Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

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

PASCAL LEMAITRE sounds like suitable name for this kind of thing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/

A quick search of that article shows it contains neither of the phrases, "freaky shit" or "no big deal".

Scientists are beginning to unravel a mystery

uh-huh, go on...

I shouldn't be too dismissive, it's easy to be scornful of scientists doing philosophy but there there is actually some interesting and useful science in that article, and in this particular subject I don't think you can say that philosophers are any better informed or their theories less wildly speculative.

otm

ITT seems intriguing, borderline panpsychist plus this prediction: a sophisticated simulation of a human brain running on a digital computer cannot be conscious - I think they mean at a very high level - even if it can speak in a manner indistinguishable from a human being. And it puts Fela Kuti in my head.

Peter Watts, sci fi author and Biology PhD:

http
://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

Trying again:

Peter Watts, sci fi author and biology PhD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

starts really well, ending is perhaps slightly disappointing

mind-blowing as the "Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect" study sounds, it seems it's been hard to replicate the findings

anyone read his books?

I enjoyed that, especially the ending! He was suitably sceptical about current theories & informative of the current state of the art in actual neural augmentation. Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious. Not remembering being conscious doesn't mean you were unconscious.

I have read blindsight, I don't recall anything about it. Does that mean I wasn't conscious when I read it?

Blindsight is really good

Just wish he hadn't repeated the old canard of driving somewhere and arriving with no recollection of how you get there = you were unconscious.

lol yeah I guess I was unconscious during several lunches last week then

hope it wasn't soup or a big plate of spaghetti

Wow- thanks for posting that video. I thought it started well and ended well (the part where Elon Musk made a surprise cameo as the advance guard of the cyber-borg was a real-life lol).

Yo consciousness is wild shit

on the whole it's a great tool, but it's sneaky as hell and tells a lot of lies

O Tru Mind

enjoyed that Peter Watts talk, however terrifying

Good, sceptical, pessimistic piece about understanding the brain in general:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/feb/27/why-your-brain-is-not-a-computer-neuroscience-neural-networks-consciousness

Reverse engineering a computer is often used as a thought experiment to show how, in principle, we might understand the brain. Inevitably, these thought experiments are successful, encouraging us to pursue this way of understanding the squishy organs in our heads. But in 2017, a pair of neuroscientists decided to actually do the experiment on a real computer chip, which had a real logic and real components with clearly designed functions. Things did not go as expected. [...] Eric Jonas and Konrad Paul Kording – employed the very techniques they normally used to analyse the brain and applied them to the MOS 6507 processor found in [the Atari 2600] [...] As Jonas and Kording put it, the techniques fell short of producing "a meaningful understanding"

That’s an awesome paper, they do recordings and try to correlate the activity with what’s happening onscreen in Donkey Kong

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268

The Visual6502 team reverse-engineered the 6507 from physical integrated circuits [11] by chemically removing the epoxy layer and imaging the silicon die with a light microscope. Much like with current connectomics work [12, 13], a combination of algorithmic and human-based approaches were used to label regions, identify circuit structures, and ultimately produce a transistor-accurate netlist (a full connectome) for this processor consisting of 3510 enhancement-mode transistors. Several other support chips, including the Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) were also reverse-engineered and a cycle-accurate simulator was written that can simulate the voltage on every wire and the state of every transistor. The reconstruction has sufficient fidelity to run a variety of classic video games

I find this pretty amazing in itself!

They’ve done that with a few CPUs outside of this context - I think there is an online Intel 4004 simulator showing voltage changes on every line as it runs.

Ledge that Guardian book excerpt is so fucking otm, thank you for linking it