If Consciousness Is A Function Of Neurons ?

[LeRepteux]

Consciousness is about being conscious of the same thing, otherwise it would not be useful. When we agree on an idea, it means that we have the same, thus that we are conscious of the same thing, which might be useful to both of us if it is right. In that sense, we don't have to agree, but it might be profitable if we do. Do you agree?

[CraigD]

Consciousness is about being conscious of the same thing, otherwise it would not be useful. When we agree on an idea, it means that we have the same, thus that we are conscious of the same thing, which might be useful to both of us if it is right. In that sense, we don't have to agree, but it might be profitable if we do. Do you agree?

I think you’re wandering off track from the main question of this thread, which is whether consciousness is caused by “neurons”, or more to the point, well-organized and operating collections of neurons such as those in human brains.

 

To address this question scientifically, we need to have an objective definition of “consciousness” that allows us to detect its presence or absence in experiments.

 

This is difficult because we live in cultures with long histories of equating the term “consciousness” with prescientific ideas such as “having a soul”.

 

I think we’d do well to agree on an objective (perhaps not ultimately complete or correct) definition of “consciousness” as the quality measured by the mirror test, then ask the question “why do individuals that pass the mirror test do so, compared to individuals that don’t?”

 

 

You might like to look at Stuart Hammerhoff and Roger Penrose about this one. I think that they have a pretty logical explanation of consciousness as a quantum function of microtubules. I don't agree with them entirely and not many other people do either.

As someone who’s been fascinated by the “what is consciousness?” question for the past 40 years of so, I’m familiar with Penrose’s, and to lesser extent, Hameroff’s, ideas a about consciousness. After the term was coined in the early 1990s, I grouped these ideas as in the “new mysterianism” philosophical school of thought.

 

In short, this school asserts that conscious (recall I’m using the work in the sense of “what makes an individual pass the mirror test”) arises not from the fairly well understood neurochemical actions and anatomy of the individuals’ brains, but from as yet poorly understood (and possibly not important – in which case their assertions are wrong) effects in very small structures within some brain cells, such as microtubules.

 

I don’t think the new mysterian are correct. I think that processes that allow some individuals to pass the mirror test arise from neurochemical actions that are at present fairly well-understood involving individual and small collections of neurons and other brain cells, but not yet very well-understood involving the many millions of cells involved in actual brain activity.

 

I’m also in the “hard AI” camp. I believe that “individuals” – for lack of a better term, “artificial intelligences” – using digital computers can perform computations somewhat equivalent to brain activity, in such a way that they could pass the mirror test, and other objective tests of consciousness.

 

PS: Neurology is complicated, and not understood even in an introductory way by many people. I think such an understanding is a pre-requisite to discussion such as this thread’s. Without it, I find that people tend to imagine simple and attractive, but demonstrably wrong, explanation of how the brain works.

 

Fortunately, there are many short introductions to the subject available online, such as this one. I recommend anyone who didn’t have an equivalent introduction in school to read and understand this one. Even if you did study neurology in school, it's a good refresher, especially if your introduction in school is more than 10 years in the past, when much less was understood in the field.

[LeRepteux]

I think we’d do well to agree on an objective (perhaps not ultimately complete or correct) definition of “consciousness” as the quality measured by the mirror test, then ask the question“why do individuals that pass the mirror test do so, compared to individuals that don’t?”

My answer is: because they perceive a move in the mirror that they just imagined and that they still remember. Which links conscience to imagination, and imagination to future, since it would then be about a future move that has not yet been executed.

Edited November 27, 2014 by LeRepteux

[CraigD]

I think we’d do well to agree on an objective (perhaps not ultimately complete or correct) definition of “consciousness” as the quality measured by the mirror test, then ask the question“why do individuals that pass the mirror test do so, compared to individuals that don’t?”

My answer is: because they perceive a move in the mirror that they just imagined and that they still remember. Which links conscience to imagination, and imagination to future, since it would then be about a future move that has not yet been executed.

I think you misunderstand the mirror test, LeRepteux. It is not a test of the ability to perceive an imagined motion, or remember one – in short, it isn’t a test of memory or planning. It is a test of the individual’s ability to recognize that the image of a mirror is of them, not another individual.

 

Also, I intended my question to require answers comparing the mental characteristics of individuals that pass the mirror test (such as adult humans and chimpanees) to those who don’t (such as dogs, cats, and humans under about 18 months age), not just explanations of how and why individuals that pass the test do.

 

A comparison of humans younger than about 18 months to ones older may be especially helpful, because this age is also when children develop more general cognitive/perceptual abilities, such as the ability to find objects removed from their visual field, and anticipate the reappearance of moving objects that pass behind concealing screens. However, many animals that fail the mirror test develop this ability, known as “object permanence”, so the mirror test and object permanence tests passing are not detecting the same ability.

 

The conclusion that most scientists in fields concerned with such tests have drawn is that passing the mirror test – what I’ve equated for the nonce with “consciousness” – is related to the development of mental models of external physical reality. What distinguishes an adult human from an adult dog – both of whom have adequate object permanence, but only one of whom is “conscious” in this sense – is that the human’s physical reality model contains a “me” object, but the dog’s does not.

 

I believe an external reality model containing a “me” object is “medium independent” – that is, can develop in animals like humans and chimpanzees, but also can be programmed into digital computers. I’ve done such programming. “remembering” and “imagining the future” is arguably easier for computer programs than for animal minds – for example, computer programs can commonly beat humans at exhaustively considering all future actions and outcomes to select a sequence of best actions to achieve a desired outcome, such as solving a puzzle purposefully made so complicated that few or no humans can.

 

Though it would be a difficult engineering and programming challenge (though stories such as this 2011 and this 2012 joke about doing so, I’m unaware of this having been done yet), I think I could write a program that would pass the mirror test, either in the real world (using a robot) or in a virtual one (in which the optics of the mirror are simulated). However, though it would meet the conditions for “consciousness” I proposed recently in this thread, it would not necessarily meet a more the more difficult requirements to be a true “human like AI”.

 

What could be missing, I think, has to do with learning using symbols and a trait, which appears unique among all known animals to humans, that Hofstadter calls, in “I Am a Strange Loop’” (p 83), “arbitrarily extensible categorical systems”.

 

Having consciousness is, I think, necessary, but not sufficient for having a human-like mind.

 

With regards both to consciousness and arbitrarily extensible categorical systems, I think it’s provocative, important, and often overlooked, to consider whether a human can develop these abilities purely through biological development, or whether social learning via social interaction is necessary. Though cases are very rare, so confident conclusion difficult to draw, I believe what data exists suggests that humans deprived of social contact for the first few, critical years of development, - “feral children” - fail to develop one or both of these abilities. As they also fail to develop the ability to learn language, this suggests that one or both of these abilities are related to language ability.

[LeRepteux]

Thanks again for caring Craig,

 

Yes I know that the test is about recognizing themselves, but those who pass the test do not recognize themselves in the beginning, they simply recognize that the individual who makes a move in the mirror makes the same move than them, in such a way that if absolutely no move is made, as on a picture, there is no way of recognizing themselves. To me, it means that this kind of recognition is about anticipating a move, because the first time a move is made, it is impossible to recognize its own one: it is only when we decide to voluntarily make one after a while that we can recognize it, and what we recognize is then what we intended to do, thus what we imagined, not so what we are doing.

 

Which raises the question of how imagination works exactly. How is it that we can prepare things in our head before doing them, and apart from recognition, what is the use for such a cognitive capacity? And my answer is anticipation: its use would be to anticipate our actions, and in particular our unknown ones, the ones that we never tried before, so that we can recognize their relevance if they give the same sensory perception than the anticipated one, thus if they don't hurt.

 

The individual that recognizes his own move in a mirror is happy because he discovers that what he thought was right, and what he thought was that the mirror would make the same move than the one he had imagined. He is happy because he knows that he might have been wrong, because it happened quite often before that he was when he did so. Conscious individuals know that trying something new can hurt, but nevertheless, only because it is exciting to try, they often do. That way, even if they are not always right, they learn a lot faster than unconscious ones.

 

Now the big question: how can we imagine moves that we never executed before? And my answer is by trial and error, which means that the brain must have developed a way to transform internally old moves into new ones out of a random process. If I am right and you add such a random process to your AI software, it should look intelligent. This way, when for the first time he would detect a coincidence between his moves and a mirror ones, he would only have to move randomly to check if the image always coincides to his moves. You may think that he will not move randomly if he decides to touch his nose for instance, because it is a known move for him and he does not have to, but he might also touch another part of his body to check if the sensation is the one expected. He has numerous possibilities equally valid, so how can he chose if not randomly?

 

I hope this answers the question of the "me" object: does it? But it introduces a new question about society: how this random process would be transferred from the mind of each individual into the groups they form? Of course we know that knowledge is transferred from one individual to the other, and from books to individuals, and that if individuals do not acquire that knowledge early, they are not able to acquire it after, but it doesn't mean that they would not recognize themselves in a mirror, so to me, knowledge has nothing to do with what produces conscience in the brain.

 

To me, conscience is about being able to anticipate a change, thus to be able to produce it in the brain before executing it, which is a very uncertain property. But if such a random process can produce the evolution of a specie, I think it could also produce the evolution of an individual, and I think it could produce the evolution of a society the same way.

Edited November 28, 2014 by LeRepteux

[CraigD]

Yes I know that the [mirror] test is about recognizing themselves, but those who pass the test do not recognize themselves in the beginning, they simply recognize that the individual who makes a move in the mirror makes the same move than them, in such a way that if absolutely no move is made, as on a picture, there is no way of recognizing themselves.

Distinguishing between and drawing a connection between the mirror test, which involves a optically nearly perfect, three-dimensional, moving, realtime image, and a “picture test” in which the image is old, still, and two-dimensional, is good. :thumbs_up

 

In humans, the ability to pass the mirror test occurs at about 18 months age, while the ability to pass the “picture test” doesn’t until about 24 months.

 

Reading about the subject, I discovered a theory published in 2003 by Phileppe Rochat called “the five levels of self-awareness”, which can be used to distinguish between the traits required to pass the mirror test and the “picture test”. Here’s a summary of the 5 levels, taken from their Wikipedia article section:

• Level 0: Confusion. At this level the individual has a degree of zero self-awareness. This person is unaware of any mirror reflection or the mirror itself. They perceive the mirror as an extension of their environment. Level 0 can also be displayed when an adult frightens themselves in a mirror mistaking their own reflection as another person just for a second.
• Level 1: Differentiation. The individual realizes the mirror is able to reflect things. They see that what is in the mirror is different from what is surrounding them. At this level one can differentiate between their own movement in the mirror and the movement of the surrounding environment.
• Level 2: Situation. At this point an individual can link the movements on the mirror to what is perceived within their own body. This is the first hint of self-exploration on a projected surface where what is visualized on the mirror is special to the self.
• Level 3: Identification. The individual finds out that recognition takes effect. One can now see that what’s in the mirror is not another person but it is actually themselves. It is seen when a child refers to them self while looking in the mirror instead of referring to the mirror while referring to themselves. They have now identified self
• Level 4: Permanence. Once an individual reaches this level they can identify the self beyond the present mirror imagery. They are able to identify the self in previous pictures looking different or younger. A "permanent self" is now experienced.
• Level 5: Self-consciousness or "meta" self-awareness. At this level not only is the self seen from a first person view but its realized that it’s also seen from a third person’s view. They begin to understand they can be in the mind of others. For instance, how they are seen from a public standpoint.

In this scheme, passing the mirror test shows level 3 self-awareness, passing the “picture test”, level 4.

 

What I suspect is going on here (and, with some research, could be shown from brain images such as via fMRI or PET) is that several distinct brain systems are involved, in different combinations, with passing the mirror test vs the picture test. Neither test can be passed unless the subject has a “‘me’ containing” mental model (more commonly called a self-model). The picture test can’t be passed unless the subject has “permanence” (level 4)

 

I don’t think what’s added to the perceptual abilities of a child acquiring level 4 is a memory ability, like the ability to remember reproduce patterns and follow paths, nor a more sophisticated self-model, but a more self-recognition ability. That is, the subject doesn’t, upon seeing a picture of themself, remember “this was once me, so still is me”, nor use a model of the external world that contains special “pictures of me” objects, but is able to match the image against a mental template of “me-ness”. I think that this “me-ness” template is similar to other templates, such as the “table-ness” template that allows us to identify small, large, rectangular, round, 3 or 4-legged tables as the same class of object, being special mainly in that the individual must have a self-model, – a “me category” – which not all individuals have, to which the template can apply, while table-ness, potato-ness, “that which will earn me a food reward-ness” and other category templates can be had by individuals without a self-model.

 

In short, the key difference between the mirror test and the picture test is that the mirror test, provides more and stronger ways to match the me-ness template, so is easier. A typical 18 month old child has a self model, but their me-ness template, while able to match a 3-dimensional, moving image, is unable to match the fewer, weaker clues provided by a picture.

 

I wasn’t able to find any research involving the “picture test” with non-human animals.

 

To me, it means that this kind of recognition is about anticipating a move, because the first time a move is made, it is impossible to recognize its own one: it is only when we decide to voluntarily make one after a while that we can recognize it, and what we recognize is then what we intended to do, thus what we imagined, not so what we are doing.

I don’t think this is true. Do you have links to any experiment showing that the first time a move is made, it is impossible to recognize it as ones own?

 

Which raises the question of how imagination works exactly. How is it that we can prepare things in our head before doing them, and apart from recognition, what is the use for such a cognitive capacity?

...

To me, conscience is about being able to anticipate a change, thus to be able to produce it in the brain before executing it, which is a very uncertain property.

I think the “preparing” you’re describing, is what psychologists usually call “foresight” or “planning ahead”.

 

There appear to be fewer animals with this ability than ones that can pass the mirror test, animals that can pass the mirror test but not a planning test, and animals that can pass a planning test but not the mirror test, but most animals that can pass the planning test can also pass the mirror test.

 

This leads me to think the abilities are related, but not identical. Some “conscious” animals can’t plan, and some non-conscious ones can, but the animals best at planning – apes, including humans – are mirror-test-passing conscious.

 

Planning test are more complicated and produce less certain outcomes than the mirror test, and AFAIK have been performed on fewer species.

 

Source (http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060518_planfrm.htm)

 

An interesting observation from that article, by Thomas Suddendor (2006), which agrees references in the Wikipedia article:

Amnesiacs “who are unable to answer simple questions about yesterday have been found to be equally unable to say what might happen tomorrow,” he wrote. “Children begin to accurately answer both such questions from around the same age. Imagining future events and remembering past events are associated with similar brain activity.”

According to the Wikipedia article, this observation, and brain imaging support it, was considered a “top scientific breakthrough of 2007”.

 

I suspect that remembering the past, planning the future, and recognizing oneself in a picture, are all features of Level 4 self awareness described in Rochat’s theory.

 

Also interesting is that damage to the hyppocampus brain structure appears to impair or destroy a humans remembering and planning ability, but not their mirror-test-passing ability.

[LeRepteux]

At level 1, if the individual is able to "differentiate between its own movement in the mirror and the movement of the surrounding environment", to me, it means that he is already able to recognize its own movement.

 

At level 2, he is able to "link the movements on the mirror to what is perceived within its own body", so to me, it means that he is able to link two different perceptions, but not that "what is visualized on the mirror is special to the self", because it was already so at level 1. For instance if the individual had only one kind of perception, like sight for instance, I think that he would nevertheless be able to recognize himself in a mirror if he was human.

 

To me, it makes sense to link recognition to motion, because brain is meant to search for food and avoid predators. If we can recognize what we see on a picture, it is only because it is useful to survival, thus useful to move. This is why I try to link conscience to motion, which is about change and resisting to change. If we throw a ball, it will change its direction and speed, but the ball will also simultaneously resist to that change. Change is linked to resistance, both come together, and consciousness is linked to animal life, which is about motion, thus also about change, which comes with resistance.

 

In our brain, we have two ways of doing things: consciously and subconsciously. Our automatisms can work subconsciously until a change is perceived, then we become conscious of what is happening to be able to adapt to the change. But how would the brain be able to adapt to a change if it knows nothing about it? To me, it seems impossible that it could change its automatisms without the help from chance. This is why I suggest that it is provided with a random process to do so, and here comes into consideration the planning process that you are talking about.

 

To change something randomly in our head and to be able to survive for real like we do, we have to be provided with a checking process similar to the natural selection of species. This way, when a change works for an individual, it can be adopted by others if it is also useful to them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but as we can observe, in the long run, its better for survival than relying only on automatisms. Fundamentally, expecting that something new will work is planning that it won't hurt, and we can do so by proceeding with small steps instead of risking our lives all the time.

 

This way, planning for a longer period of time only takes more memory thus more conscience of the future, which means that it is more risky since it is fundamentally about proceeding randomly, and that uncertainty about the future increases with time. Isn't it what we observe with the climate change?

Edited November 29, 2014 by LeRepteux

[Poppins]

Consciousness is about being conscious of the same thing, otherwise it would not be useful. When we agree on an idea, it means that we have the same, thus that we are conscious of the same thing, which might be useful to both of us if it is right. In that sense, we don't have to agree, but it might be profitable if we do. Do you agree?

 

I don't think that it would be profitable (monetarily? ideologically?) to agree on this subject. My stance is clear, consciousness is not unique to humans and the only way that I am able to test consciousness is by looking at how it relates to grammaticality. I look at the technical aspect of whether the mind can be calculated in an acquisition device. Having creating programs that respond to input with relevance, and have (in my mind) passed the Turing test, I think that I have a pretty good idea of how consciousness works. It's a hierarchical. unitary, emergent property of unconscious thought and knowledge.

Edited December 1, 2014 by Poppins

[LeRepteux]

To me, consciousness is also universal since its the result of resisting to change and that change is universal. If we accelerate a body, it resists to that change immediately. The difference with human brain is that it can introduce delays in the expression of its resistance, it can absorb a change without showing any resistance, and respond to that change years later. But showing resistance and feeling it is two different things, and human brain feels resistance the same way bodies do: immediately. To me, our consciousness is due to our neurons resisting to a change in their frequency, and since we know that we can be conscious without external change, it means that mind can create artificial change in its own thoughts.

[Poppins]

To me, consciousness is also universal since its the result of resisting to change and that change is universal. If we accelerate a body, it resists to that change immediately. The difference with human brain is that it can introduce delays in the expression of its resistance, it can absorb a change without showing any resistance, and respond to that change years later. But showing resistance and feeling it is two different things, and human brain feels resistance the same way bodies do: immediately. To me, our consciousness is due to our neurons resisting to a change in their frequency, and since we know that we can be conscious without external change, it means that mind can create artificial change in its own thoughts.

I agree. Consciousness (knowledge) is probably not fixed, but it does seem to be very redundant.

 

You might be interested in this video. Can Brain Explain Mind?: Daniel Dennett

Edited December 1, 2014 by Poppins

[ErlyRisa]

In the world of cloud computing...who is to say that any of us are conscience anyway?

 

eg. If what I remember was my breakfast was toast...and I didn't take an Iphone shot of it to tell the world, than how is anyone conscience of me ever having breakfast today?

 

ie. I am not going to remmember this breakfast today in 5 years time: So in effect this moment is actually a coma state. The only way for me to be able to access the coma that I am in today in 5 years time is to record it in a medium that I can access one day b/c my mind (conscience) is actuall completely and utterly unreliable. : I may aswell be dead or in the cloud.

 

welcome to the new world.

 

 

....now, now that I do have all of my breakfasts stored in the cloud, and there are other entities breakfasts stored thier ...we are probably having brunch in another life and I don't even know it.

[LeRepteux]

 In other words, why do we feel pain? What is pain? Is this consciousness?

We feel pain because it is useful to immediate survival, thus to our own continuity: this is one kind of consciousness. The other one has to do with what we plan when we imagine pain instead of feeling it, which is useful to the changes that we anticipate, thus long term survival. The difference between the two is time: the time to wait and see or to react immediately. Their sameness is change: the change that we feel immediately or that we may feel if it happens. We thus have two kinds of consciousness: one for reality now and one for a speculative future. When we trust our conscience to guide us through life, what are we trusting exactly?

Edited December 2, 2014 by LeRepteux

[LeRepteux]

I agree. Consciousness (knowledge) is probably not fixed, but it does seem to be very redundant.

Knowledge is now, but consciousness is also about future knowledge, which is never determined in advance.

 

You might be interested in this video. Can Brain Explain Mind?: Daniel Dennett

Dennet's description of brain activity, with neurons trying to get more importance than others, is close to mine. What is different is that he does not explicitly say that this functioning can produce randomness. To me, neurons act like us when we vote: they rely on the information from precedent neurons to fire. For an election, since everybody has a certain degree of uncertainty, the result of relying on other's opinion to vote wanders from left to right randomly from election to election. For mind, since there is always a certain degree of imprecision in each neuron, the result of letting them wander for a while can produce randomness, which might result in a good or a bad idea depending on the state of our environment when we present this idea to others.

Edited December 2, 2014 by LeRepteux

[Super Polymath]

Perception is a function of electrons in the synapses between neurons. These electrons could quite literally be galactic superclusters, with stars nebula, little alien life forms, & everything. Could you imagine how quickly galaxies fade & are remade cyclically in the atomic world for galactic superclusters to move as quickly as micro-electricity in the brain does? Holy shhh

Edited May 20, 2017 by Super Polymath

[A-wal]

Perception is a function of electrons in the synapses between neurons.

How does that give rise to awareness?

[mrg]

> If I understood what you were saying, brain waves have the capability

> to amplify or concentrate, diffract, refract and reflect, correct?

 

Brain waves are simply the electrical reflection of the firing of neurons, indicating a sort of system synchronization.   The brain has multiple neural processors, operating in parallel -- it's called the "pandaemonium" architecture.  Consciousness occurs when one of the modules, in competition with the others, acquires access to a global cortical neural network that sends its message to all the other "daemons" involved -- it's indicated by what's called a "P3" wave in an EEG scan.   Stanislaus Dehaene's excellent CONSCIOUSNESS & THE BRAIN discusses this in detail, including his interesting experiments.

[Super Polymath]

How does that give rise to awareness?

It allows for the formation of the 5 senses, is responsible for the system of cognition, & for the continuity of consciousness.