator> is driving the evolution
etc...
"When one's core beliefs have no basis in logic or objective reality, it's simple to maintain consistency. All that's needed is the invention of some new concept to explain the discrepancy."
While this is indeed a problem for cartesian dualism, it isn't a problem for something like hylemorphic dualism, which is the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas, among other mainstream Christian theologians.
I doubt that many of them will accept any scientific proof which disproves mind-matter dualism, and thus this one woudn't be breaking news for them neither.
I don't happen to believe in mind-matter dualism, but at the same time, I also don't believe it's possible to scientifically prove it one way or the other.
Can science truly explain where consciousness comes from? I would argue it cannot, because consciousness is a subjective experience, and is not objectively measurable.
Actually, can science truly prove anything about the world with certainty? I think claiming that would be ignorant of the way science works: You make assumptions, based on those assumptions you build a model and then (optionally) you show that your model correctly predicts some effect. If the assumptions you made do not hold, your proof does not hold either.
Related to that question: Is consciousness really subjective? Is it not the only thing I as a person can experience objectively?
EDIT: I don't understand why I am beeing down voted? I am just trying to explain my point of view. I don't think religion can prove anything with certainty, either. Nobody can. You can just make more or less strong assumptions.
> the way science works: You make assumptions, based on those assumptions you build a model and then (optionally) you show that your model correctly predicts some effect
Theories with predictive power are the essence of science and models are optional, not the other way round. Science is not materialistic, it would be valid even if the world we perceive was "fake", a virtual simulation for example. As long as it's consistent enough for us to make predictions, it's all good.
Theories with predictive power are the essence of science and models are optional, not the other way round.
I was thinking about Math or some subfields of Computer Science where you don't need any predictions (I'd think other disciplines have these purely theoretical subfields as well, but I dunno). I am not sure what the formal definition of a model is, but I think you'd agree you need some kind of non-trivial logic argument, otherwise it becomes, well... trivial ("X happens because we assume X happens").
Maybe I should have left that optional-remark or explained it further, it might be the reason I was downvoted in the beginning. First I also had a (semi-)joke in there about gaining citations being the ultimate goal of science, people might have though I was one of those fundamental Christians mocking science. It's very easy to get misunderstood if all people know about you is what they read in a comment of a few lines.
But I'm in perpetual discomfort with the way contemporary science is shunning anything "subjective" like it's the plague. Yes, we get it, you ("you, Science") despise uncertainty, and the subjective domain is deeply fuzzy and non-rigorous. But it leads to this robotic, industrial approach to things that should be more human - see the way hospitals work, for example.
I don't have any solutions, either. I'm just saying there's something rotten in this particular Denmark.
They may not accept scientific proof, but they are likely to accept an empiric proof -- people may not believe in atoms or Newton's/Einstein's laws of motion, but they sure as hell believe that electricity is real, fire burns and planes fly.
Empiric proof of consciousness is difficult, as NickM suggested, the problem is in the subjective nature of our perception of self.
The question behind the perception of consciousness a key one behind the issue of mind/matter dualism: imagine an empiric proof, somebody builds a powerful computer which simulates a human brain to perfection yet mind/matter dualiasts won't feel that this "being" which talks, expresses emotions etc is anything more than a simulacra, a [soul|mind|...]less machine.
I think that usually when two persons disagree, either at least one of them is wrong, or they are not talking about the same thing.
Yet, it's difficult for two persons to align to the definition of what they are talking about, when one them won't accept that definition
as something which is hits what's being discussed: imagine that I argue with a matter/mind dualist and tell "hey, my experiment proves that the neurological processes behave in exactly the same way", he will answer "so what, there is more in it than mere neurological processes".
Where is the "subjective" part in all this? The fact that you cannot even prove that I have a [soul|mind|...], the only "proof" you have is that I look like you, I'm (as far as you can tell) made of the same flash, was given birth in a similar way as you... so you just assume I behave internally as you do, so you can transpose your subjective experience to others.
Both point of view generally assume that our consciousness is general, not only mine or yours; the difference is whether the consciousness is a pure emergent phenomena of matter alone or "something else".
So the subjectiveness of the perception is only used as a tool against the provability, against the acceptance of any empiric proof; which is understandable, as the empiric proof in itself, when done in terms of matter, works in the framework of mind materialism, and as such becomes invalid as soon as you undermine the very material nature of mind.
In simple words: mind/matter dualiasts won't accept any proof based on matter.
That's why they are usually deemed as anti-scientific: because scientific thought strives to search for explanations of the natural phenomena which kind be defined in such a way that it can be falsified by observation.
Any explanation that by definition is not suitable for any kind of proof because disconnected from the rest of the physical phenomena is by definition non-scientific.
So IMHO, this is the heart of the discussion, not the "subjectivity" of the mind, that's only an excuse.
Can a sophisticated car engine be conscious? Can a Ferris wheel be conscious? I can definitely map various bits of computation to a car engine and a Ferris wheel. If you need organic matter to have consciousness, can an extremely complex car engine made of organic matter be conscious?
One can brush aside all these rigorous questions, like almost all neuroscientists, and adopt a fideistic attitude that basically stipulates a materialistic view.
Please read more about the hard problem of consciousness [1]. There will be lots of people who will disagree, but the materialistic view of the mind has lots of cracks in it [2]. One needn't even look at [2], as so far no one has given a non-gibberish answer to [1] which doesn't appeal to one or other common fallacy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience