
Neuronal “Superhub” Might Generate Consciousness - dpflan
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuronal-superhub-might-generate-consciousness
======
devindotcom
Wish we could generate a few more words for the various aspects and
interpretations of consciousness. It's such a difficult thing to define that
to say we've located a region associated with it could mean all kinds of
things — to all kinds of people. Some spiritual people will find this to
validate ideas of chakras, perhaps, while materialists will decide this is the
true and only source of the "self," while behaviorists might interpret it as
being merely the executive function.

Nevertheless, it's interesting research even if the findings are (as they
inevitably are) somewhat overstated.

~~~
hosh
For some of the spiritualists, the premise is reversed: the brain is a
receiver rather than generator of consciousness. Going by that premise, the
application of electrical current on the claustra doesn't necessarily mean it
turns consciousness on or off, though it suggests that the current disrupts
the reception of consciousness.

I personally don't find anything in here that validates the ideas of chakras.

I've been recently probing the nature of awareness (and the experience of
awareness) in my meditation practice. One of the things you can find out
through meditation is that what you think of as your "consciousness" is not.
What meditators and psychonauts consider "consciousness" is very different
than the ordinary conception of "consciousness."

I agree though, this is an interesting finding.

~~~
thenmar
I would be careful comparing the work of pseudo scientific "spiritualists" to
that of neuroscience. Why do you think scientists don't embrace these ideas?
Is it _really_ because they're somehow spiritually devoid and foolish and
intentionally ignoring whatever truth you think you're grasping? Or is it
because what you're talking about is nebulous and inherently impossible to
test, with no theoretical underpinning based on experimental observation?

~~~
cinquemb
It's funny, because in the lab I work in, we explicitly explore the subjective
experience of mediators and novices, under different mental states, and record
with EEG and fMRI. What people may think of as _" nebulous and inherently
impossible to test, with no theoretical underpinning based on experimental
observation"_, is often closer the opposite in the scheme of things…

~~~
thenmar
I wasn't saying that meditation isn't measurable, or that it's a waste of
time, I was talking about the idea of the brain as a "receiver of
consciousness". Meditation is definitely interesting, but it is dangerously
easy to cross from "this helps/interests me personally" into "I have
constructed an irrational belief system based on insights that are ill defined
and not supported by evidence"

~~~
cinquemb
I see what you're saying, and I have to add that such boundary (if such is
even well defined) isn't necessarily limited to "spiritualist" and not
neuroscientists (at least from what I have seen…) or any other groups of
people when such groups are often arbitrarily defined by any given society.

Consciousness is ill defined scientifically (and even among the many concepts
that practitioners of what people equate to meditation have been arguing about
for thousands of years) and if you asked the layman what they equated to what
consciousness is, one would probably take away the same amount of information
as to what it is compared to asking neuroscientists.

People throughout the times have had many ideas that were seen as rational and
seem to be based on insights supported by evidence, until later on people
learned that such beliefs/ideas were irrational and the supported evidence was
dubious. The people who lived and died when such ideas/beliefs were not
irrational will never know it, same with those who died thinking it helped
them/such things were in their personal interests no matter how "true" such
things may have been for x period of time.

Maybe if we seek didn't limit ourselves to what things can and can't be,
"receiver of consciousness" wouldn't seem so irrational any more than what
people now equate to popular science that at some time was equally as
irrational but is no longer questioned to the same degree which could be
equally as irrational at some point in the future.

But yeah, some sr. research scientist phd who studied ap physics and helped
build quantum computers and now trying to apply the some methods they learned
in a field to psychology/neuroscience where the current "kings of the hill"
use surveys and more surveys with the occasional cutting some people/animals
open, is probably not going to want to entertain ideas that relate qed systems
and qm theories to meditation with meditation instructors not versed in such
to any conversational degree, when they have a hard enough time trying to
explore such things with neuroscientists they work with who just got some big
funding from politicking that in the scheme of things probably wont advance
the field any more than next dubious publication that gets plastered over
social media and perceived as fact.

~~~
hosh
What kind of work do you do at your lab? I'm dubious about being able to
measure experience, but hey, I've been wrong lots of times before. I've had
some superficial thoughts about how quantum computing relates to
consciousness, but I simply don't have the background to seriously explore
this.

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niels_olson
They're asserting it imposes the singularity of experience, not "defines
consciousness". One could think of the claustrum as something that prevents
multi-threading.

~~~
hosh
It's actually possible to go enter a state where there are multiple streams of
thoughts, feelings, and action while simultaneously remaining in a complete,
integrated experience with clarity. It requires decoupling awareness from a
single strand of thought. (You are not your thoughts).

~~~
pluma
I think you may be mixing up something. What you're describing is still a
"single strand of thought", just one that is a lot fuzzier.

We can hear, see and feel at the same time even though we can at other times
be hyper-focused on any one of those experiences individually. We can observe
a single fish in a swarm closely, but we can also track the entire swarm and
all the fish in it -- albeit with a much higher error rate at the level of the
individual fish (e.g. because of "change blindness").

Unless I missed some serious research on the topic, it's not possible to be
intensely aware of every single particle (be it a particular sensation or an
individual entity that is being observed) in a complex system while observing
the system as a whole.

~~~
hosh
What I am not describing is a single strand of thought that is fuzzier. Like I
said, it's awareness with clarity.

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themgt
Fascinating. This is looking more and more likely. I've wondered for a while
if one of the main pieces of resistance to this theory is just the tiny size
of the claustrum - no one wants to accept that the seat of their own
consciousness is so miniscule.

~~~
the8472
From how I understand it it's not so much that all the processing happens
there, it's just integrated and coordinated. And that integration is what we
think of as conscious thought and action.

You have to consider that there are many layers of emergence in play. A mass
of neurons doesn't make a brain. A pile of neural networks doesn't make
symbolic thinking. Everything needs to be linked together at a higher
abstraction level to produce useful results.

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chestervonwinch
The researcher who wrote this article was also featured on Radio Lab recently:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91503-the-unconscious-
toscanin...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91503-the-unconscious-toscanini-of-
the-brain/)

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hyp0
Since mice also have it, it's _being awake_ rather than sapient _self-
awareness_.

\tangent I increasingly incline to Dennet's view, even though it seems
simplistic, that we have models of the world, of other people, and of
ourselves. And that self-model is self-awareness.

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cpncrunch
I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a bunch
of neurons connected to other neurons. If that was the case then we could
create a conscoius robot from a bunch of transistors. Roger Penrose's theory
is that consciousness is somehow created by quantum superposition.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind)

It would be interesting to see if there are any strange quantum effects at
work in the claustrum.

Of course there isn't really any evidence towards quantum consciousness, so
it's just a highly speculative theory at the moment (albeit a very compelling
one).

~~~
smosher_
I don't find this idea very compelling.

Penrose has a lot of ideas, apparently trying different things when others
were invalidated or not promising. He really wants there to be some essential
quantum involvement, but his arguments that there must be are not great. It
leaves me with the impression he's seeking the vital essence, and naming QM.
He _could_ be right since there is a lot we do not understand, but he lacks
the evidence to be anything but misguided in my opinion.

No doubt a lot of quantum phenomena are at work in the brain in various ways,
but we have no evidence that it has any essential relationship with
consciousness beyond the chemical and electrical properties needed for the
biological foundation.

> I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a
> bunch of neurons connected to other neurons.

I can appreciate that feeling, but I wonder what difference it would really
make to have quantum consciousness.

~~~
jostmey
I totally agree with smosher. Once upon a time men of science used to describe
biological systems in mystical terms because they could not understand it. Now
we live in a post-Darwin world and have started to understand biology at the
molecular level. No one uses phrases like "animate-matter" vs "inanimate-
matter" anymore.

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amalag
This article was originally published with the title "A Brain Structure
Looking for a Function."

I think that is a far better less click-baity title.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Simple rule for editors: any headline that includes a word like "might" or
"may" or "could" can be replaced by a headline with the meaning that has that
word replaced with "might not"/"may not".

When faced with such a headline, _please_ use the negation of the one you
originally thought of, then ask yourself if it makes a terrible headline. If
it does, don't use either. If there is no headline that describes the story
without such weasel words, consider spiking the story. It contains no
interesting information.

~~~
comex
I disagree. The article mostly consists of evidence for the hypothesis that
the claustrum is essential for consciousness. This focus strongly contributes
to its interestingness: while just about anything about the brain is
interesting, people are naturally most interested in the elusive
"consciousness". Not mentioning the focus, as in the original title, is
burying the lede, and since people browsing the HN front page are expected to
judge whether a link is worth reading from the title and domain alone, it
gives them a significantly worse experience without any real benefit.

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moioci
Speaking of self-awareness, should there be a test akin to the Turing test to
look for this? It seems that it would be fairly simple to simulate self-
awareness, given that it is necessarily a subjective experience, so it seems
you would want to look for something more than the most successful simulation.
I'm sure we're nowhere close with computer programs, but one might also apply
such a test to goldfish or oak trees.

