Is there something special about human beings that enables us to think, see, hear, feel, and fall in love? Something that gives us a desire to be good, a love of beauty, and a longing for something beyond? Or are all these capacities just the products of a complicated mechanism inside our bodies? In other words, am I just a machine? And could the machines what we create then also one day do all those things and more? In other words, could there be machine consciousness (MC) or artificial consciousness (AC)? If there could, we may have some kind of moral responsibility for our creations. We may also find that their existence changes our views of our own consciousness.
Ever since the Ancient Greeks, the idea that we are machines has existed. In the seventeenth century, Descartes argued that the human body was a mechanism but that no mechanism alone was capable of speech and rational thought – for that, res cogitans or thinking-stuff was needed.
Among those who rejected his dualism was Gottfried von Leibniz who came up with his famous allegory of the mill. Imagine a machine whose construction enabled it to think, feel, and perceive. Imagine, then, that the machine were enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that we could go inside it, like entering a windmill. Inside we would find only pieces working upon one another and never anything to explain the perception. From this he concluded that to explain perception, we must look to a simple substance rather than to the workings of a machine, which can never have the unity that consciousness does. Similarly as the mill, if we now look inside our brain, we can see the cogs and beams and walls that make the brain so, but not anything that seems to give us consciousness.
Nowadays, with all we know of our anatomy and psychology, the question is not so much ‘Am I a machine?’ but ‘What kind of machine am I?’, and, for our purposes here, ‘Where do “I” fit in?’ and ‘Where does consciousness fit in?’ These answers we can seek in both biological research or try to mimic it using artificial intelligence.
In biology, science has successively explained more and more of the mechanisms of perception, learning, memory, and thinking, and in so doing has only amplified the ancient open question about consciousness. That is, when all these abilities have been fully explained, will consciousness be accounted for too, or still be left out?
From the artificial direction, better machines have been developed, leading to the obvious question of whether they are conscious already, or whether they could be one day. If machines could do all the things we do, just as well as we do them, would they be conscious? How could we tell? Would they really be conscious, or just zombies simulating consciousness? Would they truly really understand what they said and read and did, or would they just be acting as if they understood? Is there a difference? We arrive at the same question that echoes through the whole book – is there something extra that is left out?
From the fourth century BC the Greeks made elaborate marionettes, and later complete automatic theatres, with moving birds, insects, and people, all worked by strings and falling-weight motors. These machines mimicked living things in the sense that they moved like them, but it was not until much later that the idea of thinking machines became possible.
During the eighteenth century, automata became immensely popular, with the most famous including a flute-playing boy, a duck with a digestive system, and the earliest chess-playing machine, the ‘Turk’. Automata continued to fascinate and frighten, and in 1818, Mary Shelley captured this fear in her novel about Frankenstein’s monster. But soon the technology began to be used for more scientific purposes.
Now there was a lot of development with small machines, most of which you already know from previous courses, so I’m not going to go over all of them. If you want to read about it, check pages 305-307. I’m just going to skip to the development of AI.
Although computers rapidly became faster, smaller, and more flexible, initial attempts to create AI depended on a human programmer writing programs that told the machine what to do using algorithms that processed information according to explicitly encoded rules. This is now referred to – usually by its critics – as GOFAI (pronounced ‘goofy’), or ‘Good Old-Fashioned AI’. So, realistically looking, these machines were far from conscious. One problem for GOFAI is that human users treat the processed information as symbolising things in the world, but these symbols are not grounded in the real world for the computer itself. So for example, a computer might calculate the stresses and strains on a bridge, but it would not know or care anything about bridges; it might just as well be computing stock-market fluctuations or the spread of a deadly virus. Similarly, it might print out plausible replies to typed questions without having a clue about what it was doing. Because such machines merely manipulate symbols according to formal rules, this traditional approach is also called rule-and-symbol AI. It’s like a three year old kid shouting ‘f*ck the monarchy’ every time it sees a picture of the royal family – not because it understands what it means but because it heard its father say it all the time.
Searle had a theory with two versions: ‘Strong AI’ and ‘Weak AI’. According to Strong AI, a computer running the right program would be intelligent and have a mind just as we do. There is nothing more to having a mind than running the right program. According to Weak AI, computers can simulate the mind and simulate thinking, deciding, and so on, but they can never create real mind, real intentionality, real intelligence, or real consciousness, only as-if consciousness. This is like a meteorologist’s computer that may simulate storms and blizzards but will never start blowing out heaps of snow.
The 1980s saw the bloom of ‘connectionism’, a new approach based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) and parallel distributed processing. Part of the motivation was to model the human brain more closely, although even ANNs from the twenty-first century are extremely simple compared with human brain cells. The many types of network include recurrent, associative, multilayered, and self-organising. The big difference from GOFAI is that ANNs are not programmed: they are trained. To take a simple example, imagine looking at photographs of people and deciding whether they are male or female. Humans can do this easily (although not with 100% accuracy) but cannot explain how they do it. So we cannot use introspection to teach a machine what to do. With an ANN, we don’t need to. In supervised learning, the system can be shown a series of photographs and for each one produces an output: male or female. If this is wrong, the synaptic weights are adjusted and the network is shown the next, and so on. Although it begins by making random responses, a trained network can correctly discriminate new faces, as well as ones it has seen before.
ANNs are useful for many purposes, including recognising handwriting, controlling robots, mining data, forecasting market fluctuations, and filtering spam, and may soon be used in many more applications like self-driving cars. The connectionist–computational debates continue, but so does the gradual movement from understanding cognition as manipulation of static symbols towards treating it as a continuous dynamical system that cannot be easily broken down into discrete states.
The machines described so far are all disembodied, confined inside boxes and interacting with the world only through humans. When first put to work, controlling robots could, at most, carry out only a few simple, well- specified tasks in highly controlled environments, such as in special block worlds in which they had to avoid or move the blocks. This approach seemed sensible at the time because it was based on an implicit model of mind that was similarly disembodied. It assumed the need for accurate representations of the world, manipulated by rules, without the messiness of arms, legs, and real physical problems. We might contrast this with a child learning to walk. She is not taught the rules of walking; she just gets up, falls over, tries again, bumps into the coffee table, and eventually walks. By the same token, a child learning to talk is not taught the rules either; in the early days she pieces together fragments of sounds she hears and gestures she sees, parses words wrong, and eventually makes herself understood.
The connectionist approach is far more realistic than GOFAI, but still leaves out something important. Perhaps it matters that the child has wobbly legs, that the ground is not flat, and that there are real obstacles in the way, and not a specialised lab environment.
Andy Clark tried to put brain, body, and world together again. ‘Fortunately for us’, he said, ‘human minds are not old-fashioned CPUs trapped in immutable and increasingly feeble corporeal shells. Instead, they are the surprisingly plastic minds of profoundly embodied agents’. What he means by ‘profoundly embodied’ is that every aspect of our mental functioning depends on our intimate connection with the world we live in. Our ‘supersized’ minds and our powers of perception, learning, imagination, thinking, and language are all created by brains interacting with bodies and their environments, both physical and social.
This view of the real world is a lot easier that many we’ve had so far. It provides the very constraints and feedback that make perception, intelligence, and consciousness possible. Human intelligence is not just ‘recognition intelligence’: it is about using understanding to make autonomous real-time decisions. Creating machines this way means constructing real, physical, autonomous agents that move about in the real world, working from the bottom up rather than the top down. There is no point in a driverless car recognising a white van slowing down quickly unless it can assess the current situation and take evasive action. This approach is sometimes called situated robotics, or behaviour-based (as opposed to knowledge-based) robotics.
Traditional AI assumed that intelligence is all about manipulating representations, yet experiments have shown this doesn’t have to be the case. For instance, Rodney Brooks and his colleagues at MIT spent many years building robots with no internal representations. Brooks’s ‘creatures’ can wander about in complex environments such as offices or labs full of people and carry out tasks such as collecting rubbish. They have several control layers, each carrying out a simple task in response to the environment. These are built on top of each other as needed and have limited connections enabling one layer to suppress or inhibit another. This is referred to as ‘subsumption architecture’ because one layer can subsume the activity of another. Brooks’s robot Allen, for example, had three layers:
Correction signals operated between all three. Such a creature’s overall behaviour looks intelligent to an observer but, says Brooks, ‘It is only the observer of the Creature who imputes a central representation or central control. The Creature itself has none; it is a collection of competing behaviours’. There are many other theories like this.
All this is highly relevant to understanding consciousness. Along with GOFAI goes the idea that conscious experiences are mental models or inner representations of the world. Although intuitively plausible, this idea is problematic. For example, it is not clear how a mental model can be an experience, nor why some mental models are conscious while most are not.
Doing away with representations may solve some problems, but it raises others. In particular, the nonrepresentational approach has difficulties dealing with experiences that are not driven by continuous interaction with the outside world, such as reasoning, imagining, and dreaming. On representational theories, it is easy to think that when you dream of drowning in huge waves, your brain is constructing representations of sea, water, and waves, and simulating death; but if there are no representations, what could it be doing?
Turing asked himself the question, ‘can machine think?’ To figure this out, he proposed a test for a machine to see if it thought like humans do. Turing chose something particular in manner of testing for his test: whether a computer could hold a conversation with a human.
First he described ‘the imitation game’, which was already a popular parlour game. The object of this game is for an interrogator or judge (C) to decide which of two people is a woman. The man (A) and the woman (B) are in another room so that C cannot see them or hear their voices and can only communicate by asking questions and receiving typed replies. A and B both try to reply as a woman would, so C’s skill lies in asking the right questions. Turing goes on: ‘We now ask the question, ‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?’ Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ‘Can machines think?’
Turing provides a critique of his own test. He points out that it neatly separates the intellectual and physical capacities of a person and prevents beauty or strength from winning the day. On the other hand, it may be too heavily weighted against the machine. A human pretending to be a machine would always fail if tested on arithmetic, and he wonders whether this test is unfair because machines might be able to do something that ought to be described as thinking but that is very different from what a human does. He concludes, though, that if any machine could play the game satisfactorily, we need not be troubled by this objection.
In other words, is there (or could there ever be) ‘something it is like to be’ a machine? Could there be a world of experience for the machine? What we really mean to ask is whether an artificial machine could be conscious; whether we could make a conscious machine. This question is much more difficult than the already difficult question posed by Turing. When he asked ‘Can a machine think?’, he could cut through arguments about definitions by setting an objective test for thinking. This just doesn’t work for consciousness. Many people have a strong intuition that there is nothing arbitrary about it. Either the machine really does feel, really does have experiences, and really does suffer joy and pain, or it does not. This intuition may, of course, be quite wrong, but it stands in the way of dismissing the question ‘Can machines be conscious?’ as merely a matter of definition. Second, there is no obvious equivalent of the Turing test for consciousness. If we agree that consciousness is subjective, then the only one who can know whether a given machine is conscious is the machine itself, and so there is no sense in looking for an objective test.
The problem becomes clearer if you try to invent a test. An enthusiastic robotbuilder might, for example, suggest that her machine would count as conscious if it cried when pricked, replied ‘yes’ when asked whether it was conscious, or pleaded with people not to turn it off. But the sceptic would say, ‘It’s only got to have an audio recording and a few simple sensors inside it. It’s only pretending to be conscious. It’s a zombie behaving as if it’s conscious’, with which we are back to the zombie/zimbo discussion.
Given these difficulties, it might seem impossible to make any progress with the question of machine consciousness, but we should not give up so easily. We may be sure that better and cleverer machines will continue to be built, and that people will keep arguing about whether they are conscious.
There are several plausible – and not so plausible – ways to argue that machines could never be conscious. Here are the main objections;
Searle proposed the Chinese Room as a refutation of Strong AI – that is, the claim that implementing the right program is all that is needed for understanding. It is most often used to discuss intentionality and meaning with respect to AI.
‘Suppose that you are locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore that you know absolutely no Chinese, either written or spoken. Inside this room, you have a lot of Chinese ‘squiggles’ and ‘squoggles’, together with a rule book in English. People outside the room pass in two batches of Chinese writing which are, unbeknownst to you, a story, in Chinese of course, and some questions about the story. The rule book tells you which squiggles and which squoggles to use to send back in response to which ‘questions’. After a while you get so good at following the instructions that from the point of view of someone outside the room your ‘answers’ are as good as those of a native Chinese speaker. Then, the outsiders give you a story and questions in English, which you answers these just as a native English speaker would – because you are a native English speaker. So your answers in both cases are indistinguishable. But there is a crucial difference. In the case of the English stories, you really understand them. In the case of the Chinese stories, you understand nothing.’
So here we have you, locked in you room, acting just like a computer running its program. You have inputs and outputs, and the rule book to manipulate the symbols, but you do not understand the Chinese stories. The moral of the tale is this: a computer running a program about Chinese stories understands nothing of those stories, whether in English or Chinese or any other language, because you have everything a computer has, and you do not understand Chinese.
I’m not going to go over the responses to this story because just as the Mary or zombie thing, there is no solution to it. Just think about it, I suppose.
Suppose that humans have some magic ingredient ‘X’, by virtue of which they are really conscious. If we wanted to make a conscious machine, we might then proceed by finding out what X is and putting it into a machine, or we might build a machine in such a way that X would naturally emerge. The machine would then, theoretically at least, be conscious.
AI researcher Igor Aleksander tackles phenomenology ‘as the sense of self in a perceptual world’ and starts from his own introspection to break this down into five key components or axioms He then uses these as criteria for a conscious machine. These components have spanned many theories and they are:
When Tamagotchis hit the playgrounds in the mid-1990s, children all over the world starting caring for mindless little virtual animals, portrayed on tiny, low- resolution screens in little hand-held plastic boxes. These young carers took time to ‘wash’ and ‘feed’ their virtual pets, and cried when they ‘died’. But as quickly as the hype caught on, it also vanished again.
The Tamagotchi had thrived on children’s caring natures, but then largely fizzled out, perhaps because the target hosts quickly became immune to such a simple trick. More recently, people have got just as hooked on using their phones to find and fight battles with 3D animals lurking in real environments, with stories of players falling off cliffs and wandering into former concentration camps in search of the Pokémon GO creatures. We humans seem to adopt the intentional stance towards other people, animals, toys, machines, and digital entities on the flimsiest of pretexts. This tactic of attributing mental states to other systems can be valuable for understanding or interacting appropriately with them, but is not an accurate guide to how those other systems really work. For example, consider the wall-following robots whose useful behaviour emerged from a couple of sensors and some inherent bias. Or consider the equally simple robots that can gather pucks into heaps. They roam around with a shovel-like collector on the front which either scoops up any pucks they bump into or drops them when it has too many. In consequence, after some time, the pucks are all collected into piles. Observers readily assume that the robots are ‘trying’ to gather up the pucks. In reality, the robots have no goals, no plans, no knowledge of when they have succeeded, and no internal representations of anything at all.
So does it like you? The harsh truth is; probably not. It probably doesn’t even realise you exist.
Introduction to ConsciousnessHi!
This book is subdivided into six parts, each with 3 corresponding chapters. Here is an overview of the components;
Consciousness, or consciousness, is a confusing concept. This book is therefore not made to resolve this confusion - in fact, it will make the probable worse.
The majority of this confusion is caused by the fact that there is no fixed sense of explanation for the concept of "consciousness," despite the many attempts made by philosophy and science. Consciousness can be used as a sign of unconsciousness, but also as the concept of understanding science of something. In other words, words fall short for this concept.
Moreover, the study of consciousness is a relatively young branch of science and therefore not much is known. This book tries to teach you to take a different look at the world around you. As you read this, you are probably so aware that you are aware of the world around you, but is that so? When are you really aware? What are you currently aware of?
Chapter 1: What is the Problem?The problem of awareness is related to a few of the well-known philosophical questions. Why do we exist? What is the world made of? Who of what am I? Do I think I am actually doing that?
Over the last century, people have only become comfortable using the term "consciousness" and it is no longer always synonymous with the mind. We know how the brain works and how things develop, how the body reacts to drugs and alcohol and sadness - and yet we are not a step further to a definition for consciousness.
What it always seems to come down to is a kind of philosophical twofold. Are we our body of our thoughts, Are we subjective of objective? We come down to a sort of dichotomy, and the question of consciousness is spiritual is simply a scientific phenomenon that we cannot yet explain.
You can think about things or so many different ways, and that is then only your subjective experience. For example, think of a dog you are stroking - the fur, the warmth that the animal radiates, etc. And then think of the same dog, but now it is waiting for you at a distance. The same animal, two very different images.
For years, philosophy has been arguing about the concept of consciousness, and you can roughly divide their opinion into monism and dualism. Most people therefore agree with dualism, which says that there is a distinction between your body and the "self" (also known as the mind, the consciousness). However, nobody knows for sure where this separation is and what it is. (This entire book would be a lot shorter if we knew that.)
An example of a dualist is René Descartes, the creator of the well-known "I think, so I exist." Descartes had a theory, indeed that the body and soul were made of two different materials, and that the soul was made of something that was not physically tangible. This is called substantive dualism.
The big problem with this kind of dualism is the contact between the two substances. It must be an interactive connection, but there is no point in the body that seems to be present. Descartes claimed that this occurred in the pineal gland, but that was later caused incorrectly. Most voices agree that substantive dualism therefore does not work.
Gilbert
.....read more Chapter 2: What is it like ...?In 1974, Thomas Nagel came up with the question, "What is it like to be a bat?" He meant that wondering how a mental state is caused if neurons are not the same as understanding how water is H2O. Our consciousness and our subjectivity stand in the way of that concept.
If you compare a stone and a cat, you will quickly say that the stone has no consciousness and the cat does. This is because there are no experiences or forms to a stone. But there is something that makes a cat a cat, a kind of being a cat. So if you say that another organism is a consciousness, you are actually saying that there is a species for that organism.
So, Nagel's definition of consciousness is whether you can ask the question, "What is it like ..." There are some snags in this definition, but as long as you are not trying to be smart and take it out of context, you are on the right track.
Imagine that you are a bat. Bats are very different from humans - they use echolocation, and their ears are much more important than their eyes. As a human being, it is very difficult to imagine what that is like. Bats don't see depth, can you imagine what that is like?
But even if you could turn yourself into a bat and back, even then you wouldn't know what it's like to be a bat, since bats don't speak a language and aren't concerned with philosophical questions.
A distinction is therefore made between P consciousness (phenomenal consciousness) and A consciousness (access consciousness). The P consciousness is the function that makes it a being to be something, and the A consciousness is the presence to think and act.
You would think that we are only talking about P consciousness in this book, but that is not the case. Reporting and realizing everything that you are aware of is also very important. Just think how you would describe colors or life, for example. You can report it, but there will always be a bit more, a bit of consciousness. This is an example of a combination between the two types of consciousness.
This distinction is also regularly rejected, and some philosophers believe that there is only P consciousness, while others only believe that there is A consciousness. Does this sound familiar? Jupp, it is very similar to dualism and monism, huh?
But if there is something to be a bat, then there is also something to be you. Use
.....read more Chapter 3: The Grand IllusionIn the past two chapters you have hopefully become a little doubtful about your own interpretation of the world. Often we cannot fully trust our own ideas about consciousness, or we do not have the right tools to substantiate it.
It can be pretty scary to realize that you cannot trust your own experiences, and if you go too deep it can throw you in a deep dark hole. However, it can also feel very liberating for some.
The point is, sometimes the existence of consciousness can seem like an illusion. Remember that an illusion does not mean that there is nothing - an illusion means that there is something that seems something else. (Example: a barking dog is an illusion of aggressiveness - however, it is not aggressive but scared.)
In the context of consciousness, it is important not to forget this definition. When we say the consciousness is but an illusion, we mean to say that in fact, it is something else that hasn’t been explained yet.
A good example of illusions are the visual ‘optical illusions’ that we all know. Our brain create an image that isn’t actually there, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing. What is there are the things that create the illusion, and our brain makes something else out of it.
Vision, can be argued, is our primary sense. If two senses are competing (such as seeing someone say something and hearing something else) – vision wins most of the time. Our language is littered with visual allegories too, such as ‘I see what you mean’.
That doesn’t mean that vision is never wrong, however – cue the optical illusions. Just like our thoughts and experience, vision can sometimes betray us and show us something that isn’t there, or leave out something that is.
It’s hard to imagine not seeing if you have seen all your life. It’s such a basic thing that, just like breathing, you are not consciously aware of doing it most of the time. But now try to focus on seeing. Look around, close your eyes and open them again. Do you see one picture? Do you see loose elements combined into one? Do you see everything or just a little bit at a time? Do you notice anything you didn’t see before?
It’s weird how these questions focus your awareness, huh? This oddity is what caused the term ‘grand illusion’ to arise. Vision can be
.....read more Chapter 4: Neuroscience and consciousnessIf you could look right inside a brain and see everything that was happening there, would you then understand consciousness? That is what this chapter opens with.
And yes, some would say yes. Materialists and identity theories would agree that, of you could see and understand everything of the brain, then the problem of consciousness would be solved entirely. However, any of the theorists that believe that consciousness is something extended, something other would disagree. Because after all, the mind, the soul is something that isn’t physical, so how could examining the brain help with understanding it?
Noë is one of these people, who says ‘you are not your brain’. We always have tried to look at consciousness as something inside the brain but what if it isn’t there? What if it is somewhere else in the body, or even outside of it? You wouldn’t find it by studying matter and neural connections. This is what is the called the fallacy of neurocentrism – believing that everything happens inside the brain.
Then, there are also the mysterians, who seem to believe that there is never a way to understand consciousness and many would also say that we are not meant to understand it. They, too, would thus disagree that examining the brain would help not in the slightest bit when it comes to understanding the consciousness. Some other mysterians also simply believe that at this point in time and technology, we will never understand conscious, but maybe in the future we might.
Interesting is that nobody flat out said that the brain has nothing to do with consciousness, they just disagree on what extend it does. The naked eye doesn’t reveal much about that big grey lump in our heads, however, attaching some electrodes or looking at a slice through a microscope helps a lot.
It’s said to be one of the most complex things in the universe, holding over 80 billion neurons and trillions of neural connection. You can understand why it is hard to grasp everything that the brain does. But those neural connections don’t end with the brain. They are also spread out over the entire body, and with the spinal cord together form the Central Nervous System (CNS).
Quick recap of the brain:
Chapter 5: the Theatre of the Mind‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.’
These are the words of Hume , the beginning of the 18th century. It stems back from the days op Plato and his allegory of the cave. If you don’t know the allegory, look it up on YouTube, there are some pretty good videos on it.
But Hume did usher a word of caution, not to let the theatre mislead us. The idea of a theatre is very simplistic, while in reality, the mind is a very complex, fluent thing.
If asked where they think they are located, most people answer somewhere in their head or their heart. Most people (about 83%) conceive themselves as ‘the I that perceives’, often located in their head near the eyes.
Most people also feel like their mind is a space, where sensory experiences come and pass, a place where things and thoughts are viewed by the mind. This is exactly like the Cartesian theatre. And while it may feel like that big open space, Daniel Dennett (He’s back people!) argues, like many other theorists, that this space and the mind in that sense of the allegory, do not exist.
The Cartesian look of things is simple. Many materialists still search for that one place where consciousness arises – the Cartesian Theatre – and thus still hold onto a dualist pattern of thinking, where the consciousness has to arise from a single specific place.
Being a Cartesian materialist (CM) has become some type of word for abuse. It implies you cannot pick sides, or are unconsciously not very convinced of your own point. In other words, it’s not very nice.
CM is everywhere if you just look, in common phrases such as ‘snap into consciousness’ or the idea that something happens outside of the consciousness. This chapter examines the evidence of whether or not a theatre of the mind is possible.
The biggest question thus far asked is, ‘where the hell is our consciousness located then?’ If you, very attentively, reach out and touch you nose, where do you sit in your theatre and experience
.....read more Chapter 6: The unity of consciousnessIf there is one thing that has not been questioned yet, it is that our consciousness is one thing and certainly not made up out of many parts.
From an outsiders point of view, this seems like a rather illogical assumption. The brain for instance, is made of many parts and processes, all running and functioning simultaneously, without ever having to come together. The same goes for the body. So why not for the consciousness?
It is proven that different processes in the brain and body work at different speeds and cues. This means there isn’t a focal point where they all start or finish. Seeing as we cannot find on specific place the consciousness is housed or located, it would almost make sense to consider that the consciousness might be made of many parts as well.
However, if you stop looking from a biological point of view, you might see where this conscious unity is coming from. After all, you only experience one ‘me’, and the only point your consciousness can ever find itself in is the present. We only see one world around us, not different parts of sound and vision and touch. Thus, a question arises;
How can such unity, experienced right now, arise from such diversity of non-instantaneous processing?
When stating it like that, dualism will look like a very nice, promising option. Dualism, after all, states that there is one, coherent mind that governs consciousness and is completely separate from those neuro-biological processes in the body. There, problem solved.
Many philosophers, such as Descartes and Poppers, chose this solution. As did Benjamin Libet, who proposed to take a part of a person’s cortex from the brain and keep it artificially alive. If his theory was right, then electrical stimulation of the piece of brain should, through central mental fields, provide a sensation with the owner of the brain, and thus prove consciousness is a mental field. (It failed.)
So yeah, like proven in previous chapters, though seeming to hold the answers, dualism seems to run into more trouble than the answers that it offers. Including dualism, there seem to be three options to the unity of consciousness;
Doesn’t it seem like the three options every consciousness issue ever offers? That’s right, because they are. These are the three things always to consider when dealing with a consciousness problem.
.....read more Chapter 7: AttentionMany philosophers are still in disagreement of whether the concept of attention is a real thing or not. The very familiarity of the concept of attention can make it hard to think about clearly, but perhaps we should start with how it feels. The metaphor of the ‘spotlight of attention’ comes easily to mind because paying attention feels this way – like directing a light on some things and not others. Perhaps it feels as though attention makes things or thoughts brighter, more prominent, or more focused.
Attention feels like something extra. Hamilton, for instance, described it as, ‘Attention is like concentrated consciousness.’ It feels like the intensity of things increase when you focus attention on them.
And while we shouldn’t thing of attention’s metaphors – such as the spotlight – as something real, experiments have found that the metaphor of ‘lighting up’ has an almost realistic equivalent: a real attentional ‘spotlighting’ effect in visual perception. Participants kept their eyes fixated on the fovea, where spatial resolution is highest, and were shown textures in the periphery, where it is much lower. When they attended to the textures, they could more easily distinguish them. It was as though their spatial resolution had improved. Crucially, in tasks where enhanced resolution actually makes the task harder, the same effect was found for focused attention too: participants’ performance got worse. Later experiments found that the same effect for brightness, contrast, and colour saturation, but not for differences in hue. It seems that, as in James’s notion of focalisation and concentration, attention actually increases the spatial resolution of what we see. It may also change visual and other sensory experience in different ways depending on context, so it seems that attention can qualitatively shape the kinds of conscious experiences we have – even if, as James also pointed out, we know how to adjust for these effects so we are not misled into thinking the light actually just got brighter.
The image of the spotlight of attention is well known, but perhaps, looking at your own experience, there might be a couple of different metaphors applicable too. This is one way for what we call ‘first-person practice’ to relate to consciousness and one reason why we ask you to devote time and energy to the ‘exercises’ suggested in each chapter: we cannot hope to understand consciousness in general unless we are familiar with our own personal version of it. And the idea of ‘paying careful attention to experience’
.....read more Chapter 8: Conscious vs UnconsciousThe ‘power of the unconscious’ is a common phrase reflecting the popular notion that our minds are divided in two, conscious and the unconscious. We are either urged to unleash our unconscious potential or listen to what bubbles up in us, but we also learned to overrule our animal instincts and emotions with reason thanks to our conscious mind.
We link the conscious and the unconscious to mind and body: we often think as the conscious processes as mental ones (I’ve given it much thought) and the unconscious processes as embodied (I have a gut feeling)
The division of the mind can be traced back to ancient Egypt about sleep and dream and early Hindu texts. Plato also gave the soul three parts: Reason, Spirit, Appetite, all with their own goals and abilities.
Gradually this shifted from parts of mind to mechanisms and distinct types of processing within one brain. This can be traced back to Helm-Holtz’s idea of ‘unconscious inference’, to William James’s distinction between associative and true reasoning. Most theories suggest that one process is fast, automatic, inflexible, effortless and dependent on context, while the other is slow, effortful, controlled, flexible, requires working memory and independent of context. This has been rediscovered and reinvented time after time, the distinction is common because it is valid.
The question is this – what could the difference between conscious and unconscious processes be?
For this we will consider first perception, then action and finally how perception and action and conscious and unconscious may converge in the phenomena of intuition and creativity.
Simple everyday phenomenon, like only noticing the humming of a microwave when it stops, seem odd because it suggests perception without consciousness. You unconsciously hear the sound. The phenomena of unconscious perception have been known since the very early days of psychology. Whenever there is a talk of automatic behaviour, unconscious processed or subliminal effects, there is an implicit comparison with conscious processes, yet those remain entirely unexplained. In early experiments, conscious perception was defined in terms of what people said: if we say we are conscious or unconscious of something, then (unless deliberately lying) we are. Yet this is problematic in some ways:
One problem is that whether people say they have consciously seen (or felt or heard) something depends on how cautious that are being. This became clearer with the signal detection theory.
This requires tow variables to explain how people detect things like sounds, flashes of
.....read more Chapter 9: Agency and free willIf you think back to the things you do and the movements you make, there is often a disconnect between the build up and the actual action. Think of it like waking up and it is freezing, but you are under the covers and there it’s warm.
The question James asks us in this scenario, is, how on earth do we get up, under these circumstances? Where does the will to get up and go about your day come from? It might involve a long process of convincing yourself of sticking a leg out of the covers, then removing them, then getting up, but other days, you blink, and you find that you miraculously just got up, without any conscious decision to do so. (Exercise 1) This is example of the oddity that is free will.
The problem of free will may be the most-discussed philosophical problem of all time and we can date is back to as far as the Ancient Greek philosophers two thousand years ago. The basic question is whether or not we are free to choose our actions and make decisions, and for us and this book, it is whether consciousness has any role to play in our acting freely or feeling the things we do.
Many religions bear the concept of free will, as well as the consequences of the actions that you make out of free will. Christianity has Heaven and Hell, in the Islam people are judged by the Almighty Allah. And when asked then what it is that made these choices, most religions point to the soul as the one with the free will. A form of consciousness then.
There are two main problems. For free will, the biggest problem is determinism: if this universe runs by deterministic laws, then everything that happens must be inevitable, so the argument goes, and if everything is inevitable, there is no room for free will. And without free will, there isn’t a point to doing anything, because there was no other way things could have gone.
The problem for the belief of absence of free will is moral responsibility: if I am not truly free to choose my actions, then how can I be held morally or legally responsible for them?
This is where the connections with self and consciousness come in. Because after all, we tend to believe that ‘I’ am the one who acts, the one who has free will. ‘I’ am the one who (un)consciously decided to spring out of bed early this morning. When the chosen action then happens, it seems as though my conscious thought was responsible.
And it’s true that it seems that without the conscious thought, you would
.....read more Chapter 10: Evolution and animal mindsHumans are animals, so questions about consciousness of the human can also be related to the rest of the animal kingdom. This chapter will introduce the basic of evolutionary theory as a foundation on which to ask about the evolution of consciousness in different species.
What is mindless design?
When we see obvious signs of design, we readily infer a designer. This, in essence, is the argument of design by reverend William Paley in 1802. He supposed that he found either a stone or a watch. For the stone he concluded it had always been there, but for the watch he concluded it must have a maker. Every bit and piece constructed to fulfil its purpose. He could not see how these complex pieces could have come together by accident, nor the effect of natural forces. He thought it self-evident that ‘there can’t be design without designer; contrivance without contriver; order, without choice’.
With animals and their specific and complex designs of anatomy and behaviour, it must indicate there is a designer, in which this argument become evidence for the existence of god.
Paley’s ideas were wrong. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins said there are more than just two options – accident and or conscious design. There is a third, that was not able to be explained in Paley’s time, but was clear by Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution.
Evolution means gradual change and living things might, in general sense, change. The fossil world suggested gradual change in living forms and this demanded explanation. What was missing was the mechanism of how evolution works. Darwin came with the answer, natural selection. Over a longer period of time, creatures vary and if there sometimes is a severe struggle for life, then some variation must occur in structure or habit that is advantageous to a creature. The individuals with this new characteristic will survive and produce off spring with that same characteristic. If you have Variation, Selection, and Heredity, you must get evolution.
Natural selection isn’t the only force in evolution. Together with mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, sexual selection, and layers of self-organisation from the molecular level upwards, it explains how design appears natural without designed.
What is directed evolution?
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck agreed with Darwin. He believed that if an animal used a particular faculty to change itself, the effect would be passed on to their offspring. This suggested evolution is progressive and directional, with species inevitably change over time. Darwin’s scheme suggested no thing as progress. This vastly created a tree
Chapter 11: The function of consciousness Evolutionary theory answers the ‘why’ questions in life. ‘Why do birds have wings?’ So they can fly. Then you can ask, why are we conscious?
Nikolas Humphrey thought we developed consciousness because it gave us a selective advantage. However, the link between consciousness and evolution is not that simple. The history of evolutionary psychology contains multiple scientists with different beliefs about its origin.
Charles Darwin wrote evolutionary psychology (E.P.) would settle as a respected field in biology. Nevertheless, Williams argued that the human mind couldn’t be defined solely by the mutations of genes. This opposition introduced ‘sociobiology’, a field which has been ridiculed repeatedly. Sociobiology has similarities well as as differences with evolutionary psychology, listed in the table below:
Similarities between sociobiology and evolutionary psychology | Differences between sociobiology and evolutionary psychology |
Exploration of human sexual behaviour and preferences | The understanding of the construction of the human mind |
Differences in ability and aptitudes between sexes | E.P. believes we behave the way we do because of our genes and environment |
Social gender roles | Sociobiology treats human behaviour as adaptions |
Assumption of the presence of human nature |
|
The problem with the ‘adaption’ theory, according the evolutionary psychologists is that we have a different origin (first humans in Africa) which we have to take into account when judging these adaptions (sugar for hunter-gatherers even though it causes obesity now, food cravings by pregnant women even though we are well-fed now). Steven Pinker debated that we also developed certain tastes and traits, because it made us more desirable to produce offspring.
Along the way humans grew a sense of morality, but where did this come from? Some believe it was provided by a God, others think it is a product of our consciousness. What is clear is that we can trace the origin of morality to our ancestors, namely the preservation of your own genes (family as well as racial) and the theory of reciprocity. This reciprocal altruïsm is believed to be the source of sympathy, trust and justice.
According to evolutionary theory, our consciousness should serve a function. However, we can argue whether it has a function at all, and if so, what it
.....read more Chapter 12: Evolution of the MachinesIs there something special about human beings that enables us to think, see, hear, feel, and fall in love? Something that gives us a desire to be good, a love of beauty, and a longing for something beyond? Or are all these capacities just the products of a complicated mechanism inside our bodies? In other words, am I just a machine? And could the machines what we create then also one day do all those things and more? In other words, could there be machine consciousness (MC) or artificial consciousness (AC)? If there could, we may have some kind of moral responsibility for our creations. We may also find that their existence changes our views of our own consciousness.
Ever since the Ancient Greeks, the idea that we are machines has existed. In the seventeenth century, Descartes argued that the human body was a mechanism but that no mechanism alone was capable of speech and rational thought – for that, res cogitans or thinking-stuff was needed.
Among those who rejected his dualism was Gottfried von Leibniz who came up with his famous allegory of the mill. Imagine a machine whose construction enabled it to think, feel, and perceive. Imagine, then, that the machine were enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that we could go inside it, like entering a windmill. Inside we would find only pieces working upon one another and never anything to explain the perception. From this he concluded that to explain perception, we must look to a simple substance rather than to the workings of a machine, which can never have the unity that consciousness does. Similarly as the mill, if we now look inside our brain, we can see the cogs and beams and walls that make the brain so, but not anything that seems to give us consciousness.
Nowadays, with all we know of our anatomy and psychology, the question is not so much ‘Am I a machine?’ but ‘What kind of machine am I?’, and, for our purposes here, ‘Where do “I” fit in?’ and ‘Where does consciousness fit in?’ These answers we can seek in both biological research or try to mimic it using artificial intelligence.
In biology, science has successively explained more and more of the mechanisms of perception, learning, memory, and thinking, and in so doing has only amplified the ancient open question about consciousness. That is, when all these
.....read more Chapter 13: Altered states of ConsciousnessJames, at some point, said the following; ‘Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question.’
James’s ‘other forms of consciousness’ would now be called ‘altered states of consciousness’ or ASCs – a concept that seems simple but is notoriously difficult to define. I get drunk and so feel and act differently; I recover from depression and wonder how life could ever have felt so unliveable; I feel like a calmer person on the meditation mat. In all these cases, something has obviously changed, but what? As soon as we start to think more deeply about altered states of consciousness, the problems begin.
You can define ASCs;
Chapter 14: Reality and ImaginationIn everyday life, we discriminate ‘real’ from ‘imagined’ all the time without noticing the skill involved. That is, we distinguish our own thoughts from what we assume to be a public reality independent of those thoughts – a skill called reality monitoring or reality discrimination. Experiments in which people are asked to see or hear some stimuli, and to imagine others, show that many different features can be used for the purpose of discrimination, including how stable, detailed, or vivid the experiences are, and whether they can be voluntarily controlled. One study presented participants with either complete or incomplete well-known word pairs and tested how well they remembered which words were actually presented and which needed completing imaginatively: visual presentation resulted in better reality monitoring than auditory presentation, and speaking the words out loud worked better than internally verbalising (‘thinking’ about) them.
Distinguishing memories of events that really happened from events we have only imagined is particularly difficult, and its failure results in false memories – that is, convincing ‘memories’ of events that never actually happened. These can be created when we tell the same story many times, with slight variations, and then remember the last version we told. The latest version retroactively interferes with the original memory. False memories can also be created when a family story keeps being told or a photograph from childhood convinces you that you can remember that day on the beach. And they can have lasting effects on behaviour.
It is super important to make the distinction between real and imagined. False memories are most problematic when people ‘remember’ sexual abuse that never happened or identify suspects they never saw. There have been tragic cases in which therapists allegedly recovered repressed memories of sexual abuse under hypnosis and convinced their patients that the events really happened when they did not.
Real memories tend to be more detailed and more easily brought to mind than false memories. Sometimes real memories can be identified because we can put them in context with other events or remember when and how they happened – a skill called source monitoring. This is not important for learning skills and facts. For example, you may reliably and correctly remember the speed of light, the capital of Germany, and the name of the man next door, without needing to remember when or where you learned them, but for autobiographical memory the context is important. If the memory of an event in your life is detailed and plausible, and fits with other events in time and place, then you are more likely
.....read more Chapter 15: Dreaming and BeyondHave you ever had that you were dreaming and you realised you were? And then a lady passes by in your dream and you really don’t like her dog, and when you blink, the dog changes? No? Just me then?
This is an example of a lucid dream: a dream in which you know during the dream that you are dreaming. This ability to ‘wake up’ inside a dream while staying asleep prompts all sorts of interesting questions about sleep, dreams, and ‘altered states’ of consciousness. What does it mean to say that I ‘wake up’ or ‘become conscious’ in a lucid dream? Aren’t you conscious in ordinary dreams? What are dreams anyway? Are they experiences or only stories constructed on waking up?
When we sleep, we all go through a cycle of three states: waking, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and non-REM sleep, a typical night’s sleep consisting of four or five cycles between non-REM and REM sleep. These waking and sleep states are defined by physiological and behavioural measures, including how easily the person can be awakened, their eye movements and muscle tone (the degree of passive contraction in the muscle fibres), and their brain activity as measured by either EEG or scans. In REM sleep, the brain is highly active and the EEG resembles that of waking, although paradoxically, the sleeper is harder to wake up than during non-REM sleep. Even in non-REM sleep, the overall firing rate of neurons is as high as in waking states, but the pattern is quite different, with the EEG dominated by long, slow waves rather than complex, fast ones.
The neural systems and physiology of sleep has been well studies and generally considered to be well understood. During sleep, parts of the brain are isolated in different ways and to different extents. Blocking of sensory input happens at the thalamocortical level in nonREM sleep and at the periphery in REM sleep. In REM sleep, the brain stem blocks motor commands at the level of spinal motor neurons so that whatever is going on in motor cortex does not result in physical activity. This means you can dream of climbing out of the window onto the roof, but your legs won’t let you do it – although these protective mechanisms can break down briefly in sleepwalking, and are overactive in sleep paralysis.
.....read more Chapter 16: Egos, bundles and theories of the selfWho is reading this book? Who is conscious of the writing on the page, the attempt to understand and answer the question, or the sounds of revelry in the next room? Questions about the nature of consciousness are intimately bound up with those about the nature of self because it seems as though there must be someone having the experience: that there cannot be experiences without an experiencer. Our experiencing self seems to be at the centre of everything we are aware of at a given time, and to be continuous from one moment to the next. In other words, it seems to have both unity and continuity.
In everyday language, we talk constantly about our ‘self’. It seems that we not only think of this self as a single thing but give it all sorts of attributes and capabilities. In ordinary usage, the self is the subject of our experiences, who carries out actions and makes decisions, a unique personality, and the source of desires, opinions, hopes, and fears. This self is ‘me’; it is the reason why anything matters in ‘my’ life. But where or what is this ‘me’? Are you ready to question everything you know boys and girls?
One way of escaping the problem might be to declare that I am my whole body, and there is no need for a self as well. This would be fine, except that most people don’t feel that way. We feel like something more than just the body.
That this apparently natural way of thinking about ourselves is problematic has been recognised for millennia. In the sixth century BC, the Buddha challenged contemporary thinking with his doctrine of anatta. This is often, perhaps inaccurately, translated as ‘no-self’, when really he was rejecting the common idea that we consist of a separate and continuous entity. Instead, he claimed that the self is just a name or label given to a collection of parts, in the way that we give the name ‘carriage’ to a set of parts – a suggestion that seems as hard to understand and accept today as it was then.
The central question is why it seems as though I am a single, continuous self who has conscious experiences. Possible answers can be divided into two major types. The first, ego theories, claims that it is true: there really is some kind of continuous self that is the subject of my experiences, that makes my decisions, and so on. The second, bundle theories, accepts that it seems this way but claims that really there is no underlying continuous and unitary self. The illusion that there is
.....read more Chapter 17: the View from WithinWhat do you discover when you look into your own mind? William James was confident: ‘Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness’, he said. But a hundred or so years later we might be inclined to raise a few awkward questions.
What does ‘looking’ mean? Who is looking into what? Does the looking itself change what is seen? Is there value in looking without reporting? Does reporting destroy what we are trying to describe? Can everything be reported when some experiences are supposed to be ineffable? How reliable are our judgements about our states of consciousness? Are states of consciousness even the kind of thing that reliable judgements can be made about? Do these questions ever end? God I hope so.
The study of consciousness is sometimes divided into two fundamentally different approaches: the objective third-person approach and the subjective first-person approach. Between these two there is sometimes added another: the second-person, or inter-subjective, approach. This approach is concerned with, but limited to, the development of empathy between people, the roles of mirror neurons, imitation, and joint attention in the relations between two people, and theories of intersubjectivity and how self is constructed through relationships with others and it will not be necessary for you to know this in order to understand the chapter.
Going back to the first two, there are two ways to discuss them; One concerns first-person versus third-person science; the other concerns first-person versus third-person methods.
There are at least three problems with the notion of a first-person science.
All these are arguments against a first-person science of consciousness, but none of them necessarily rules out a role for subjectivity, experiential work, or first-person methods in third-person science. There,
.....read more Chapter 18: Waking UpIntroduction
Siddharta Gautama, after 7 days of fasting under a pipal tree, became enlightened, he “woke up”. His message for the world was not to look in others, like himself, for truth, but to see it within oneself. He said “work out your own salvation with diligence”. This was where the Buddhism, as we know it, really came to life. Siddharta, later known as Buddha, proposed four truths:
Despite warning of tradition, Buddhism became a religion, first Theravada Buddhism in southern India, Ceylon and Burma, then Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet, Chan Buddhism in China, Zen Buddhism in Japan, and now Western Buddhism… in the west, obviously.
So, this final chapter of the book discusses the following: Can we change our consciousness? Buddhism is one discipline in which spiritual and scientific learning are among the most interweaved. Buddhism also finds a place in psychology more than any other religion. Since 1987, Dalai Lama has been engaging with western scientists, in 2005 held a speech at the biggest annual neuroscience congress.
So why do we like Buddhism so much? Maybe because there is no god or otherwise supreme creator, no indestructible human soul (only, Buddha is a bit like Jesus but less from outer space and more an idol that people strife to be like) and absolutely no duality! Also, Buddhism is almost empirical: If you do X, you will experience Y. Straightforward instructions, based on practice and experience.
Also, Buddha said: Everything is relative and interdependent, arising out of what came before, and giving rise to something new. This is like the scientific principle of cause-and-effect and that’s also applied to consciousness. What it comes down to is that there’s no consciousness without matter, sensations, perceptions, and actions that condition it.
Buddhism focuses on methods, not doctrines. It has none, and in addition thus
.....read more
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