
Consciousness: The Mind Messing with the Mind - pavs
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/science/what-is-consciousness.html
======
vinceguidry
> It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The
> phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it
> has this property that is nonphysical.”

There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-
physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how
the real world happens.

Think about, oh, say, a road. What's the difference between a road and a
random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are
the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of
asphalt has real consequences for the world around us.

There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of
people have real-world effects on the physical world around us.

Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non-
physical. You can compare ideas to each other.

One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things
that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the
physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non-
physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical
would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical
than physical.

If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it
would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing
over reality, but are only debating semantics.

~~~
hackinthebochs
>many more things in existence are non-physical than physical.

What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question.
Surely we know what physical existence is: some capacity to interact; be
causally affected or causally affect other physical things. This definition is
a bit circular in some sense, but it has closure which is important.

The word "exist" has a foundational importance in all of human intellectual
activity. What is the analogous notion of non-physical existence that supports
it sharing this term?

>If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it
would lose none of its potency.

When we say consciousness exists, we're not saying something of similar
importance of how a child might say giant pink elephants exist. They're both
ideas, but we mean something very different.

~~~
paulsutter
> What does non-physical existence even mean? This isn't an idle question

Much of modern life exists by convention only (by agreement among people) and
has no physical existence. Bank balances, ownership of property, no-parking
zones, national borders, having a college degree, the prestige level of a
school, friendship, being a Seahawks fan, agreements, the law, political
affiliation, religion, etc.

~~~
hackinthebochs
But all those things have an "ontology" (mode of existence) owing to being
constituted by or supervening on things we know to exist (carbon, hydrogen,
electrons, etc). These things are abstractions, but ultimately are grounded in
physical existence either by the instantiating substance or substances that
operate on the abstraction (e.g. brains). But those who argue for non-physical
existence of things such as numbers are going further than this by saying that
these non-physical entities are _independently_ members of the constitutive
fabric of the universe. This seems entirely unsupported and unnecessary.

~~~
EGreg
The concept of existence seems to require conscious observers.

~~~
hackinthebochs
Sure, inasmuch as concepts require conscious minds. But surely the universe
would exist if it had never spawned conscious observers. So I don't see that
the question of existence begins and ends with conscious observers.

~~~
vinceguidry
It has to begin and end with conscious observers, because they are the only
ones that can consider the question. The universe does not need your answer,
you do. The question quite literally ends when you do.

------
visarga
> “the body is made of things, and things don’t have thoughts.”

Ha! I could say the opposite. The body is not made of magical stuff, just
plain matter. And it has consciousness, it feels like something to be alive.
So, consciousness cannot be but the result of matter arranged in space.

Let's make an analogy. Say you have a car on the road. It is free to move.
Then come many more cars. Suddenly, the road is gridlocked. Is "being
gridlocked" a property of the single car? Is it a property that only appears
when multiple cars are in a certain relationship? Where does "being
gridlocked" reside, in the car, in the road, in the other cars?
[http://biser3a.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg](http://biser3a.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/gridlock.jpg)

I believe that emergent properties can and do occur. The new properties emerge
from the complex structure of causal relations that exists between simpler
elements. This complex web is "stuff" that adds to, and changes, the simple
elements of which the system is formed. In other words, the emergent system is
made of its constituent parts plus the internal structure, and this internal
structure is a property of space and time. Similarly, matter itself might be
insentient, but matter arranged in special patterns in space and time is
conscious, thus consciousness comes from the properties of space-time, not
just from the constituent matter of the body. The space-time arrangement is
the software, the atoms of the body are the hardware. They work together to
generate consciousness.

~~~
majewsky
Of course "being gridlocked" is a property residing in the individual cars. It
just becomes measurable only when you pile up a lot of them in one place. ;)

------
westoncb
I've spent a lot of time thinking on the 'hard problem.' My current stance is
that it works like this:

Imagine you are a sphere. Got it? Wait—hold on now! You didn't really imagine
that you /are/ the sphere, you imagined you were a sort of disembodied human
spirit residing within the sphere. Now, really imagine your total existence is
/being/ the material constituting the sphere. Can you imagine that being the
sphere in this way is very, very different than interacting with it externally
as a human?

The hard problem is trying to explain how our total experience at any moment
could be as it is, when we also know that it is in some sense created by the
neurons in our brains. How can a clump of twisted neurons be the same thing as
the feeling of warmth or the perception of the color blue?

My solution is that our experience (in the above sense) is how it is to
actually /be/ a neuron aggregate.

Additionally, I think the problem is so hard because it doesn't involve a
system that exists /within/ the material universe; instead it's an aspect of
the whole thing itself. This is analogous to how we shouldn't expect the rules
of Monopoly to be useful in describing the physical constituents of, e.g.,
paper Monopoly money. We shouldn't expect the notions of 'system,'
'consistency,' 'causality,' 'time,' etc. to apply to the nature of the
universe itself just because they are good for describing things within it.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Very nice reasoning. It still doesn't explain how a paramesium, without
neurons (so no neuron aggregate there), can experience (a sub-human)
consciousness.

Ref:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5OMuFMFUIU)

~~~
westoncb
Sure it does: the sub-human conscious experience of a paramecium is what it's
like to /be/ the part of the universe comprising the paramecium. Although that
part of the universe is as much a paramecium as the part that's human is
human, so I don't think what's going on there is 'sub' human. That said,
there's less complexity there, so it seems like being that part of the
universe would be less 'interesting'\--but then again, that's just a human
value judgement and probably similarly irrelevant to the universe and
paramecia. Neurons aren't central to what I'm talking about; I'm just applying
something like a variant of the panpsychic hypothesis to the human situation.

~~~
visarga
DNA is a complex language, it's words are chemical signals and it exists in a
soup formed of mineral and organic stuff. I think even a paramecium has quite
a lot more complexity than we give it credit for. We also know that cells talk
to each other by electrical and chemical signaling, so there is that external
language besides the internal one.

------
HillaryBriss
The article starts out noting that talk therapy combats depression. It
contrasts this with the fact that prozac and other SSRIs also combat
depression.

SSRI's being chemicals added to the human brain, are "physical." But somehow,
talk therapy is "non-physical".

That's where the article lost me.

Isn't two people talking a physical activity? There are two physical people,
sound waves moving between them, neurons firing in their brains. It's even
observable by outsiders.

~~~
westoncb
I think the difficulty the author is pointing out is that it seems odd we
would could obtain similar modifications to brain state by chemicals and
speech. The issue is highlighted if you consider a hypothetical analogous
situation that we never observe: imagine if we could become literally drunk
just by hearing a certain sequence of words.

~~~
qu4z-2
But plenty of words can have huge impacts on mental state. Is that odd?

"Your significant other was just involved in a serious car accident and is in
critical condition."

Or consider attending a (good) stand-up comedy act. That situation can put you
in a very different mental state even without the use of alcohol or other
drugs (although people do often combine the two).

~~~
westoncb
Right. The tricky thing is having words and chemicals lead you to precisely
the SAME state.

~~~
qu4z-2
Sure, but "combats depression" is probably a broad enough effect that they
wouldn't necessarily be the SAME state in this case either, right? They could
both treat depression in different ways.

------
azeirah
For anyone interested in this, I can highly recommend Giulio Tononi's book
"phi". Part fictional, part art, part science. Pleasure to read while being an
informative introduction to his findings about consciousness

~~~
melchebo
Seemingly the only relevant reply in this comment section. That said, the
article is kind of vague and has a few big misunderstandings unrelated to
Tononi's Phi and Information Integration Theory.

Phi is basically a complexity metric that tries to put a number on the effect
of memory in a system. I'm unsure wether this has any relation to
'consciousness', but it's at least interesting to measure effects of having a
low or high Phi.

For example functional programming languages favor a low Phi. Everything is
defined by the input, memoization is possible (sort of what you call 'mocks'
in other programming languages). There are no side-effects (memory of past
events elsewhere), or at least they have to be invoked explicitly as 'unsafe'
operations.

Also, code that calculates Phi:
[https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples...](https://github.com/wmayner/pyphi/blob/develop/pyphi/examples.py)

------
westoncb
Regarding how talk therapy and meditation could have similar effects on the
human brain to medication: we have cognitive subsystems whose behavior is is
partially determined by our 'schemas'
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_\(psychology\))),
and partially determined by something like coefficients that scale chemical
responses to certain mental states arising.

Talk therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy) work by modifying a patient's
schemas. For example, suppose you have a schema for human relationships that
effectively says "in any relationship there is a winner and a loser"; holding
that belief is going to direct the patient's behavior (and interpretation of
events) in ways that probably lead to unhappiness. So, by modifying the
patient's view on that point (i.e. altering a schema of theirs), this
cognitive subsystem that uses schemas to interpret events and decide behavior
ends up behaving differently. Drugs (e.g. SSRIs) seem to effect something like
the 'coefficients' I mention above—but potentially you could have similar net
changes by modifying this cognitive subsystem's coefficients or the schema
input it operates on.

The importance of schemas in this kind of dynamic seems under-appreciated,
though there's evidence of thinkers honing in on it from way back (William
James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience", for example, is basically a
study of this cognitive subsystem I mention. More recently I noticed Carol
Dweck discussing schemas as foundational to the theory behind her work on
learning styles.)

(P.S. I believe learning meditation is essentially non-discursive, totally
experiential/empirical schema modification [your beliefs can be modified by
arguments or new observations; CBT uses arguments, meditation observations],
so that's how I see it relating to the rest of this.)

~~~
xrmagnum
Learning Meditation is related to this, not because it brings new Schemas or
modify existing ones but rather, because it trains to be more detached from
them. After all, the very goal of the practice is to identify those schemas
forming and letting them go.

~~~
westoncb
I agree with that, but the process of /learning/ meditation specifically
(which is largely done by practicing) works at least partially through schema
modification.

For instance, you probably have schemas relating to the importance of
addressing thoughts as they come up. If you believe your thoughts are super
important, you are very attached to them; if you take a view that they are
these wispy non-essential things that one may delve into or not, you are more
detached.

------
sebastianconcpt
The mind is not Consciousness.

Mind is behavior. A Philosophical Zombie has behavior and a mind. An AI will
have some sort of automata mind.

But that's not Qualia. Consciousness is necessarily something else.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo)

~~~
dwaltrip
How can a mind have the intelligence of a human and not be aware of itself? I
never liked the philosophical zombie argument. I haven't yet been able to
realistically imagine such an entity.

~~~
balfirevic
The funniest part is that, since his behavior is indistinguishable from his
non-zombie variant, Philosophical Zombie will write long papers about how they
have qualia but Philosophical Zombies don't.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Indeed, that's mind-boggling. The only alternative is to start valuing more
self-experience.

You know you are experiencing qualia and that you are not a philosophical
zombie but you can't prove that others aren't. At least not so far.

:)

------
IsaacL
The article discusses a professor who hypothesises that consciousness is
simply an illusion the brain creates for itself. But you can't explain the
concept 'illusion' without reference to 'consciousness', so this explanation
is meaningless.

[https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-
Binswanger/dp/09856...](https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Know-Harry-
Binswanger/dp/0985640618)

This is the book I recommend to anyone genuinely interested in the nature of
consciousness.

~~~
marxidad
I don't think Ayn Rand's Objectivism is useful for knowing anything about
consciousness.

~~~
warmfuzzykitten
Or for any other purpose, actually.

------
woodandsteel
This is one case of the larger issue of the limits of human knowledge.
According to some versions of mysticism, it is possible to unify completely
with the universe so nothing in it is beyond our knowledge.

However, if you stick with the methods of the natural sciences, it seems there
must be limits. For instance, if you explain an observed phenomena in terms of
an underlying law, then you have the question of why that law is so. If you
explain the law as due to a deeper law, then you in turn must ask why that law
is so. It seems pretty clear that, going down in levels like this, eventually
you would have to reach a point where you would say "That's just the way it
is, we don't know why"

Now with respect to consciousness, the question is whether we can explain it
through some more fundamental, knowable features of reality. Many think you
can, and are striving to do so.

Others, like the noted philosopher Colin McGinn, say no, this is a question we
will never be able to answer. In particular, he argues the human mind was
designed to understand many sorts of things, but this is beyond its abilities.
I tend to think he is right.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
The truth is the opposite, and always has proven to be: the natural sciences
are the only way to acquire real understanding, while every form of mysticism
by which "nothing is beyond us" ends up being us fooling ourselves again.

~~~
woodandsteel
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was not saying that mysticism is
correct, but that there are matters that are beyond the understanding of the
human mind, including natural science.

As to natural science being the only road to truth, natural science is itself
founded on human experience, and human experience is also the basis forms of
truth, such as ethical and mathematical.

------
marxidad
One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether our brains have more
than one consciousness arising from it and we are just one of them. In split-
brain experiments, it's shown that two independent consciousnesses can exist
in the same skull, since they have been physically cut from each other. The
predominant assumption is that when both hemispheres are connected, only a
unified consciousness arises. Tononi says that in any composite system of
consciousness, the component consciousnesses are suppressed and only the
highest-level one is active. But what if they're still active and have their
own subjective experiences? We won't necessarily see it in other people just
as split-brain patients seem like one person until you scrutinize them. And
that all consciousnesses will have access to the same memories sort of muddies
it up a bit, but it still accounts for different phenomena, including
unconscious thoughts, desires, and behaviours; and changes in personality.

~~~
xena
Here is a perfect read for you then: [http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-
gone-wild/](http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/)

~~~
marxidad
Thanks! Apparently, there's a subreddit for cultivating these other sentient
agents in a way that you are conscious of them:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/)

------
azeirah
The most interesting problem out there :)

Would it help to perhaps, instead of philosophizing, guessing and mathing, to
try and look at things that definitely do influence consciousness (birth,
death, alcohol, sleep, others) and experiment from there?

No matter how far removed it is from answers, at least you can get some
arguably measurable datapoints, compared to guesswork that's a big win!

~~~
delecti
> alcohol

Alcohol has an effect on the brain, which then results in effects on
consciousness. It might seem like a pedantic difference, but we don't really
have a solid grasp on how the brain results in consciousness, so I would
imagine that investigating alcohol>consciousness has so many confounding
variables involved is so complicated that we might not benefit from it.

Of course I'm certainly not under the impression that my college psych 101
class makes me any sort of expert, and I might be being far too pessimistic.

~~~
azeirah
Seeing you took one psychology 101 class that makes you more of an expert than
me :p

I'm more of a consciousness enthousiast..

I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and more
interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction of the
first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a
consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

Experiment with your own consciousness, it's the only one that's provably
observable to you. Based on this assumed truth, you can ask others to do the
same.

Following the alternative path of experimenting with our own consciousness, I
come up with questions like these, very fun to think about.. but I don't know
what I can do with it. I'm no neuroscientist, or even a scientist at all. Are
any of them actionable?

What would it take to add another qualia space to our every-day experience
(and with qualia spaces I mean the range of qualia experienced that are linked
to any sensory experience, all possible observed images fall into one qualia
space.) Would it take another sensor attached to our body? Adaptations to our
brain? Are the ones we have (vision, sound, smell, touch, internal feelings,
emotions, heat, thought) all the qualia spaces there are?

Imagine a volume slider for your hearing. You know that louder sounds in the
outside world means a louder experience of sound in your mind. What is the
mind's volume limit? Is there even a volume limit? Can we reach it with by
producing sound waves? Assuming the limit is far higher than whatever we have
ever experienced in our every-day lives, what would it do to a person to hear
a sound that is so much louder?

So much to think about!

~~~
djokkataja
> I'm less interested in the question of "can computers be conscious?", and
> more interested in "what is consciousness". I believe taking the direction
> of the first question leads to a dead end, because even /if/ you build a
> consciousness computer, you still wouldn't have a way to prove it.

I agree with you, but I don't think the first question is a dead end...
suppose you devise and install a computer chip that can replace a tiny portion
of your brain by interfacing with neurons around it, and over time it learns
to perform the same function as the piece of brain tissue it replaced. If you
think this is physically possible (even if not feasible with current
technology), then by extension, over a long enough period of time you could
replace every bit of biological nervous tissue with synthetic components.
Assuming the synthetic components were able to wholly serve the same functions
as the biological ones that they replaced, you would have a computer which was
conscious, and you would have an inside perspective on it. :)

On the other hand, in theory it might be possible to do that complete nervous
system replacement without actually understanding what consciousness is. So I
agree that "what is consciousness?" is still a more interesting question. I
found The Ego Tunnel[0] to be a good jumping off point for defining
consciousness.

At this point I think the problem of consciousness is one of scope: any
description of consciousness that fits into the the mental capacity allocated
to our intuition will lack explanations for aspects of our conscious
experience that we can easily identify with a few moments of introspection,
and any more comprehensive description of consciousness will exceed our
ability to intuitively grasp as a whole. I don't think this is a fundamental
limitation; I think it's just a reflection of how much base knowledge is
necessary to build up adequate intuitions because of the complexity of the
system.

[0]: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097DHVGW/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097DHVGW/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

~~~
tgflynn
I've never found that argument convincing.

It seems to suppose that consciousness is an either/or phenomenon. Either
you're conscious or you're not. But what if consciousness is more of a
continuum and the intensity of your conscious experiences can increase or
decrease. Further let's suppose that the source of consciousness is somehow
distributed throughout the brain. When the first small set of circuits is
replaced your conscious experiences became ever so slightly less intense, by
such a small amount that you didn't even notice. This continues every time
another small brain region is replaced until at the end you no longer have any
conscious experiences at all.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
Yeah but that's still considering the epiphenomenon hypothesis and not other
possibilities. What if the only thing you can explain with the epiphenomenon
idea is the Philosophical Zombie (mind) but you still didn't explained a bit
about consciousness.

Ref:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo)

~~~
tgflynn
My intent was actually not to take any firm position on the nature of
consciousness but rather to present one possible model, that I think many
would find plausible, as a counterexample to the progressive replacement
argument (ie. the argument that a machine can be conscious because you can
gradually turn a human brain into a machine).

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among
its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its
own neurological processes.

Oooh. That's a little problematic. Because you have to wonder how far that
sort of simulation has to go to be of any use. If they mind has an image of
itself, then wont' the image have an image of itself, and so on ad infinitum?
Is that physically possible? If it isn't and so the mind doesn't have that
infinitely recursive image of itself, won't then its perception of itself be
inaccurate? And if it's inaccurate, how useful is it after all? Specifically,
how well can the mind use its image of itself to influence itself if it
doesn't know itself very well?

I mean, we're in angel-dancing on pin-heads territory here. Maybe not state
facts about how the mind works with such absolutely conviction when all we
have is speculation? Just a thought, like.

------
scotttt
Interesting, but I'm not sure how you can summarize the cutting edge of ideas
about consciousness without mentioning Daniel Dennett

------
mirimir
> Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the
> audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with
> itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world.
> Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation
> of its own neurological processes.

Hoffstadter argues that there are multiple levels of simulation.

> The discussion, broadcast online, reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s newest play,
> “The Hard Problem,” in which a troubled young psychology researcher named
> Hilary suffers a severe case of the very affliction Dr. Graziano described.
> Surely there is more to the brain than biology, she insists to her
> boyfriend, a hard-core materialist named Spike. There must be “mind stuff
> that doesn’t show up in a scan.”

Understanding what this instance of Firefox is doing from imaging and signal
tapping would arguably be nontrivial. Especially without very much about the
software. Right?

------
vbit
The argument that we are machines made of meat and so machines made of any
other substance may be conscious too is a remarkably weak one to me (a lay
person, not a consciousness or AI researcher).

Isn't any arbitrary region in space a _machine_? Because it has physical
inputs, physical outputs can some kind of physical computation within? An
elevator is a machine but so is the building with many elevators. A city with
many buildings, cars, people etc. (all the physical space and things in it
withing the bounds of the city) is another machine. Is a city conscious?
Clearly it is more complex than an individual brain?

From a slightly different angle - why does my consciousness stop at the limits
of my body while the physical chain of reactions extends smoothly well beyond
it, and infinitely into the universe?

------
taliesinb
Michael Graziano's Attention Schemata Theory is in my opinion a pretty
convincing way of thinking about consciousness. Here's a talk he gave about
it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE).

(warning: includes wacky ventriloquist act)

------
bytefactory
The article mentions the brilliant Scott Aaronson, who's written a couple of
articles on the subject:

1\.
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756)
2\.
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1951)

I'll admit that 85% of what he said flew way over my head, but the 15% I did
grok was quite interesting.

------
EddieSpeaks
This article lost me at David Chalmers

~~~
warmfuzzykitten
That's just cognitive dissonance kicking in. I had no problem with Chalmers,
but had my own dissonant moments beginning with panpsychism. Why anyone would
give credence to such ludicrous, unfalsifiable theories is beyond me.

