
Self Awareness, the Last Frontier. By V. S. Ramachandran - DaniFong
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rama08/rama08_index.html
======
vicky
There's the seed of an idea going around that the Flow state (Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi) is a function of our Self Awarenss.

Here's a interesting article on the practical application of this that
LifeHacker linked to some time ago ->
<http://www.life2point0.com/2006/06/the_little_book.html>

Edit: Just found it on Scribd -> <http://www.scribd.com/doc/86499/The-Little-
Book-of-Flow>

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GavinB
"(except in pathological states like folie a duex and romantic love)"

Great essay, but I just loved that side note. "Oh, by the by, love is a
pathology. Now, back the the article."

~~~
randomwalker
Pathological has a secondary meaning of "highly abnormal." Also, brain scans
have shown activation patterns of people in love to be very similar to those
with OCD and other mental illnesses. See this TED talk:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html)

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rms
When the mystery of consciousness is "solved", will it be capable of being
explained in English? Or can it only be solved at some level of math and
physics?

~~~
biohacker42
Definitely in English, and also in bio-chemistry. Math and physics only as
much as chemistry is applied physics and physics applied math.

~~~
tel
I feel that math will probably show it's head in studying neuronal networking;
after all, we're going to want to model it someday.

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jmtame
I asked about this on HN a short while ago, and most people try to address
consciousness as it not really existing because it's created by your mind. I
hated that psychology and neurology could explain how dopamine makes you feel
happy, but beyond that, there were only chemicals, axons, dendrites, and
synapses. It's like saying sodium ion channels fluctuate to carry an
electrical signal, but in the big picture, it's difficult to understand how
exactly that allows me to think about "reality" different from others
(assuming others do).

The resounding answer I got, although unsatisfactory in my mind, was that our
brain is either very complex or very simple. Neurons are vastly capable of
amazing things, or we're just creating this all up as we go and we've even
defined this concept of reality based on a bunch of data that was given to us
and which we for the most part accept without thinking much about it.

Then again, how do I even know you exist. For all I know, my brain is making
this all up, and everything that exists is nothing but a figment of my
imagination (solipsism). And then I encounter another person who says the same
thing (I'm telling you, I exist too, and I was wondering the same about you),
and that's supposed to be where we hit an infinite loop and crash. Our
operating systems seem to be a notch above the market's.

~~~
jerf
One of the great dangers of brain research today is that as we find the
"explanation" for things, we will conclude they are just illusions and not
real.

Well, the thing is, we're pretty sure at this point then that everything is
"an illusion", by this standard. Religious experience, love, red, pain, it's
all just an illusion brought on by neurons firing in certain patterns, right?
Moving into the computer realm, the text box I am typing this into is an
illusion brought on by clever programming, as is the browser. It's not an
isolated series of claims of illusoriness, you need to consider the whole of
them at once, including not just the politically popular ones (religion), but
everything that argument makes sense for (red, mathematics, scary).

I submit to you that this view, while popular, is silly. How can _everything_
be an illusion? That stretches the meaning of "illusion" beyond sensibility. I
propose to you that the "illusion" is in fact the real thing, and what you
considered _reality_ was in fact an illusion brought on by your ignorance of
how things truly work. Finding a neural explanation for an experience does not
make it illusory, it merely brings it into the fold of things you partially
understand, _displacing_ your previous ignorant ideas about what is "real".

Failing to take this view is, IMHO, extraordinarily dangerous to yourself.

This text box is not an illusion. It is a text box in every way that matters.
I send it keystrokes, it puts up text, you read it later. What more do you
want? Red is not an illusion. It impinges upon my eyes, I see it and process
in certain characteristic manners, all of which are every bit as real as
anything else.

Higher levels of organization are not "illusions" merely because they are not
atomic. My car is made of nuts and bolts and fabric and metal, and it _is_
those things, profoundly, but it is _also_ a car. My brain and self is made of
neurons and glia and blood flow and individual firings, but it is also my
self, nevertheless. My text box is no less real for being built twenty layers
deep on various more atomic APIs.

To apply this directly to a contentious point, establishing the neural
location of religious experiences does prove or disprove them any more than
establishing the neural locations of "pain" proves pain isn't real. To
disprove a worldview, you need to use logic of the form "Given your worldview,
this fact about the world conflicts", and "I found your religious experiences
in the brain" doesn't fit that mould. Christians, Muslims, and other religions
with creator gods will claim that the creator god put the circuits there
because they tap something real. Hindus may not claim a creator god put it
there (I know less about Hinduism), but they will still claim it is there
because it taps something real. And so on, for many religions.

I'm not saying this disproves the atheistic, Darwinistic view of religion the
"I found the neurons" discovery engenders for such people. I'm saying it
doesn't disprove most religions to any greater extent, either; it's basically
null evidence on that front.

(And heck, while I'm making controversial statements, may I also add that IMHO
this viewpoint very nicely harmonizes the traditionally disparate "Western"
and "Eastern" views of the world, and that they not only need not be at
loggerheads but actually fuse into something quite nice.)

~~~
pchristensen
I like this. Even though _the way you perceive it_ is an illusion, something's
there outside the illusion. And the way we perceive things has such good
internal consistency (usually) that it has to be a pretty good approximation
of what's really out there. Plus, everything has to be perceived one way or
another - what would it even mean to "see things as they really are" when it
comes to matter, light, etc?

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amichail
Why can't scientists conclude that there is nothing interesting that we can
discover about qualia? Subjective experience can't be tested scientifically.

~~~
DaniFong
Nothing interesting? How can we be so sure?

Qualia can at least be found out about, if perhaps not so scientifically.
Recreational drugs can be taken to play with perception. Qualia can be made to
change fairly reproducibly. Maybe you can't find out much about some other
person's experience, but it's something.

~~~
amichail
I think the qualia problem asks why subjective experience exists and whether
people experience the world in the same way subjectively. So this has little
to do with recreational drugs and perception.

~~~
DaniFong
My point is that one can know something about the content of one's own
subjective experience, and how it changes. Knowing about someone else's
subject experience is a much taller order. So far people seem to learn about
it by assuming that others are much like themselves, and then asking them
details to get a better picture by successive approximation. It seems we're
stuck with examining _responses_ to qualia, at least for now.

~~~
MaysonL
One can also do some fairly objective studies of subjective experience. See
for example, Robert Ornstein's book _On the Experiencce of Time_
[http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Time-Robert-E-
Ornstein/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Experience-Time-Robert-E-
Ornstein/dp/081333442X)

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mtw
And there we are, religious experience (loss of selfishness and making one
with the environment) is hyperactivity of neuron circuits.

And at the opposite end, we have autism, with no empathy towards others since
their "circuits" are inoperative

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bd
Fascinating. I wonder what are the implications for AI research.

It may be not so hard after all to create artificial conscious mind, in fact
in may be even easier than getting right the "intelligence" part.

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biohacker42
This is a great article, and it reminds of all the other recent advances in
our understanding of the brain, like this one:
[http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080305/full/news.2008.650.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080305/full/news.2008.650.html)

I sincerely hope our understanding of the brain is at the start of geometric
growth.

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diN0bot
Interesting article, but unfortunately lacks references.

I wanted to find out more about kinetic muftis but according to Google
Ramachandran is the only one to use that pairing of words. After that I
realized that many claims were being made with few details and no references.

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pchristensen
This was a beautiful line: "I have long known that prayer was a placebo; but
upon learning recently of a study that showed that a drug works even when you
know it is a placebo, I immediately started praying."

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zby
Wow that was a lot of interesting stuff. One thing that stuck in my mind is:
"a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo"

~~~
zupatol
A former alcoholic once told me that when he stopped drinking the sight of a
wine bottle was enough to make him drunk.

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Allocator2008
Good article. Except for the "qualia" asides. Really there is no such thing as
qualia. There is nothing to explain, there is no "explandum", so to speak.
There is no such thing as "redness", there is only the fact that a human
subject will use the word "red" to refer to an electromagnetic pulse of
wavelength 600nm. The subject will say "red" to relate the wavelength, that
is, we can predict the subject will say "red" if asked for the "color" of a
pulse shone at the subject of wavelength 600nm. There is simply nothing to
explain in qualia, it does not exist.

To steal from Dennett, one might as well ask about gremlins that appear in the
cylinders of a combustion engine. We can explain the fact that wheels move in
a combustion engine via the action of the cylinders, or, we can say it is the
action of the cylinders plus the gremlins. Thinking of qualia as something
that needs explaining is like thinking that your car's movement is predicated
upon the gremlins produced in its cylinders. The gremlins do not exist,
neither does redness, nor any other type of qualia. Period.

~~~
tocomment
This sounds interesting. Where can I learn more?

~~~
Allocator2008
[http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-
Denne...](http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-
Dennett/dp/0316180661/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230745125&sr=8-1)

That is an amazon link to Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", where he
deals with consciousness, qualia, and so forth. Dennet's personal website is
at: <http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm>

By the way, I myself am not a philosopher, I am a QA engineer, so it is not
like I have a "stake" in this whole topic, but I just like Dennett's approach
to it, which is more sane than some others.

