
Ask HN: Where does consciousness come from? - jmtame
I've been pondering this with several other friends.  If you take a psychology class, you learn all about the brain, neurons, and neurotransmitters.  But at some point, do you wonder how do we feel a sense of "personality" and consciousness based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off?<p>For example, I know we have an amygdala and frontal lobe where our personality is formed.  But what about the chemical make up of neurons?  How does that cause us to feel certain ways?<p>Does anyone feel like the field of neurology fails to explain a lot of the low-level fundamentals?<p>EDIT: At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?
======
randomwalker
"do you wonder how do we feel a sense of "personality" and consciousness based
on nothing more than electrical signals firing off?"

This is one of the central questions of cognitive neuroscience today, and
scientists aren't even close to a convincing answer. It is exactly the wrong
question for an ask HN post -- it's like a bunch of sailors speculating about
quantum mechanics. Please read the papers. Here's a great introductory video
for a lay audience -- Dan Dennett's TED talk:
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consci...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html)

I do sympathize with your point that the abstract scientific jargon seems to
leave one wanting for a "real" answer, but since the science itself is way
incomplete at this point, any attempt to pare it down will result in something
that's no better than random guessing.

~~~
davidw
[ I generally try and avoid frivolities, but... ]

> a bunch of sailors speculating about quantum mechanics.

Arrrr... 'tis like the waves of the ocean, but also like me musket shot - at
the same time, lads!

I agree though, that outside of one or two people (robg?) , most of us aren't
very knowledgeable about the subject.

~~~
jwilliams
> _I agree though, that outside of one or two people (robg?) , most of us
> aren't very knowledgeable about the subject._

The neuroscience side, yes - but I think the philosophical implications are
anyone's game (that's the beauty of philosophy really - no license required).

~~~
JabavuAdams
Actually that's the retardedness of philosophy. See Dennet's TED talk. By the
way, thanks to those posting on this thread for introducing me to Daniel
Dennet.

I had mentally categorized philosophy as "verbose wanking by a bunch of people
who would rather win debates than understand things," until watching his
lecture.

------
pg
The word "consciousness" doesn't mean one single thing. To the extent it means
anything definite, it seems to refer to a collection of self-referential
thoughts.

I'm sure everyone who studies the brain wonders very much how neuron firings
correlate with these thoughts or any others. I'm equally sure everyone who
studies the brain would be surprised if they _weren't_ "based on nothing more
than electrical signals firing off."

~~~
mechanical_fish
What I find amusing is the phrase "nothing more than electrical signals". As
if electrical signals were somehow _trivial to understand_. As if _one_
individual neuron didn't embody so much chemistry and physics and history
(it's got your entire genome stored inside!) and complex behaviors (it's a
tiny little _creature_!) that we can't even understand it _in isolation_.

I'm not sure whether to recommend Dennett's _Consciousness Explained_ or to
compel the questioner to work through _The Molecular Biology of the Cell_ ,
followed by (e.g.) Hölldobler and Wilson's _Journey to the Ants_ \-- and then
keep going -- before trying to dismiss the complexity of a network of neurons
with the wave of one hand.

~~~
yan
I find that some people (hooray weasel words) are so driven to find that
something special that can put humans in a completely different realm from
other things and animals that they won't accept that the same processes that
run us also run most other living things, just more progressed.

I don't know why people need a clear, binary difference of what makes one
"human" to appreciate how beautiful life and the mind is.

Am I in the minority that has no problems with being categorizes as a mammal,
just more progressed, not different altogether?

~~~
ddemchuk
I think that defining difference could be language. While on a biological
level we are not much different than primates and other mammals, what we do
have that no other animal so far has exhibited is language. Humans communicate
on a level above and beyond anything else in the animal kingdom.

This leads into my biggest question regarding consciousness: how does one
think without language? We all have an inner self speaking in one language or
another, but what if we had no knowledge of any language?

Does language define consciousness?

~~~
byrneseyeview
_how does one think without language? We all have an inner self speaking in
one language or another, but what if we had no knowledge of any language?_

When you cross the street, do you narrate the situation to yourself ("One car
approaching at about 25 miles per hour, currently two hundred feet away,
decelerating at...") or do you model them visually?

~~~
ddemchuk
But crossing the street does not require a heightened sense of consciousness.
In fact, you are probably not even conscious of nearly everything that's going
on as you cross the street, you are just doing it.

Now if you were sitting on your couch in dead silence in a pitch black room,
what would be going on in your head with no language?

~~~
byrneseyeview
I can't track how much of my thought is visual versus verbal -- because, of
course, if I did so I'd switch to verbal mode -- but there are plenty of
thoughts one can consciously have that don't require words. The category that
most readily comes to mind is sexual fantasies. They don't require
consciousness, I guess, but I suspect that many beings we think of as
conscious have such thoughts, consciously.

------
kirse
This is a great question, and one that will never be answered by scientific
naturalism. The current worldview assumed by scientists is that the "natural"
and "material" is all we have and all that can be used to explain everything.

Unfortunately, while this does form a powerful basis for truth in the
empirically observable, it completely shatters and is horribly faulted when
one tries to explain the unempirical and unobservable with only what you have.
It is an extremely powerful assumption (based on faith in a worldview) that
the domain of the metaphysical is purely explained by the physical (the laws
of physics and the material)... In your case, where does this concept of mind,
self, and consciousness come from? It's clearly powered by a physical entity
(the brain), but the "self" is also clearly not a physical entity.

There is absolutely no proof that the system of material thinking holds water
in other domains such as the metaphysical, so most of what scientists think
about the mind and self come out of some seriously convincing bullshitting.
They really have no clue how it arises, and it will never be explained unless
we manage to re-create a conscious entity ourselves.

With that in mind (pun not intended), take anything you read about how the
"self" comes about with a serious dose of common sense. This is where it's up
to you to make a decision, because the scientists (while sounding smart),
really have no more clue than you do =)

~~~
glenstein
Well, "the metaphysical" needs to actually _be there_ , before it can show us
any shortcomings of "scientific naturalism".

How exactly does someone observe the "unobservable"? How could one come to
confidently believe in a realm built up out of "unempirical" content?

If anyone can satisfactorily answer these questions, chances are they have
done science, and discovered that the unempirical content everyone was talking
about was scientifically describable after all, unique from other science only
in its being particularly difficult to apprehend.

Until we get there, this unempirical component of consciousness being posited
shares common heritage with the Luminiferous aether, the life-force, hollow
earth theory, mythic gods of natural forces and any number of premature
theories which hover in the closing gaps of indeterminacy before a science
comes along to explain them.

~~~
FlorinAndrei
Keep in mind though, a large part of modern science is a monism - it tries to
explain everything starting from a single principle.

I'm not saying that's right or wrong, I'm just pointing it out. A monism works
beautifully, as long as its basic assumptions are true. Unfortunately, the
converse is true - a monism cannot detect whether its axioms are true or not.
The more it keeps digging, the more it appears to confirm itself.

It is quite possible that the fundamental assumptions of materialist science
are true. It's just that, if they are not, chances are the system will never
detect its own incompletitude.

------
skynomad
I think this might be the wrong place to be looking for such answers. Anyway,
you might like to do some research on Emergence and Chaos theory. The
fundamental aspect of emergence is that individual agents (ie neurons) follow
simple rules, and through interaction with other agents also following these
simple rules, a system emerges which is greater than the sum of its parts,
with its own goals and intelligence which is not known to any of its
individual agents. There is a brilliant book on this entitled "Emergence: The
connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software" by Steven Johnson.

Another interesting author to read is Brian Fay. He argues that the conscious
'self' does not exist as a concrete thing, but rather, it is dynamically
created through interaction. He gives a very interesting analogy of an eye
traveling through space, and can only become aware of itself by seeing its
reflection. He then explains that we see our reflection in others, and
eventually that becomes internalised.

The reality is that the brain is the most complex structure we have yet
encountered, and it will be a very long time before we fully understand how it
works and how the mind is thus constructed within it.

------
Retric
_At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?_

The brain starts well before birth. Humans don't have a single on switch so
much as a long bootstrap process that starts when the first few neurons start
to link up and ends at death. Although most positive changes happen by ~25
years old.

What we think of as consciousness is basically the neuron's that stop focusing
on what is going on and start considering options that we don't directly carry
out. AKA when you actually catch a ball you don't really think about it but
when you consider how you might do a better job in the future well that's
consciousness. The brain is not a fixed entity but a constantly adapting
system and consciousness is really best thought of as part of that adaptive
process.

~~~
rodrigo
Also against the switch view; It well migth be a replica of the evolution
process; a little being w only a couple of neurons that handle simple
proceses, and by iteration grows to a more complex being. That would also
correspond w the natural pattern of growth.

------
cool-RR
I can try to answer this according to my theory. So one big "IMHO" on all the
following text.

Saying that chemical activity "causes" us to feel certain emotions is not
correct. A little thinking could show you how absurd this is. "Causing" would
mean that there is some sort of cause and effect here, some event X that
causes event Y. Like when you turn on the kettle and the water boils. So this
would mean that when a chemical event X is happenning in a brain, it will
cause the person to feel an emotional event Y. This is an absurd hypothesis.
Where is event Y? It's actually hard for me to explain why I find that
hypothesis so absurd. Maybe someone here can help.

Anyway, my opinion is that THERE IS a correspondece between chemical events
and emotional events, but it's not causality. I can't lay down all of my
theory here, but I would say that there is a one-to-one correspondence between
the "inside" world and the "outside" world. (Like a 1-1 correspondence between
sets.) And those X and Y are paired together in that correspondence.

I remember when I was in elementary school I wanted to make a conscious
computer program. I was programming in Basic at the time. I thought, "Okay,
the program should be able to feel pain. So I should make a variable PAIN, and
when certain events happen it will cause PAIN to be equal to 1 or 0 or -1 or
whatever." But I kind of got stuck there, because what do you do after you set
a value to the PAIN variable? The best you can do is to have the PAIN variable
determine the behavior of the creature, for example to make it scream "ouch".
I believe that when it comes to emotions of creatures other than ourselves,
behavior is all there is to their emotions. When it comes to our own emotions,
it's more complicated and independent of our brains.

~~~
ahoyhere
Dude, there's lots of empirical evidence that introducing certain chemicals
into a human body result in certain feelings. It's not 100%, but it's pretty
causal.

~~~
byrneseyeview
I think his point is that, dude, there's a lot of empirical evidence that by
introducing certain electrical charges into a computing device results in
certain outputs. In other words, he's saying that when you say "You change the
chemical composition of the body in X way, and this causes feelings,"
everything after 'way' is redundant.

------
yan
Check out "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter, he tackles that
question and argues from the point of view that hard ai is possible. Check out
"Emperor's new mind" by roger penrose for a conflicting viewpoint. Both books
will teach you _much, much_ more than it's central thesis and is a tour
through other important topics in science.

Also, you might find the brain science podcast (
<http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com> ) interesting. She tackles some of
these questions also, summarizes current research and interviews other people
in the field.

~~~
mindviews
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book after GEB called "I am a Strange Loop" that
deals pretty much exclusively with the ideas of self and consciousness. This
is far and away the most compelling argument for consciousness being an
emergent property of the brain that I've ever seen. I strongly recomend this
book for anyone interested in the topic.

------
sgrove
I major in cognitive neuroscience, which is exactly what you're asking: how
does conscious thought arise from unconscious parts?

I think one book you may benefit from reading is
[http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-
Valent...](http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-
Braitenberg/dp/0262521121). It's a wonderful and short book with some subtle
humor and amazing powers of explanation. After reading it you may very well
have a better understanding of how it's possible (and how many different ways
it might be possible) for what we see as complex behaviors to _emerge_.

I've had dozens of friends read this short book, and they've all thanked me
for the recommendation and ended up buying a copy for themselves.

------
jbert
As far as I know, you'll get no answers here (or anywhere).

My view of things was shaped a lot by some sections of Hofstadter's Godel,
Escher, Bach. If you allow that symbols (think of a bunch of object properties
+ some methods) can be represented in the brain and operate on each other.
(There's a good description in GEB which suggests we use a javascript-like
prototype object-based system. Briefly, if someone starts talking about an
individual they know called Joe, who's a football player, you basically mint a
fresh new symbol which carries some of it's own data (name => Joe) but also
inherits from your default 'football player' symbol. As you find out more
about Joe, you add more specific data on Joe's symbol, which shadows the
football player one. That, to me, explains a lot about prejudice (some
people's heads overly-favour the inherited attributes. But I digress...)

Your brain models the world by creating symbols which reflect the world
(evolution helps for that). An important (the biggest/most complex?) symbol in
your head is the one which represents yourself.

Consciousness is then that symbol operating on itself.

All this is of course happening in a physical substrate which has it's own
methods of affecting things (psychoactive substances washing through your
brain etc).

------
gregorylent
western science is barbaric, primitive, stubborn, and totally ignorant about
this ... and so arrogant about their model, which says consciousness comes
from meat ... yogis have nailed this so well over a few thousand years of
investigation of the nature of the self and its relationship to consciousness
... you will have to learn some new vocabulary, and do some meditation ...
worth every moment spent .... just as an example of the subtlety of the east,
there are five words in sanskrit for aspecets of the mind, while we have only
the one ..

your question is great, the motivation is wonderful, and may your search be
fruitful .. it is the reason for birth, to come to understand this ...

enjoy

~~~
yan
If not meat, where? I don't mean to offend, but I am curious as to how one can
separate pseudo-science, already disproven ideas (All matter is made from 5
elements) and some eastern tradition from posed hypothesis, repeatable
experiments and conclusions that are up for being argued.

~~~
yters
One approach is to say consciousness is properly basic like science assumes
matter and/or energy are/is.

------
rms
Consciousness isn't special. And neurology can't satisfactorily explain what
it means to exist because English itself can't describe how a bunch of
chemical reactions add up to _cogito ergo sum_.

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombies.html> seems a little relevant.

------
Eliezer
I recommend either Gary Drescher's "Good and Real", or the relevant parts of
Overcoming Bias (which aren't exactly collected into one place yet).

~~~
randallsquared
I don't recall seeing implementation details in OB, and the description of
that book doesn't indicate there are any in there, either. Of course, that's
because the real answer is "no one understands it, yet". A bunch of jargon and
entertaining stories can be used to show that some proposed implementation
_isn't_ the right answer, sometimes, but it can't be the answer.

~~~
Eliezer
Well, I'm not just going to come out and _tell_ you how to build a conscious
entity. Next thing you know, people would be making conscious Java applets.

That's the real reason "no one can explain the hard problem of subjective
experience". It's actually pretty simple, but as soon as someone figures it
out, they realize how easy it would be to create billions of small computer
programs experiencing intense suffering; so they keep it a secret.

~~~
randallsquared
Ah. That must be it. Thanks for the tip. :)

------
jhp
I believe that consciousness is the ability for a computing system to
continually maintain and update several simultaneous contexts. These contexts
may run highly detailed simulations (including the core "where I am") or more
abstract thinking (including the current conversational or semantic context).
For a human being, the "primary simulation" results in a powerful feeling of
self, perhaps because the here and now that you are feeling is also the here
and now that you are simulating.

While sustaining these contexts, the system is able to explore related
information and can choose to break focus on a certain context, or to open a
new context. Usually, a discarded context can be quickly restored, such as in
the case of restoring an interrupted thought. Perhaps, then, contexts are
continually run, stored, and restored. I don't know. What I do know is that
the primary world simulation (with its continual sensory update) is rarely
broken without the system electing to do so.

That would be "losing consciousness" :)

Whether received through sensory input or through memory in the form of stored
simulations or related concepts, the constant exploration of related
information influences the context that spawned it (and often the other
contexts as well). This allows the computing system to update its assumptions
as represented in simulation or conceptual frame, and then begin anticipating
and exploring possible future contexts.

\- JHP

------
jackchristopher
There are two methods for investigating consciousness; One subjective, the
other objective. The first is philosophical, the second is a physical. And
they should lead to the same answer.

Both sides will claim their method to be the right one. And from time to time
one will seem better than the other. But ultimately, some questions will be
left unanswered. And both methods will break down. And you will want to fill
in the gaps.

But you'll realize that one may complement the other. And you may decide the
course ... but you'll never be sure.

------
paraschopra
Four to five years ago, I would have asked the same question and would have
been superemly excited about being able to ponder over such questions.

Now, I simply don't bother.

------
speek
It depends on who you ask, but there are two general camps: the bottom-up
approach and the top-down approach (neuroscience and psychology,
respectfully).

I believe it to be a side product of response to stimulus (neurons firing
off). If I'm right, we're going to have a lot of fun with interfaces in the
next 20 or so years. I'm a big believer in emergent neuropsychology (the
functional programming version of brain science).

I'm not going to delve into the top-down approach because you get a lot of
other really cool theories, but a lot of it has to to with perception ("Is
this red the same color to me as it is to you (other than just naming this
color red)?").

In response to your edit, I'm pretty sure that neurons start firing before
birth but neurons are interconnected in a multi-dimensional graph, so it's
pretty much a chain reaction that gets influenced depending on external (or
internal) stimulus.

I believe that when we take both the bottom-up and the top-down approach and
meet in the middle, we will have a true AI... but I'm guessing it'll be based
on a non-vonNeumann architecture.

------
tricky
Maybe a little off-topic, but something I've been thinking of for a while. Has
anyone ever tried to build a mesh network of nodes that react to signals and
fire outputs? I'd to build a few million of these and evolve them to see if
they'd ever do anything interesting.

Does anyone know if anyone is working on something like this?

~~~
yan
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network>

Is that what you mean?

~~~
tricky
No. Something more along the lines of interconnected signal processors that,
after a while, achieve sort of a message pumping stasis. I think it would be
interesting to evolve the network until it is able to "react" to changes in
the outside environment (i.e. signals coming in from outside the network)

------
tsally
Woah, woah, woah. What's this business of talking about consciousness like it
exists? The only thing you know for sure is conscious is yourself. You simply
make assumptions that other people are conscious based off of their responses
to various challenges (questions, interaction, etc). But you don't know
whether their 'consciousness' is even remotely related to yours or not.

This is why the Turing test does not seek to address the issue of
consciousness. It simply tests the appearance of consciousness. We will
_never_ know anything about the consciousness of anything else besides
ourselves.

~~~
pygy
... until we plug two (or more) brains together using miroelectrode arrays.

------
tlrobinson
This is one of those questions that bothers me. Not the question itself, just
the fact that we don't know, and likely can't know.

Is there some test to prove if something has "consciousness"? Without such a
test I don't think we can know what it really is. You might propose having the
thing explain the feeling to you, but I could just program a computer to do
the same thing (theoretically).

I have no way of knowing whether or not anyone else besides myself experiences
this thing called consciousness.

You all could be perfectly designed robots that are tricking me into believing
you're also humans who experience consciousness.

~~~
Tichy
The funny thing about your thought experiment, as well as the infamous
"chinese room", is that you could actually turn it on it's head. The
conclusion is that consciousness doesn't matter.

~~~
randallsquared
If you divorce all the products of consciousness from consciousness itself,
then you could say consciousness doesn't matter. Also, any particular product
of consciousness is easily produced without it. Given that evolution stumbled
on consciousness, I think it's plausible that within the constraints of
biology, consciousness is the simplest way to produce the behavior we
associate with it.

------
chengmi
This question is better suited for a philosopher rather than a biologist:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind>

~~~
yan
... until biology catches up.

~~~
chengmi
So take biology out of the discussion, and consider consciousness in a
computer system. If a program is self-aware, is it conscious? Or is there more
to consciousness than that? Why don't conscious computer programs exist if we
already understand how consciousness works? Would it be ethical to reboot that
program, if it existed?

Biology can explain how neurons in the brain (computer) works. It can also
potentially explain how thought and logic play out (program logic). But how do
you explain consciousness in this metaphor? this.isRunning? Or does it make
more sense to say that even if we understood all of biology, there are still
things that we won't fully understand?

------
Tichy
Consciousness doesn't really exists, it is just an illusion.

It is both scary and amusing to me that there are entire (expensive)
conferences dedicated to something the participants can't even give a
definition for.

~~~
yters
Why do people find the "illusion" response helpful?

"How do Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and relativity work together?
Don't worry about it, the physical world is just an illusion, and illusions
aren't rational."

~~~
Tichy
What I mean by "consciousness is an illusion" is that consciousness does not
exist. It is a non issue. Again in this thread as in any other discussion on
consciousness, nobody has given a definition of consciousness. There is
nothing meaningful to talk about.

On the other hand, the physical world exists, or at least out perception of it
exists. You might say that you also perceive consciousness, but honestly, what
is it you perceive? I don't think it is the same as perceptions of physical
things.

~~~
rodrigo
What do you mean by consciousness does not exist? How do you define
consciusness? you have to have a definition so you can deny it.

~~~
Tichy
Well the whole discussion is rather useless then, isn't it? Perhaps we should
discuss the Spaghetti Monster instead?

~~~
yters
Do you have to define red to discuss it?

~~~
rodrigo
It migth help.

~~~
yters
Definitely, but the point I'm getting at is that there are loads of things we
discuss without having to define them. Especially the basic terms of whatever
you happen to be defining. I.e. do I need to define the words I use in this
question for you to understand what I am asking?

~~~
rodrigo
If youre going to discuss something it helps to have a common ground to begin
with, as i dont pretend to know what consciousness is or if it even exists, i
asked Tichy to tell me his definition so i can understand what hes denying.
Not to the point of defining all the words, just the basic concepts were
trying to understand.

~~~
Tichy
Then I am sorry, I didn't think you meant the question serious. My criticism
of the whole consciousness debate is that nobody knows what they are talking
about, so I am the last person who could give you that definition (since my
point is that there is no meaningful definition of it).

People have this notion that there should be this something called
consciousness, but they can not say what it is supposed to be. This becomes
especially clear in Searle's Chinese Room where Searle describes how an
intelligent process is supposedly not conscious, but he still dodges the
question what he means by consciousness. To me the chinese room shows that
there is no such thing (ie the notion seems to be that a human speaking
chinese does so by employing his "consciousness", whereas the chinese room
example basically proves that consciousness is not required).

------
eggnet
If we mechanically understood how thinking or consciousness worked, we would
have AI. We don't understand, and don't have AI. I hope I was helpful :)

~~~
chris_l
Intelligence != Consciousness

~~~
randallsquared
That's true, but most people really mean artificially generated consciousness
when they say "AI". A few people, like Yudkowsky, really don't, but the
original post here was about consciousness, not really powerful optimization
processes.

------
jsyedidia
You should read "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach," by
Caltech professor Christof Koch, which is a book about this subject.

------
mpk
I doubt you're going to get any answers here. I've seen GEB mentioned already
and if you're a reader I highly recommend Julian Jaynes' Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Fascinating theory, but
the consensus seems to be that it's probably not correct. I picked it up after
encountering references to it in a diverse set of sources.

~~~
yan
While that book is fascinating and totally came out of left field when it was
published, I don't think I would recommend it as an introduction to
consciousness. The idea that people very similar to modern humans weren't
self-aware as recent as the pharaohs is fascinating though!

~~~
yters
That is very interesting. Know of any good links about the non self-aware
people?

~~~
yan
It was basically introduced in the book mentioned in the above post. You can
read more about bicameralism here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_>(psychology)

(I'm pretty sure it's been disproved since, but he put forward a very
interesting theory)

edit: err use the entire link, the parens didn't get included.

------
KevBurnsJr
The first thing a psychedelic experience will teach you is the absurdity of
such a question.

Edit: Genuinely surprised to see that nobody else has mentioned the
psychedelic experience in their search for a solution to satisfy this line of
questioning.

------
seejay
I think Buddhism has very good explanation for such questions. I suggest you
read some good Buddhist books or find someone who has a good knowledge about
Lord Buddha's teachings (probably a Buddhist monk) Good Luck finding answers!

~~~
ahoyhere
No, it doesn't really. Buddhism doesn't concern itself with the question of
"why." That's ego talking.

------
markessien
Consciousness is just the firing of pleasure centers when external actions fit
into pre-defined purposes. It's like the very highest abstraction of a
functional event-triggered programming language.

------
mrtron
Id recommend reading Godel Escher Bach.

It talks about how complex things can be built from simple building blocks.

There really are no answers other than it is impossible to exclude such
complexity from a system.

------
yan
_At birth, when does the first neuron fire, and how does it sustain itself?_

Body activity doesn't start from birth, even the zygote has already processes
inside it that are life processes.

------
fawxtin
Conciousness is somewhat a prevalence over instincts, you got "magically" a
way to "choose". You really should read S. Freud, and M. Minsky if you want to
know more about.

------
pygy
First one has to define consciousness as subjective experience, not as being
awake.

The only consciousness one is able to experience is his own. But solipsism is
a point of view that is both depressing and not really explanatory of
anything.

Let's assume that people around, who are similar to us, are conscious too. The
problem in the last sentence is the word "similar". A few centuries ago, Black
people were considered soul-less animals by their "enlighted" European peers.
We recentlty came to realize that most traits that we thought made us unique,
like symbolic language for example, or "theory of mind" ie realizing that
other creatures have other thoughts and other beliefs than our own, are shared
by other species (eg bonobos).

Even if they don't recognize themselves in the mirror, in most animal species
that I know of, individuals are able to recognize their own smell.

Assuming personnal consciousness can be mapped to some part of the brain
processing, can a dog, a frog, a worm be conscious? How many neurons make a
conscious brain?

Let's keep on recursing.

Are plants conscious? At least, some of them seem able to compute. The opening
and closing patterns of stomata (the pores that allow the gaz exchanges on
leaf) are not statistically different from those of some 2d cellular automata.
(Evidence for complex, collective dynamics and emergent, distributed
computation in plants <http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0307811100> )

Can a monocellular animal be conscious? Not only do they sense and react to
their environment, but some are able to anticipate periodic variations of
their surroundings, and memorize stimuli patterns. (Amoebae Anticipate
Periodic Events <http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101> )

Now please be confused :-)

I don't think that consciousness is related to the ability of having explicit
self referential thoughts (how do we define thoughts, BTW? are they language
related or not necessarilly?), nor to symbolic language.

From the "mapism" point of view, something that really puzzles me is the fact
that identity is preserved overnignt, despite the extensive plasticity that
occurs while one is sleeping.

Could identity rely on the statistical properties of a brain rather than on a
strict material mapping? Cognition at least, and possibly conscious access to
information relies on bayesian processing of the information (see Hakwan Lau's
work).

As long as we don't have proper formal models of these concepts, we'll keep on
speculating.

I really wonder whether it's possible to find a Gödel-like paradox regarding
statements about consciousness pronounced by conscious beeings... :D

/rambling.

------
renno
<http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000901.html>

------
jogaun
The unknown is vast in all disciplines, especially neuroscience.

------
chris_l
Consciousness is the brain sensing the mind of the world. But that's just my
speculation :)

------
joubert
Study some ethology.

------
time_management
I'm philosophically a Buddhist, so I put consciousness ("mind") first and
wonder more about where the physical world comes from. Experientially, the
world is not much different from a dream (except the sex is more awkward) but
it has certain properties of persistence, regularity, and sharedness among
~10^11-14 sapient organisms that make a convincing case for a world of cold,
hard matter that exists independently of us. But that's an illusion.

The physical universe doesn't actually exist, any more than a dream world
does. There are probably trillions of universes in existence-- maybe
infinitely many. They can't be counted, and they don't much matter because
they're physically inaccessible to us. We're lucky, though, to be in an
exceedingly successful universe whose laws are set ("fine tuned") to allow for
complex life. The universes that don't support complex life to observe them
might be "out there", but they effectively don't exist.

Mind is eternal, but the processes it can support depend on the physical
system (body/brain) to which it binds, and of course that physical system
evolves and, sadly, collapses. We're extremely lucky to have our minds bound
to such beautiful, powerful creatures as humans. We could've just as easily
been bound to cockroaches or tapeworms (and it can happen after death in a
negative rebirth, but karma's another subject entirely).

The transmigration of consciousness is taken as self-evident by Eastern
religions, and there's actually a fair bit of evidence for reincarnation
(refer to the work of Ian Stevenson). What's controversial is whether or not a
mind-- or, at least, an unenlightened mind-- can exist independent of a
physical body at all. The Theravadan perspective tends to be that it cannot,
whereas Tibetan Buddhists believe in an intermediate experiential state called
the bardo.

 _Am I butterfly dreaming I'm a man? Or a bowling ball dreaming I'm a plate of
sashimi? Never assume what you see and feel is real!_ \-- Doreen, Chrono
Trigger.

~~~
yters
Can you describe the most convincing evidence for reincarnation?

~~~
rodrigo
I dont view reincarnation as "me" waking up in some other body in some other
time; IMHO it has to be on a gene level, "me" is just a bunch of genes wich
have learned and contribute to the general pool. Or something like that.

~~~
yters
Well, then anything adaptive is "reincarnation." You might as well just call
it "adaptation," then, instead of redefining another word.

~~~
rodrigo
Thats it, i normally dont say "reincarnation". It seems to me that words like
that were used to make graspable a concept thats hard to grasp; but it lost
its sense when someboy tried to hard to make it fit in some view of things.

Edit: It can also be called Evolution.

------
ahoyhere
I'll give you $8k and two months this summer. If you come up with an answer,
we'll both get rich.

~~~
blues
Um, no. I'm a "formerly autistic" (the irony should freak you) researcher in
(classical) information theory and linguistics. You will hopefully get your
answer at linguistics.name, when I get around to it. There is no charge to
just learn the material. I do claim to own the theory itself, So you can't
teach it without a license from me. Life is hard y'know?

------
ram1024
consciousness is simply the state of being responsive to one's environment.

it can boil down as far as gauging the responses of one neuron, but the
"environment" of that neuron is its connectivity to others, so it's far more
comprehensive to total consciousness up as the whole collective.

ideally, you'd be able to single out a singular and distinct "thought" and
trace the workings of all your cognitive elements involved. the result of this
thought then loops back through the system and re-patterns it with a
"conclusion".

the chemical nature of one's neurons is the important part whether malleable
or incorrigible, allowing us to exhibit unique traits and personality.

