
Are We Really Conscious? - dctoedt
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html
======
richard_cubano
I have trouble understanding the purpose of consciousness. Some argue that it
improves survival because an animal that has a certain type of mental model of
the world will perform better. So, evolution has produced a brain which
"tricks" the animal by constructing what amounts to an elaborate 3-D video
game for that animal to play so the animal will make good "decisions."

Of course, this argumentation presupposes that a "decision" means something.
These same scientists typically argue that behavior is essentially
deterministic, assuming one could model the brain completely.

But if that's the case, wouldn't it be more efficient not to construct this
elaborate video game and instead have the system operate based on a set of
complex rules, sort of how one would build an expert system or neural network?

It seems to me possible that consciousness is bound up with "free will."
Perhaps animals evolved consciousness because it enabled them to harness some
sort of property of the universe that improved decisionmaking precisely
because it could improve on the results of a rule-based expert system. This
would rely on some concept of non-determinism.

Obviously I can't explain a mechanism for the above, which is a key reason a
scientist would reject it.

Still, I find existing explanations for the evolution of consciousness
lacking. Also, determinism is drastically at odds with our experience of life,
though that doesn't necessarily prove anything.

~~~
pointernil
You may find "Consciousness and the Social Brain" by Michael S. A. Graziano
quite interesting. It provides an evolutionary path of development for this
phenomenon. In short: Consciousness is the "theory of mind"-"mechanisms"
(which developed prob. first) targeted at the subject itself to gauge social
interaction more precisely. Cheers

~~~
pointernil
ooops ;) i should have read the article which says it all as it is by the
author.

------
A_COMPUTER
I am finding it hard to escape the conclusion that consciousness is a
fundamental property of the universe that manifests in localized systems that
feed back on themselves. I have seen convincing evidence that consciousness is
illusory based on experiments where it can be induced to make testably wrong
feelings. But then you are right back to what it means that there's anything
to perceive something even incorrectly, or the idea of an illusion without a
thing having the illusion. I suppose this requires some sort of leap of
language and understanding of the world, and I'm not clear you could do
anything useful with that knowledge since it's impossible to experience
anything as a human except subjectively. Arguing against consciousness seems
to me like a religious person arguing that something had to create the
universe or it wouldn't exist, to a scientist. The scientist can just say "I
don't have to entertain explanations for why it shouldn't be here because the
fact of its existence settles at least that much." this isn't an argument
against studying consciousness or limiting theories about it, but it's not
something that can be declared nonexistent.

~~~
kazinator
But if it's a fundamental property, why is it so easy to turn it off by
falling asleep, or with anesthesia? Your brain regulates your body just fine,
and can even solve problems, while your "self" goes away somewhere,
temporarily.

~~~
themgt
It's pretty important to distinguish between consciousness and a sense of
identity or self. Self is pretty clearly is a constructed, somewhat illusory
concept. Consciousness is not.

You can turn off a light bulb. That doesn't mean the light isn't real.

------
PhasmaFelis
Humans are conscious _by definition_ , because "conscious" is a concept we
invented to describe one of our properties. Human consciousness is a
tautology; questioning it makes as much sense as asking "is blue blue."

It may be that consciousness does not work the way some people thought it did.
That's interesting and useful information. But it doesn't change the fact of
consciousness.

~~~
dougabug
When someone asks "Is blue blue?" they implicitly mean "What is blue?" or
equivalently "Does blue mean what we think it does?" Blue has both an
objective and subjective meaning, which today we see has different (i.e.
electromagnetic spectra vs psychovisual perception). The question raised in
the article is basically, "Is human consciousness special?"

When Copernicus questioned the Earth's special place at the center of the
Universe, it upset people immensely. Similarly, Darwin's ideas upset massive
numbers of people to this day by suggesting that we are the product of
relatively mundane forces. Human beings naturally tend to believe that they
are special and that mere mechanisms cannot match their extraordinary
attributes.

It's clearly upsetting to people to suggest that people are not "conscious,"
but in fact the spirit of the question is useful and sobering. "Consciousness"
and "awareness" are loaded terms, often tinged with connotations bordering on
mysticism. "Attention" is generally a more mundane word. We have no qualms
recognizing engineered attention systems, while most would balk at describing
them as "self-aware", or "conscious." If we define consciousness as a system
with reflexive attention, then human are conscious but so are certain computer
systems. What's in dispute is the quasi-mystical, highly anthropomorphic
conception of consciousness, by whatever name, verses a more mundane and
objective notion of sensing and modeling external and internal events.

------
sjclemmy
So the argument goes something like this: Because my brain models things
imperfectly it follows that my model of my self awareness is imperfect
therefore doesn't exist. What? And then the title suggests there is evidence
for this, but doesn't present any.

~~~
dang
The title appears to have been editorialized by the submitter. We've reverted
it. (Submitted title was "Are We Really Conscious? Brain Science Suggests
We're Not".)

~~~
dctoedt
> _The title appears to have been editorialized by the submitter. We 've
> reverted it. (Submitted title was "Are We Really Conscious? Brain Science
> Suggests We're Not".)_

Submitter here --- the "Brain Science Suggests We're Not" was the subheading
used in the squib on the front page of the NY Times Web site; it seemed to be
helpful.

~~~
dang
Ah ok. That's why I hedged by using the word "appears"; it did sound like NYT
language. Sorry for doubting you!

------
pitchups
The argument presented here is almost identical to the one by Doug Hofstadter
first in his book "Godel, Escher and Bach" and later in more detail in "I am a
Strange Loop". In other words - consciousness or the subjective feeling of
experiencing qualia, is the brain's recursive interpretation of its
interpretation of the external world.

~~~
pointernil
... maybe by actively attributing those "experienced qualia" to an
experiencing subject: it self.

"Consciousness and the Social Brain" \- Michael S. A. Graziano: provides a
thesis on how and in what stages this could have developed via (social)
evolution...

~~~
pointernil
ehmmm, well that's what the article by the same author says which i did not
read before posting this ;)

------
tjradcliffe
The premise of the headline is a very common invalid argument that goes like
this:

1) Declare (usually implicitly) with no basis whatsoever that term X has this
One True Meaning.

2) Demonstrate that a common instance of things generally subsumed under term
X does not have the properties implied by the arbitrary and baseless One True
Meaning (implicitly) declared in step one.

3) "Conclude" that therefore the common instance of X is not "really" X.

The key that this is nonsense is the use of the metaphysically loaded weasel-
word "really". OK, if we aren't "really" conscious are we still just-plain-old
conscious? How about conscious-enough-for-going-on-with?

The argument depends on a Platonic view of concepts, which is false (if it was
true it would never be possible to create a new concept, which people in
Plato's time almost never did, but we do all the time.)

"Consciousness" does not identify some Platonic form or Aristotelian essence,
but a set of empirical properties that are a) found in organisms with a
particular type of nervous system and b) lead to a range of self-regulatory
behaviours and c) are intimately entwined with our self-experience.

We may make false assumptions about the implications of consciousness--for
example, we may assume that it is not a perfectly ordinary organic function of
the brain--but there is still a phenomenological cluster whose relevance to
human experience is extremely difficult to dispose of. If you for some reason
really wanted to use the word "consciousness" to mean something that had
nothing to do with the three characteristics listed above, you would still
have those three characteristics left over, and it would still be in a
position where having a single word for them would be quite convenient.

For comparison, suppose we believed that the process of digestion was
essentially one of combustion, but at some point we learn that in fact
digestive acids and enzymes are doing something that is quite different from
simple oxidation (combustion). If someone said that that point, "Do we really
digest? Stomach Science Suggests We Don't" everyone would look at them rather
oddly, because everyone outside of philosophy departments knows that
"digestion" means "the process of breaking down food in the stomach _whatever
the cause of that process happens to be_ " rather than "this one particular
explanation for the process of breaking food down in the stomach".

This is not a small error, and there are entire fields of philosophy (most of
post-war Continental philosophy, in my view) that are nothing but
instantiations of it. "We have found that conscious is not unitary, therefore
the self does not 'really' exist" is one of the more ridiculous notions of
this kind.

It's like someone looking under the hood of an automobile and finding that the
engine can be taken apart, and then declaring (as if it was a deep insight
instead of a hilarious mistake), "Internal combustion is a myth!" because it
is accomplished by a machine that's decomposable into components rather than
by some unitary unanalyzable magic. Only someone uncritically wedded to the
idea that consciousness (or internal combustion) must _really_ be unitary
(why?) would make such a claim, and yet there is no basis in the phenomenon
that requires us to insist on such a characteristic.

Or it's like saying airplanes don't "really" fly because they don't flap their
wings. Why would anyone think that "flapping" is a _necessary_ property of
flying to the extent that when they see something that flies without flapping
they want to exclude it from the concept named by "flying" rather than modify
their concept named by flying to include things that don't flap? Unless, of
course, they believe in Plato's notion of concepts as rigidly fixed ideals
rather than pragmatic tools that knowing subjects make and re-make to aid in
our understanding of the world.

~~~
edanm
Err, while I agree with most of what you say, I don't see how it's relevant to
the article. While I cringed at the headline, the article itself is better. So
were you going on the headline alone?

(Note: the article is better, as much as something can be better in trying to
talk about one of the oldest "mysteries" facing humanity in 5 paragraphs
written for an uninformed audience. I agreed with most of the statements of
the article but it certainly didn't have time to teach me anything when it's
so short.)

------
wahern
"And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the
story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect
information."

That statement is a contradiction, presuming the author has a brain.
Consciousness is, if anything, the ability to be skeptical about the illusions
our brains create. And no matter how deep the rabbit hole goes (our perception
of ourselves is another dimension of illusion), we are all aware, at least
some of the time, about these illusions. And that skepticism is what allows us
to slowly, methodically wade through the swampy waters of our mind and to
eventually build monuments (metaphorically and actually).

The author built a straw man (a muddled, confused straw man) and then deftly
tore it down with the skill of a small child. It would be prudent to assume
that his book chronicles a similarly sophisticated analysis of the mind, and
so should be avoided at all costs.

------
NautilusWave
It's nearly criminal that Douglas Hofstadter's 'I Am a Strange Loop' is
mentioned nowhere in the article.

------
andybak
I have similar feelings about this line of argument as I do about the
Ontological Argument (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument)
)

I have an immediate intuitive grasp that it is a flawed argument and - putting
to one side for the moment whether I can move beyond intuition to construct a
solid rebuttal - I find it hard to understand that someone could hold this
belief in good faith.

(It's subtly different to my feelings about Solipsism where I have an
intuitive feeling that it's incorrect but I actually concede that it's a
logically sound position to take.)

To be slightly whimsical for a moment - I wonder if this is proof that
philosophical zombies exist. They could maintain this belief coherently whilst
Descartes and I can dismiss it without further consideration...

------
mkempe
Behind every claim, every argument, even self-contradictory or self-defeating
ones, there are fundamental facts that cannot be escaped: stuff exists
(existence, Parmenides), it acts and changes in accordance with its nature
(identity, Aristotle), and we're aware of existents in some form
(consciousness, Socrates and/or his "secretary" Plato).

Given this, when someone tries to tell you that there is nothing (or only an
ineffable higher dimension) to be truly aware of, or that causality is a
baffling myth, or that there is only really matter not awareness -- you know
the argument is fallacious or arbitrary (not even wrong!) and doesn't deserve
serious inquiry.

What faculty --other than consciousness-- would one use to inquire into the
nature and existence of consciousness?

------
yottah
This seems like a politically motivated piece of nonsense to discredit
individualism and to make one seem insignificant. It's not that consciousness
doesn't exist. Consciousness is existence itself. Nothing other than
consciousness can exist.

------
kazinator
One amazing thing about consciousness is that it turns off and on.
Consciousness is not a necessary consequence of what goes on in the brain: it
is configurable! Where is the "I", the "self", when I sleep a dreamless sleep?

------
wglb
_our intuitions about awareness come from information computed deep in the
brain_

What is the evidence for this?

And who says consciousness is entirely part of the brain?

And particularly what tjradcliffe said in thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tjradcliffe](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tjradcliffe)

------
cpncrunch
"Brain science suggests we're not"? That isn't the title of the article, and
the article doesn't even make that conclusion. It is just talking about a
theory of consciousness, but nowhere does it mention any science that suggests
we are not conscious.

------
danieltillett
More effort has been expended on this question than any other question other
than the existence of God. It is possible that a recent breakthrough has been
made, but this article has not convinced me.

------
zafka
The data manipulating functions embedded in my skull were quite amused when
they digressed from the topic and started wondering.."What do these people do
all day long?"

------
chroem-
Let's all perform an experiment right now to show that we're conscious:

Look at an object and then turn around and face the other direction so that
you can't sense it anymore. Are you still aware that the object is there? If
yes, congratulations! You have consciousness.

That object you looked at still exists as a pattern of neuron potentials
within your brain's inner state. If you have a corresponding inner state for
an external object, you possess some degree of consciousness.

~~~
millstone
This sounds more like memories than consciousness. Even planaria can remember
the best path to get food.

~~~
chroem-
Long term memories are distinctly different. Rather than existing as patterns
of potentials within a recurrent neural network like short term memories, long
term memories are stored in the physical arrangement of the neurons
themselves.

Long-term learning is an inherent property of any neural network, but short-
term storage of patterns, and more importantly interpretation of those
patterns, has quite a bit of overhead.

------
hyp0
What about the _feeling_ of experiences?

Perhaps like behaviourist pain: the unpleasantness _is_ the wish it would
stop.

------
bumbledraven
Major Betteridge fail.

