Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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Having 100% of your thoughts be non-lingual is just so hard to fathom

Of course "all stuff has a rudiment of consciousness and we have brains structured to locally concentrate that quality for a few decades" is the Occam's razor perspective, and not coincidentally the fundamental of the Buddhist view.
I'm a neuroscientist with a long interest in consciousness and I can tell you that, to the best of my knowledge, (a) we know fuck all about the generation of consciousness from neural activity, (b) I'm totally comfortable with the idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness and that neural systems in general carry an overtone of awareness, (c) that the brain / neurons are not made from anything in any way different from the rest of the material world, and so (d) the above view is the least dogmatic position from my perspective.

what percentage of the day do y'all feel like you're actually attentively "I could testify to perceiving X,Y,Z in court" conscious?

That's a really good question, I personally cycle from nonresponsive to dimly aware to aware most of the time. "I'm on it" is probably 20 minutes a day.

i am an automaton built for shitposting

my infinity ai went bonkers on the weekend so i had to disable it

back to normal human posting til i fix this fuzzy logic

crosspost to the actual artificial intelligence thread

I'm not convinced the Occam's razor perspective is that all stuff has a rudiment of consciousness. We know brains are associated with consciousness, and we have zilch evidence of consciousness not associated with brains. That's the bottom line. Even if we have no clue how brains generate consciousness, it seems the best starting point to presuppose that they do, and to remain totally agnostic as to whether consciousness can be generated in other ways.

In so far as, like Matthew said, brains are made up of the same fundamental stuff as everything else. But then you could say all stuff has a rudiment of chocolateyness too.

Yep. Brains are just atoms, and so all atoms can be assembled in such as way as to produce consciousness. That's a trivial truth.

I think being a bat would be frickin awesome, btw

we have plenty of evidence of perception/learning/memory/agency happening outside of brains, of which brains only seem to do some of the time and not particularly reliably.
what constitutes consciousness if not those attributes?

Consciousness is having a subjective experience of oneself or one's surrounds. Stuff like feeling pain or feeling sad. Just because my MacBook Air has memory or a camera or can get things off the internet doesn't make it conscious.

xxp ZZ the Occam's razor comes in if we say that the things brains are made of are both ordinary and turned over rapidly (most of the proteins have a lifespan of a few hours to a few weeks) - so if there is something special about "brains", then this ordinary stuff would have to be blessed with specialness on the way into being incorporated into the structure, and decommissioned when broken down / excreted / exhaled. That there is something special about the structure and organisation of brains, in terms of their ability to organise vague protoconsciousness into a mostly-unified single-entity consciousness, I wouldn't disagree. A pretty-crap, don't-push-it-too-far analogy might be gravity, which is a property of every atom and particle with mass, but which only organises into an appreciable gravitational field when you lump enough stuff together. Just the good old emergent-property definition I guess.

and yes the subjective experience is the Chalmers "hard problem" I guess - we can find correlates for many behaviours / responses but not for the experience of being it

your MacBook air has a system of sensors to monitor its own well-being and will shutdown when it overheats or is low on battery (feeling hot or hungry). in what sense does it not have a subjective experience?

When you say “consciousness is emergent” it’s required to draw a little rainbow with your hands in front of your face, fingers extended and wiggling.

I'm not convinced the Occam's razor perspective is that all stuff has a rudiment of consciousness. We know brains are associated with consciousness, and we have zilch evidence of consciousness not associated with brains. That's the bottom line. Even if we have no clue how brains generate consciousness, it seems the best starting point to presuppose that they do, and to remain totally agnostic as to whether consciousness can be generated in other ways.

― Zelda Zonk, Monday, March 19, 2018 11:24 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Having the “rudiments of consciousness” is not the same as having higher order animal consciousness. Absolutely no one here is arguing that rocks think or get sad. It just means that properties allowing it to exist are found everywhere.

Also Granny’s example of Chocalateyness is interesting because it a subjective category that wouldn’t exist without consciousness! But point taken, defining natural properties by what they can form in some instances is pretty reductive. That said, with all of our eggs now in the brain basket, what is it about brains that makes experience come into being? Their information processing ability? Most explanations for consciousness that aren’t an outright denial of its existence or reducing mostly to amount to “well if it gets sufficiently complex it just emerges I guess. We’ll figure it out someday!”

hi from the emergent hippie camp

face rainbows are good fuiud

Ha I was wondering if anyone would point that out re: chocalateyness. I'm not so sure it is dependent on a consciousness to exist tho: the arrangement of chemicals responsible for chocolateyness would still be there. Similarly, chocolateyness can exist yet be either undetectable or experienced totally differently by other organisms. Or other humans for that matter. I guess it depends on if you view chocolateyness as purely the subjective experience of a human consuming chocolate or is it a quality of the matter itself.

what percentage of the day do y'all feel like you're actually attentively "I could testify to perceiving X,Y,Z in court" conscious?

100%

it's often said that the idea that one can do something familiar e.g. drive to work and have no memory of doing so shows that a lot of the time we are acting non-consciously, on autopilot. i think this is rubbish, memory isn't consciousness and not remembering something doesn't mean we weren't aware at the time. so that testify in court question is misleading.

not remembering something means you aren't aware of it now, and if it happens so closely in time after the fact, it is highly suspect that you (in the "conscious construct sense") were ever aware of it.

on a structural level, isn't memory shown to be synonymous with consciousness? the actual mechanisms of memory are the same ones used for awareness?

deferring to an actual neuroscientist here:

we know fuck all about the generation of consciousness from neural activity

Alcohol/drug blackouts & twilight amnesia are 2 (similar) things off top of my head that refute that.

Then there's the guy (probably other cases too) who only has short-term memory. He is fully conscious. Just remembers nothing that happened after 7 seconds or so.

Guys like that have been shown to retain procedural memory (like backwards writing) which amazes them when they can reproduce these "new" skills.

There appears to be a human 'preconscious' that receives constant signals from all senses in every part of the human body, even in sleep. But most of that information is evaluated for importance and stored or discarded without ever rising to the level we tend to identify as an awareness of our self and our surroundings.

The simplest demonstration of this is our hearing during sleep. Familiar noises that are not identified with danger do not awaken us, but noises at the same decibel level that indicate danger, or are unfamiliar, may very well start us awake. If we aren't conscious during sleep, how can this happen?

Right so if episodic memory, procedural memory, and consciousness can all exist with or without one another, how does it follow that consciousness=memory on a structural level?
xp

There's also priming, too. I don't know what reacting to noises while sleeping and priming shows wrt to consciousness other than that there's multiple layers to it. An organism can receive and even process raw stimuli that never makes it to the active focal "window" of conscious attention.

So "If we aren't conscious during sleep, how can this happen?": I'd say there is some level of consciousness. A sleeping person will wake up due to noises; a dead person won't.

different kinds of memory = different kinds of (un)consciousness -- we tend to spuriously conflate these things as belonging to a single narrator.

And guess what part of the anatomy is damaged when someone has memory issues like that?

why are these "issues"? they are normal disjunctions in experience that we lie to ourselves in thinking are conjoined.

I'm speaking of the people who have only short-term memory. Or any other memory disorder.

the disjunctions aren't exclusive to people with brain damage -- they are just made more plain to see (e.g. corpus callosum severed patients who show that much of visual perception isn't "conscious" at all)

I have no idea what point you're trying to make, sorry

well mainly the point is that the bulk of what passes for conscious ego-driven experience.. isn't?

yes it's well-established that the notion of a unified, continuous self is an illusion

And plenty of evidence that conscious experience of doing/being lags tens-hundreds of milliseconds behind the brain actually doing stuff. Which is a pretty interesting problem to think about - almost like we have to wait for the activity to cohere into something at the right scale to "experience".

that lag could reasonably correspond to memory retrieval. if you only accept master consciousness as a linguistic narrative, then that narrative requires the memories corresponding to the words and their referents. I'm not a fan of ascribing consciousness only belonging to the part that can speak, but if you were a judge awarding an inheritance to one half of a split-brain patient, would you give it to the one with the functioning language centers or the other one who can catch a baseball that the linguistic side doesn't seem to know was pitched right at it?

You can have false memories, memories of things you didn't actually experience. You can have no memory of things you truly did experience. So I don't know why it makes sense to conclude that memory=consciousness.

And plenty of evidence that conscious experience of doing/being lags tens-hundreds of milliseconds behind the brain actually doing stuff. 

when the 'stuff' is as simple as deciding when or with which hand to press a button, yes. is there any similar evidence for more complex processes? perhaps many day-to-day decisions are that simple and reflexive, but many are not and require more conscious input.

a false memory in the process of construction is experienced. in re-ifying that false memory you experience it over and over. if anything, you are more conscious in the construction of a false memory than in one which was so trivially discarded.

I don't regard consciousness as an agent outside-the-box which influences brain activity. I regard experience as the slightly-lagged apperception of the coherently conscious system's activity. As in the conscious brain does stuff, but it takes a moment to feel that. Like the wake thrown off a speedboat. So yeah I think there is behaviour that we need to consciously think about, but that the thought process is sub-experiential, solutions or alternatives arise from neural activity which is part of consciousness but is not explicit. We become aware of its products, not the process. You can't feel or experience the dozens of potential threads spawned by contemplating a possible strategy, you only "experience" whichever one(s) were strong enough to cohere and suppress the others.

Idk man saying memory equals consciousness is to me akin to saying a live broadcast is the same as a recording. Not recording something doesn't mean you didn't see it.

And it's theoretically possible to insert false memories into a brain rather than a brain actively creating them itself.

only a very small portion of the human visual field is of any reasonable acuity -- the rest is a blur that is filled in by memory, so you literally would not be able to experience an entire picture without memory. Limiting experience to the pure raw sensory information available at any given time means you probably didn't "see" much of anything.

If that's "memory" maintaining a seamless sensory world, it's "memory" in the sense of sustained coherent activity or sustained attention (aka "working memory") only, which is not what most people would mean when using the word "memory".
I find it helpful to think of our sensory experiences as models which are updated by inputs from receptors as often as they're available.