Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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.

Begging the question of what a "representation" might be, I think it's intuitive that it is simpler and more efficient to maintain a seamless representation informed by the best available sense data, than to log and deal with every raw input. That's the point of having a brain - to ride the sea of sensory information at a more coherent level. Allows us to strategise rather than simply react.

and to return to the thing I said earlier about planning and threads, there is also quite a lot of evidence that representations / activity patterns compete with each other, often within the same networks of neurons / glia, and dominate when they cohere better than their competition. To experience a unified self one has to wait for the winner to emerge before folding it into the narrative. Which pattern "wins" may depend on both external evidence, and internal states like behavioural goals, so that we reach the interpretation which is the most use to us at that moment. Oops getting pretty handwavey here, I'll stop now.

I like the idea of neuron wars, it’s pretty metal

I think it might be a bit like the game go where if you outflank the competition they fall into line with you.
(which reminds me of a Sunday afternoon once when I was visiting Tokyo and realising they televised go matches, literally static shots of the board and two people thinking intently for minutes at a time, with occasional excited breakaway to commentators playing out possible scenarios on magnet boards)

this is all good stuff, i'm sure i'm too taken by the idea of a unified all-seeing all-powerful consciousness. this though:

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. 

reads like pure epiphenomenalism, which to me is a repugnant conclusion. i want to be driver not a passenger! i know that's not an argument against it, just an incentive to find one. what evolutionary purpose does this passive experience serve? is it just a side effect?

happy to be sat in the back of the limo dozing off

Maybe it's just handwaving "I can't believe it's not epiphenomenalism" but to me the conscious-actor and the conscious-experiencer are one and the same entity. I think the consciousness that drives the boat feels the wake as well - the two are not in sync but I think this allows us to "own" our bodily actions regardless of their driver - if I roll my ankle, stumble and recover I still feel like "I" did it when my awareness catches up and processes it all. Even though my body would have performed the same movements if the descending pathways were cut at the midbrain (more or less). So I think the stuff we do ranges from the purely-automatic stretch-reflex type stuff, up to actions and strategies which are the result of consciously setting up conditions and mental states which lead to outcomes we want. I think of awareness as the feedback loop from that process - what are we doing now, what's next. And I think it's possible to be conscious and volitional without being aware in that way, whether you're a goat or just really stoned.

as a super clumsy dude i totally disown the majority of bodily actions.

This thread has gotten really good. Some very evocative musings on consciousness here.

in all seriousness can you guys recommend some books on this? i find this fascinating.

Probably something by Daniel Dennet

know yr enemy

I should probably read Dennett’s big consciousness book even though he seems to say baffling things in interviews. I suspect materialists and dualists are saying similar things just in a different language. It seems like arguing about that turns into a shouting match and misses the nuanced texture of conscious experience that both sides could agree on.

the oliver sacks books aren't explicitly about consciousness but are pretty good in illustrating the aspects of consciousness that maybe shouldn't qualify as consciousness (which lends support to the idea that almost none of it should qualify). It's really odd he never mentions his own face-blindness in them.

recommended reading

http://i.imgur.com/SaTCn8x.jpg