Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained

[apeiron]

So I guess the spine and brain stem is enough to give rise to subjectivity. Children with hydranencephaly just have brain stem more complex than the reptiles. Anyway. If Damasio were right, the brain stem was the seat of core subjectivity (?) There are many nuclei in the brain stem which could act like complete nano processing units or super computers in themselves.

It is wrong to say that kids suffering hydranencephaly have only a brainstem. How much higher brain is left varies from case to case.

But who disputes that the brainstem is both complex and core? I wouldn't say it was the seat of subjectivity. But it is certainly core to being alive.

 

[Dotini]

Is it even remotely conceivable that quantum mechanics, particularly the phenomenon of entanglement, might have something to do with explaining consciousness?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110331104014.htm
ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2011) — Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems? Until now, says Prof. Ron Naaman of the Institute's Chemical Physics Department (Faculty of Chemistry), both biologists and physicists have considered quantum systems and biological molecules to be like apples and oranges. But research he conducted together with scientists in Germany, which appeared recently in Science, shows that a biological molecule -- DNA -- can discern between quantum states known as spin.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

 

[disregardthat]

The problem with consciousness is that we have no idea what we are talking about.

 

[riezer]

It is wrong to say that kids suffering hydranencephaly have only a brainstem. How much higher brain is left varies from case to case.

But who disputes that the brainstem is both complex and core? I wouldn't say it was the seat of subjectivity. But it is certainly core to being alive.

Oh.. btw.. those kids suffering hydracencephaly have intact superior colliculi... so even though they are blind.. they can sense movement... it's like the phenomenon of blindsight where people who are blind can catch a ball when you throw it at them... controlled by a particular unconscious part of the brain... like just lizard who catches fly with their tongue by using the superior colliculus. Also Damasio said:

"To date, the superior colliculus is the only brain region outside the cerebral cortex known to exhibit gamma-range oscillations".

I wonder what you think is the secret of Binding? And it's connection to the 40 Hz oscillations.
I have read Chrisoff Koch "Quest for Consciousessness: A Neurobiological Approach". At first he thought 40 hz is related to the Binding Problem and now think it is just indirectly related to it. What is your thought about this?

 

[Dotini]

http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/images/stories/pubPDF/2003_Zheng.pdf
This paper presents evidence that there may be macroscopically long range forces extending among cells due to charge separation and deep alignment of charges.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve

 

[apeiron]

I wonder what you think is the secret of Binding? And it's connection to the 40 Hz oscillations.
I have read Chrisoff Koch "Quest for Consciousessness: A Neurobiological Approach". At first he thought 40 hz is related to the Binding Problem and now think it is just indirectly related to it. What is your thought about this?

As I said, a holistic view of the brain as a dynamical hierarchy would see both the integration and the differentiation. So yes, there must be some mechanism to bind distributed activity into a coherent whole. But this is not the secret of consciousness, nor a theory, in itself.

You don't get c in a system just because of some rhythm. You get c because there is an anticipatory modelling of the world taking place.

So a theory would look more like Grossberg's ART (adaptive resonance theory) neural nets, which modeled binding as part of an anticipatory modelling hierarchy long before it was found in the lab.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_resonance_theory

 

[apeiron]

The problem with consciousness is that we have no idea what we are talking about.

Who is this "we"? Have you been to any conferences recently?

Just a selection from the programme at ASSC 15.
http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/Program_201106010_update.pdf

CONCURRENT SESSION 2 (3:45pm-5:45pm)
CS2a: Attention & consciousness
Chair: Melanie Wilke (University Medicine Goettingen, Germany)
Venue: 1F Centennial Hall
3:45pm- CS2a-1

Cognition is nice, but consciousness is better
Victor A.F. Lamme
Department of Psychology, Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands v.a.f.lamme@uva.nl
4:05pm- CS2a-2

Consciousness is not necessary for feature binding
André W Keizer [1], Bernhard Hommel [2], Victor Lamme [1]
[1] University of Amsterdam Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Department of Psychology Amsterdam, the Netherlands [2] Leiden University Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition Leiden, The Netherlands a.w.keizer@uva.nl
4:25pm- CS2a-3

Attention is necessary for awareness
Michael A. Cohen, Ken Nakayama
Department of Psychology, Harvard University michaelthecohen@gmail.com
4:45pm- CS2a-4

Unconscious pop-out: attentional capture by unseen feature singletons only when top-down attention is available
Po-Jang Hsieh, Jaron Colas, Nancy Kanwisher
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute, MIT hsieh.pj@gmail.com
5:05pm- CS2a-5

Unconscious cognition isn‘t that dumb: Subliminal primes exert top-down modulations
Filip Van Opstal [1], Wim Gevers [2], Cristian Buc Calderon [2], Tom Verguts [1]
[1] Department of Experimental Psychology at Ghent University, [2] Unescog at Université Libre de Bruxelles filip.vanopstal@ugent.be
5:25pm- CS2a-6

Spatial awareness after pulvinar inactivation
Igor Kagan [1], Melanie Wilke [1,2], Richard A. Andersen [1]
[1] Div. Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA [2] Dept. Cognitive Neurology, University Medicine Goettingen, Germany igor@vis.caltech.edu

CS2c: Representation & introspection
Chair: Dan Lloyd (Trinity College, USA)
Venue: 2F Hall II
3:45pm- CS2c-1

Inner speech and introspective self-knowledge
Kengo Miyazono [1,2]
[1] Department of Philosophy, The University of Tokyo, [2] Research Fellow (DC2), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science kengomiyazono@yahoo.co.jp
4:05pm- CS2c-2

Is naive introspection really unreliable?
Kranti Saran
Harvard University saran@fas.harvard.edu
4:25pm- CS2c-3

When to trust first-person reports—and when not to. A new approach towards first-person methods in consciousness research
Jennifer M. Windt
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz windt@uni-mainz.de
4:45pm- CS2c-4

What metarepresentation is for
Tillmann Vierkant
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Langauge Sciences, University of Edinburgh t.vierkant@ed.ac.uk
5:05pm- CS2c-5

Two levels of metacognition
Santiago Arango-Munoz
Ruhr-Universität Bochum santiagoarangom@gmail.com
5:25pm- CS2c-6

Perception versus memory: An argument against representationalism
Joseph N. Gottlieb
University of Illinois: Chicago, Department of Philosophy joseph.gottlieb@gmail.com

CS3c: Theories and models of consciousness
Chair: Timothy Lane (National Chengchi University, Taiwan)
Venue: 2F Hall II
10:30am- CS3c-1

Dolphin consciousness and higher-order thought theories
Ryoji Sato
the University of Tokyo ryoji80@dol.hi-ho.ne.jp
10:50am- CS3c-2

Attention and the structure of consciousness
Adrienne Prettyman
University of Toronto adrienne.prettyman@gmail.com
11:10am- CS3c-3

The sensorimotor approach and higher-order representationalism
Oliver Kauffmann [1] , John Michael [2]
[1] Research Center Gnosis, University of Aarhus, Denmark. [2] Research Center Gnosis, University of Aarhus, Demark olka@dpu.dk
11:30am- CS3c-4

Consciousness, Intentionality, and Naturalization
Amir Horowitz
The Open University of Israel amirho@openu.ac.il
11:50am- CS3c-5

Inner clock model and conscious judgments of duration
Michał Klincewicz
Graduate Center, City University of New York michal.klincewicz@gmail.com
12:10am- CS3c-6

Self-oscillator model of bistable perception explains percept stabilization and reversal rate characteristics with interrupted ambiguous stimulus
Norbert Fürstenau
German Aerospace Center, Inst. of Flight Guidance, Human Factors Dptm., Lilienthalplatz 7, D-38108 Braunschweig, Germany norbert.fuerstenau@dlr.de

 

[disregardthat]

While I am certain that the articles you refer to are relevant to the study of consciousness, my point is that there often is a categorical mistake involved when philosophizing about the nature of consciousness. If one at one page discuss e.g. the hard problem of consciousness, and at another try to answer this with results from neurobiology, one is making such a mistake.

Not that I regard the hard problem of consciousness a problem at all. It is a mistake in language, a problem generated by a certain mental picture of consciousness. One cannot admit it as a genuine scientific issue, and answer it with reference to facts of the biological structure of the brain.

Philosophical problems are not solved, they are vaporized, so to say, by adjusting to another point of view and admitting that they do not really make sense. The real problem is why we believe they make sense.

Sorry if this is de-railing the discussion.

 

[Maui]

Who is this "we"? Have you been to any conferences recently?

Just a selection from the programme at ASSC 15.
http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/Program_201106010_update.pdf

I haven't attended the conference, but having seen similar works by other peers, i have to say that that's an impressively comprehensive list of people who don't got a clue on awareness.

 

[Galteeth]

As I said, a holistic view of the brain as a dynamical hierarchy would see both the integration and the differentiation. So yes, there must be some mechanism to bind distributed activity into a coherent whole. But this is not the secret of consciousness, nor a theory, in itself.

You don't get c in a system just because of some rhythm. You get c because there is an anticipatory modelling of the world taking place.

So a theory would look more like Grossberg's ART (adaptive resonance theory) neural nets, which modeled binding as part of an anticipatory modelling hierarchy long before it was found in the lab.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_resonance_theory

Adaptive resonance theory reminds me a bit of Plato.

 

[apeiron]

While I am certain that the articles you refer to are relevant to the study of consciousness, my point is that there often is a categorical mistake involved when philosophizing about the nature of consciousness. If one at one page discuss e.g. the hard problem of consciousness, and at another try to answer this with results from neurobiology, one is making such a mistake.

That's a very different point and one I agree with.

The problem lies with people who philosophise about the hard problem rather than those who theorise about the neurobiology of consciousness.

The hard problem does represent an ultimate limit on knowledge, sure. But in the meantime, the amount of neurobiology to be learned seems pretty unlimited.

 

[riezer]

That's a very different point and one I agree with.

The problem lies with people who philosophise about the hard problem rather than those who theorise about the neurobiology of consciousness.

The hard problem does represent an ultimate limit on knowledge, sure. But in the meantime, the amount of neurobiology to be learned seems pretty unlimited.

Daneil Dennett and Antonio Damasio have complementary ideas in that both are neural realists (Dennett on the philosophical side, Damasio on hard neutral data). I'm still slowing reading Damasio "Self Comes to Mind" comparing each ideas to other authors. What do you think about feelings? Damasio stated that:

"The issue of how percertual maps of our body states become bodily feelings - how perceptual maps are felt and experienced - is not only central to the understanding of the conscious mind, it is integral to that understanding. One cannot fuly explain subjectivity without knowing about the origin of feelings and the acknowledging the existence of primordial feelings, spontaneous reflections of the state of the living body"

Damasio put feelings first before the mind while other authors think feelings are just production of the mind. What are your thoughts?

 

[apeiron]

Damasio put feelings first before the mind while other authors think feelings are just production of the mind. What are your thoughts?

I think this is an example of how Damasio is not wrong, but is very clunky.

Who would not say consciousness is embodied? Who would not say that subjectivity is about both internal and external perceptions (or feelings and sensations)?

So your phrasing here - some say feelings are before the mind, others say they are productions of the mind - is off. It inserts an unhelpful dualism into the description.

Instead, say brains (noun) are good at minding (verb). Or anticipatory modelling. And clearly that involves a negotiation between bodily wants and environmental possibilities. If consciousness is biological, then that would be its logic.

Study the brain and you can see the hierarchical organisation that makes this happen - pain mapping both down in the periaquiductal grey and up in the anterior cingulate.

In evolutionary terms, the brainstem mapping came first. But in us, it is an integrated story.

 

[riezer]

Consciousness studies are very interesting whatever is the conclusion. If our highest ideals like love, empathy and sentience and the reality of the self is entirely physical, then someday combination of technology and biotechnology can make us immortals by transferring extending our biology or our mind to machines and vice versa.

How come we spend trillions of dollars in weapons and not even a billion in consciousness research? The reward would be life changing... because the fruits of consciousness research would give us immortality by extension, manipulation of the sense of self beyond biology to machines and technology and their coupling. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates would choose physical immortality if the secret of the brain was to be solved.

But then if consciousness and sentience and sense of the self were beyond biology. Then it's just as interesting because even if technology could maintain the brain indefinitely, the innermost subjective experience originator wouldn't be willing.. so this means immortality would be impossible because humans are just part of something higher and bigger and a lifetime is all we have. At most the only thing that can be immortalized would be our lower nature.. so you would only have a futue race of selfish, dominating, killing machines with nothing higher inside to guide them and absolutely no sense of love, mercy, hope, sacrifice, etc.

At this point. We actually don't have clue what is the case above. But if you have a clue that subjective experience is 100% physical, then show the proof that physical immortality is a possibility and nothing higher is holding us back or controlling our existence. Maybe this would motivate Bill Gates to donate a few quarter of a billion, lol...

 

[riezer]

Neither of them have particularly good models. Neither of them have anything startling to say. One is an adequate populariser, the other is a famous egotist. Neither carry any particular weight in the field.

If I was pointing you to the best work that is computational in its language, but tries to capture the biological essence, then historically I would look to the cyberneticists like Ashby and MacKay, then the ART neural nets of Stephen Grossberg, and most recently to the Bayesian brain approach of Friston, Hinton and others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_brain

A predictive coding or anticipatory approach to consciousness explains pretty directly why such a system would have "internal states". It has to to work.

People with coma and bedridden. If you ask them questions, their brain parts can answer back as shown in functional MRI. One coma patient was told to imagine the inside of her house, parts of her brain pertaining to spaces light up and many others like this. They have a mind but they are unconscious. Now the 1 million dollar question, does this ART neural nets and Bayesian brain model you mentioned above got to do with the unconscious mind only? Or does it include the mechanism the creates the owner of the self and self-awareness? If the latter, any strong argument why it should be so?

The standard computational model gets it back to front by thinking the brain works by turning sensory input into experential output - some kind of internal display that arises for no particular reason while the brain is trying to generate suitable motor output.

But the biological model I'm talking about says systems guess the state of the world from experience. They create running predictive models. Then they respond to the errors of prediction to update that model. So it is instead output before input. You need a state of experience to be able to experience.

It is not complicated at all. There is certainly no need to invoke "computational complexity". You just need to turn your notions of processing round so they face the right way.

Dennett of course is sort of talking about this with his "intentional stance". But that is the problem with Dennett. He sort of gets a lot of things vaguely right and then thinks he is being original. When it seems just obvious and better described to those already at work in the field.

Edelman had a similar "my big idea" approach. He made himself very unpopular even though he had raised big bucks for a research institute.

Damasio is just a decent neuroscientist who knows his stuff, but had no sharply focused theory of the kind that would produce actual models.

 

[riezer]

People with coma and bedridden. If you ask them questions, their brain parts can answer back as shown in functional MRI. One coma patient was told to imagine the inside of her house, parts of her brain pertaining to spaces light up and many others like this. They have a mind but they are unconscious. Now the 1 million dollar question, does this ART neural nets and Bayesian brain model you mentioned above got to do with the unconscious mind only? Or does it include the mechanism the creates the owner of the self and self-awareness? If the latter, any strong argument why it should be so?

I think split brain experiments give strong indications that neural nets are sufficient for self-awareness. Anyone disagrees?

 

[bohm2]

Assuming unification within present-day physics/neuroscience is unlikely, can anyone envision what type of revision in physics is required for unification to proceed? I mean can one work backwards by establishing what kind of properties qualia have and how these can be realized in a future or present-day phyics? What are some of these properties of qualia? Non-locality? Unity?