Network theory suggests consciousness is global in the brain

http://www.kurzweilai.net/etwork-theory-suggests-consciousness-is-global-in-the-brain

by jonbaer • 11 years ago

65 49 11 years ago

It seems rather tenuous to suggest that because all the parts of a conscious brain are active, all of the brain must then be conscious.

Luc• 11 years ago

After reading it, I don't think anything like that is suggested by the article.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

I think they're arguing that consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently large network, rather than being located in a particular cerebral structure.

mewwts• 11 years ago

That's a great explanation.

klank• 11 years ago

I'm in agreement. Think of large social sites like reddit or 4chan. I think it would be fair to consider them as conscious entities for the same reason. They can have conversations with themselves about themselves and can even have conversations/interactions with outside entities all driven "by their own volition".

charlieflowers• 11 years ago

Also, does awareness of the presence of a disc equate to consciousness? That seems rather tenuous.

smtucker2• 11 years ago

I'm not sure "consciousness" really exists. A computer surely isn't aware of what it is computing and you don't need a global state of consciousness to describe its functionality. Why point to things like "consciousness" when our brains being biological automatons is a perfect explanation already?

It gets even sillier when you consider that the criteria for what things are considered conscious seems to be quite arbitrary. They say a human is conscious. Is a dog? I think most people would agree if a human is conscious a dog is. Is a squirrel? I think most people would agree. Is a lizard? Maybe. Is a spider? eh... Is a worm? well some might only have ~300 neurons... Is a plant? Well, no neurons, but they technically do react to stimuli...

How about a rock? Well it certainly doesn't have any neurons and doesn't react to stimuli but what is so special about neurons and reacting to stimuli anyway? The concept of a threshold for consciousness doesn't seem to hold any weight to it. It has nothing backing it up.

When two particles interact with each other is a barrier of consciousness formed? Are all systems conscious? Is the universe conscious? Are all possible systems made up of all the connections of all the constituent parts of the universe conscious?

bencollier492• 11 years ago

That depends what you mean by "consciousness". If you mean the "experience of awareness", then we can't even properly define it, let alone begin to explain it.

This whole question is so hard because we find it impossible to define the terms. It could be that by default, we cannot define consciousness. Perhaps that implies that the universe is made of consciousness, rather than the other way around.

smtucker2• 11 years ago

You are right we should properly define our terms. And of course as you pointed out it is very hard. Maybe if we defined them in a sort of reverse order it would be easier.

Consider humans as biological automatons. Our brains are some sort of neural networked computer and the architecture of the neurons makes for, from a programmers point of view, some very advanced sort of "artificial" intelligence. From here there seems to be two possibilities: 1) That is it. Nothing else and their is no "being" experiencing what the brain processes or 2) something else, I think this idea is what we call...

Consciousness would be the idea that their is some sort of unifying sort of connectedness that allows the soul, ghost, being, etc to experience what is happening and in some people's viewpoints have an affect on what is happening (freewill in other words).

To me this definition seems terribly biased towards my point of view but I don't really know of any other way to define this.

amelius• 11 years ago

Interesting. But if the universe is all consciousness, then one can ask what it is conscious about, and why this consciousness is forced to follow the laws of physics.

On the other hand, I find it surprising that science does not deal with "experience of awareness", for clearly it is part of reality (since we are talking about it) and hence of physics (there is only one way out of this, which is to say that we are all zombies just making up that our awareness is influencing reality).

By the way, anyone know of a more concise term for "experience of awareness"? I have been looking for it, and I'm sure it must exist, but no luck so far. How do philosophers address this concept?

cristianpascu• 11 years ago

Or we have a soul, separated from but interacting with the body. :)

jlebrech• 11 years ago

maybe the electron in a computer are what makes it "conscious" the thing with silicon is that it coerces the electron on a set path. a neuron is more lenient and lets the electron choose more freely.

ukigumo• 11 years ago

I'm no expert in neurology or any related field but I think the concept on consciousness is somewhat fuild but overall I would explain it like this:

Knowledge of self, aknowledging one's physical and mental limitations and one's ability to relate and interact with others and the environment in such a way that transcends on's initial limits if one is so inclined(ie, desire for growth and the choice not to do it).

Just responding to stimuli is not enough, because humans can accept that the stimuli and chose not to respond to it or can decide to act despite said inputs.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

Confused: a definition is unrelated to what we 'want' consciousness to mean. I define it like this: we know what it is to be 'unconscious'. Conscious is the opposite of that, which is simply responsive to stimuli.

If we want to describe that other idea with a word, then perhaps self-aware is closer.

sp3324• 11 years ago

You have a list of things of decreasing consciousness. So the question is, what makes a dog more conscious than a worm? And can we make a computer with more of that same property?

danparsonson2• 11 years ago

But before you work that out you need to define what you mean by 'more conscious'....

chimprich• 11 years ago

Interesting. Consciousness is the only thing I'm sure of that exists.

lobo_tuerto• 11 years ago

Mu.

snowwrestler2• 11 years ago

This line of analysis can be followed for almost anything we have a word for. Anyone can draw a typical chair. Now start morphing it: the back gets shorter and rounder, the legs get shorter, more and more... At what point does it stop being a chair? And what does it become then? Where's the boundary between a stool and a chair? A chair and a bench?

The fact that consciousness, as a word, has fuzzy edges, does not imply that it does not exist. Most of our words have fuzzy edges.

kazinator• 11 years ago

I'm not sure "consciousness" really exists.

If so, then the work of anesthesiologists is quackery. :)

Why point to things like "consciousness" when our brains being biological automatons is a perfect explanation already?

Because reductionism doesn't provide a satisfying explanation for higher level emergent phenomena.

For example, x86 disassembly isn't particularly informative about what is happening in a theorem-prover written in Lisp.

I think most people would agree if a human is conscious a dog is. Is a squirrel? I think most people would agree. Is a lizard? Maybe. Is a spider? eh... Is a worm?

Probably, there is a continuum. A squirrel is conscious in a less "rich" way than a dog, and so on.

ThrustVectoring• 11 years ago

If "consciousness" doesn't exist, then you need to explain why people talk about "consciousness".

bweitzman• 11 years ago

A computer surely isn't aware of what it is computing A computer could be conscious without being aware of what it is computing just like a human can be conscious without being aware of what their neurons are doing.
The concept of a threshold for consciousness doesn't seem to hold any weight to it. So then consciousness must be a sliding scale? I would agree.
Is the universe conscious? I would say this is likely. If neurons and the rest of our physiology can give rise to consciousness, then I think it's likely that there are objects at larger scales than us that are conscious (at least partly) due to our behaviors.

mjklin• 11 years ago

It seems you're talking about what William James called the "Mind Stuff Theory" [1]. He ended up rejecting it, but even a hundred years later our conceptions are too muddled to have good arguments either way.

[1] http://psychclassics.asu.edu/James/Principles/prin6.htm

divan• 11 years ago

Jeff Hawkins wrote absolutely the same thing in his "On Intelligence" book (2004), and came to that conclusion from his brain model.

sebastianconcpt• 11 years ago

Something that you might find interesting:

There are two basic lines of thought here, the hard-electron AI school of thought that pushes the emergent hypothesis and the "Consciousness is not Computation" school of thought that accepts that Mind is Computation but states that Consciousness is something else.

Tip: the AI hypothesis does NOT explain nor predicts the thing that a Paramesium can do.

https://www.singularityweblog.com/stuart-hameroff-quantum-co...

danielbarla• 11 years ago

the AI hypothesis does NOT explain nor predicts the thing that a Paramesium can do.

Can you elaborate? Off the top of my head, I believe Paramecia display slightly above amoeba-like intelligence; what I'm missing is the leap to how a theory of emergent consciousness would not be able to explain this.

albertzeyer• 11 years ago

Yes, exactly. That's the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) theory about the Neocortex.

According to him, "consciousness is simply what it feels like to have a neocortex". I.e. it's a global property.

Some more here: http://vinodwadhawan.blogspot.de/2014/03/122-hawkins-model-f...

dmichulke2• 11 years ago

So analyzing the process of detecting a disk on a screen is somehow supposed to permit conclusions on consciousness?

Well, my cat meows when I switch on the light so I suppose I should write about how "Electricity suggests language development is intrinsic in mammals"

sp3324• 11 years ago

Yes. When a person is conscious of a disk on the screen, their brain scans look very different from when they do not detect the disk. And there isn't just one part of the brain that changes. I'm not saying fMRI is a great tool for this, but it seems like a pretty clear conclusion.

dmichulke2• 11 years ago

Well I think that 'consciousness' is a pretty strong term for something described in the article.

Just to clarify: Are cats or toddlers conscious? Are the people that do not see the disk conscious?

snowwrestler2• 11 years ago

The analogy I fall back on is the concept of a wave in a body of water. Where, in the body of water, is the structure that defines the wave? How does a wave arise from a bunch of water molecules?

What we call a "wave" is actually a broadly distributed energy pattern in the water. We just have created a single word for it to help us recognize and talk about that pattern.

Consciousness might be like that--a (very complex) pattern of energy in the matter of the brain. "Consciousness" would refer to a pattern of behaviors, rather than a physical "thing" like a rock or a hand.

lerno• 11 years ago

Consciousness is typically understood as "the one that experiences". The failure of reductionism to explain it can be demonstrated by an example:

You accidentally burn your finger on the stove, this is detected by the nerves that send nerve signals to the brain that signifify pain. In the brain those signals create an incredibly complex reaction in the brain that cause you to withdraw your hand. For a "philosofical zombie" - an awareless automaton - that is all that happens.

For an aware being, this is followed by an "experience" of pain.

How does this experience of pain arise? There is an action and reaction in both the aware and the unaware, an automaton does not EXPERIENCE pain, even though reaction and consequent actions are identical.

Let us focus on the experience of the aware observer - where does it start? If it is in the brain, we can reduce it to physical effects, in which case our automaton could replicate it. Plus, at what point does the feeling arise? It's clearly not in the hand itself, nor in the nerves. But nerves are an extension of the brain. We have a part of the brain that handles pain, but why should those particular brain cells cause a painful feeling to arise? These are just like all the other cells in the brain, just differing in connections.

Why would the activation of some cells cause pain to arise? If it is due to the connection that cause our brain to decide that this was a negative experience, then this would imply that the feeling arises when the pain center sends signals that it is stimulated to other parts of the brain. Then does the feeling of pain arise in the cells connecting to the part of the brain dealing with pain? If so, by what mechanism do those parts of the brain cause the feelings to arise?

There is no way to nail down a mechanism that isn't physical and anonymous (i.e. doe not know the context of what it is connected to), and trying to claim that inanimate objects are self-aware is a bit of a stretch. We reach the conclusion that there is no good way to describe aware experience arising from the physical.

Nor do any simple metaphysical notions of "soul" work, as any metaphysical system run into similar issues (if there is a soul, then by what process does it give rise to awareness)

Network theory suggests consciousness is global in the brain

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