Continuing the countdown, Day 3 (of 10). Topic: Modern and fascinating ideas about the brain for us all to discuss. How likely is each idea to be true? And if true, what are the implications?
Brain idea 8: Of all the brain's functions, consciousness is one of the trickiest to study. In part, because we don't even know how to define what it is. Progress is happening around measuring levels of consciousness by combining complexity-based measures of EEG recorded brain activity (derived from physics), following noninvasive brain stimulation (TMS). These consciousness meters predict not only changes in consciousness level when we are awake versus asleep, but also which coma patients are 'locked in'. They also suggest that certain substances enhance consciousness.
The friendly version:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1031776/the-hunt-for-hidden-signs-of-consciousness-in-unreachable-patients/
The deeper dive:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejn.15800
@NicoleCRust it is IMO an unreachable topic. I like to hear about what motivates people to describe their work as consciousness research given the heavy implications of that (and given that frequently other topic headings could fit it just as well).
Do any of you remember when Francis Crick did his book tour, and he ended his talk with an enthusiastic slide that read something like
!!! CONSCIOUSNESS NOW !!!
His talk included the claim that it was a moment, much like the time of DNA, when understanding consciousness was at hand. Around 1994. Crick and Koch were the chatGPT of that era.
You might both be too young to have seen any of this.
@wandell @NicoleCRust I guess that was the time of a formal search for the *neural correlates of consciousness*? Though that is a different quest
@Neurograce @wandell
I like how @anilkseth breaks down this space: Consciousness level (what I was referring to above); Consciousness content (awareness; the NCC); Consciousness Self (the Cartesian theater; Free Will).
I think folks are still searching for the NCC? https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.22
And there's the fun story that Christoph Koch has until next June to find it or he loses a case of Bordeaux to Chalmers:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831830-300-consciousness-how-were-solving-a-mystery-bigger-than-our-minds/
@NicoleCRust @wandell @anilkseth looks like we will need to be very busy the next 6 months!
@NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth
It's indeed a frustrating topic to work on, especially given that people who have their own theories of consciousness are too fixated on them.
My point has been: instead of trying to study these old theories, we should follow new findings in neurobiology and try come up with novel ideas.
My own crappy way to use advances in neuroscience to develop a new view of consciousness was written up in this tics paper https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(20)30175-3
@jaanaru @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth cool theory!! Just out of curiosity, have u thought of any other possible substrates of consciousness beyong those slim elegant layer 5 pyramids.. 😉
@jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth
Thanks! I've been working on this annoying topic for 18 years so there are quite some, but fortunately enough I haven't tried to write up all the stupid ideas I have had!
However, if people keep on pushing the idea that LLMs are conscious then I might need to get back into business. Anyone else feel this way?
Anyway, I am in the bed with a high fever so I should really put the phone down. Stay safe and healthy, everyone!
@jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @PessoaBrain @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
Nicole, you started out asking about complexity measures of consciousness. Anyone interested in this has to absorb Scott Aaronson's critique of IIT: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
He shows that the IIT measure does not even come close to isolating what we think we mean when we separate the conscious from the unconscious. The punch line is:
"More generally, we can achieve pretty good information integration by hooking together logic gates according to any bipartite expander graph: that is, any graph with n vertices on each side, such that every k vertices on the left side are connected to at least min{(1+ε)k,n} vertices on the right side, for some constant ε>0. And it’s well-known how to create expander graphs whose degree (i.e., the number of edges incident to each vertex, or the number of wires coming out of each logic gate) is a constant, such as 3. One can do so either by plunking down edges at random, or (less trivially) by explicit constructions from algebra or combinatorics. And as indicated in the title of this post, I feel 100% confident in saying that the so-constructed expander graphs are not conscious! The brain might be an expander, but not every expander is a brain."
Tononi, to his credit or blame, is so committed to IIT that his response is yes, such an arrangement of logic gates is conscious. But I think that pretty much destroys any connection of what he calls consciousness to what the rest of us are referring to when we use that term.
I don't doubt that there is some sense in which conscious brains are functionally in more complex states than unconscious brains. And that it might be possible to characterize this difference in ways that are, say, clinically meaningful in identifying awareness in locked-in patients. I have no idea how effective any of the existing measures are at this, or how unique they are in being effective (if they are), or whether, if they do the job, they are about as simple as any criterion that could do the job can be. I don't even know if these questions have been asked. At any rate, these are practical issues.
But the idea that one proclaims a theory, writes down an expression for complexity and proclaims that is the alchemical formula for consciousness -- well, that's just silly. I think that completely misunderstands what a theory is.
I'll also add that I agree with several people above (@neurograce, @DrYohanJohn, probably others) that the "hard problem of consciousness" -- why do objective arrangements of matter create subjective experience -- is not a question science can answer. Science is a process of distilling out the objective, measurable, reproducible. It can tell us all about the structures of neural activity that enter consciousness and create its contents, the NCCs. Maybe when we understand this and get used to it the hard problem won't seem so interesting or bothersome. Maybe it will seem natural that *that* kind of neural activity enters conscious awareness. Maybe the mystery will seem to disappear. But all science can tell us about are the objective structures and their correlations with subjective experience. Not why cold dead matter organized intro energy-consuming, reproducing (living) entities can, in some cases, produce subjective awareness.
#neuroscience @cogneurophys
@TEG @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @PessoaBrain @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay are you saying scientists have to use their own first person subjectivity to study consciousness?
@Neurograce @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @PessoaBrain @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
Yeah, but really specifically for that "pure-qualia aspect", which I see as the tricky bit in terms of method. Where strictly first person subjectivity is precisely the object of study, then that has to be where you get part of your data from. (So not for, say, conceptually non-hard problems such as voluntary behaviour or self-reported perceptions.)
@kendmiller
@jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
Question for the group: is there a sense in which the "hard problem of consciousness" is similar to the problem of "life"? This one has clearly receded into the background, no elan vital needed.
To me it seems that the hard problem is a holdover from dualism. Biology in general seems to me about the "general problem of organization" and we seem to be constantly getting stuck at find "the exact level" (eg section in evolution is only possible at the individual level).
The problem of consciousness is of course interesting, much like the problem of life.
I don't think the term 'holdover' applies to dualism, inasmuch as dualism is still a live answer to the HPOC. 'Life' doesn't necessarily raise the same issues as consciousness because the observed properties of 'life' fit within a materialist framing (life is just stuff moving) while phenomenal consciousness does not seem to belong the the same ontological category (just like mathematics doesn't seem fit in a materialist ontology).
@tmoldwin Haha not for everyone apparently :) (in terms of materialism framing)
@PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
I think there are a lot of similarities in these debates. One common problem, in my view, is that while "life" and "consciousness" are nouns describing *properties*, they're sometimes discussed as if they are somehow things that a system possesses (or not), as opposed to ways that a system operates...
@PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
As in Chalmers' p-zombies - the exact same as you and me, but with "consciousness" somehow removed (like it's an extra thing that can be there or not, as opposed to a descriptor of a mode of operation)
The thought experiment on zombies works only if you already assume a metaphysics of consciousness. Basically: introspect your qualia right now. Now imagine THAT getting sucked out of your zombie twin. But what is the THAT? Answering that question already is taking a stand on the main issue. But until you answer it in a specific way, the thought experiment doesn’t get off the ground. And the way you have to answer it to make a problem hard is already begging questions about consciousness. My empirical question is this: psychologically what is going on when you introspect THAT? The most empirically plausible answer is one that makes many of the conundrums go away. @LeslieKay @WiringtheBrain @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @PessoaBrain @jaanaru @anilkseth @wandell @jiahongbo @jerlich @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @kendmiller
Even without p-zombies, there are still questions about consciousness that scientific methods are unable to probe.
For example, when we test if someone has locked-in syndrome, we use responsivity to questions or cues in order to correlate brain signals. But there is nothing logically impossible about forms of awareness sans responsivity.
@attninaction
@LeslieKay @WiringtheBrain @ShahabBakht @PessoaBrain @jaanaru @anilkseth @wandell @jiahongbo @jerlich @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @kendmiller
I guess that claim depends on what you mean by *awareness* and *responsivity*. The THAT mentioned in my post is something that is not theoretically innocent, but is interpreted in concrete ways in unvarnished appeals to awareness by every theorist, including me. That’s when things become unclear from the get go. There’s no agreed upon conception of conscious awareness. For example if you mean ordinary seeing can exist without responding by moving, sure. But that’s an actuality. My preference is just to use ordinary perceptual verbs when speaking of awareness. Much is clear then. @jerlich @LeslieKay @wandell @anilkseth @NicoleCRust @kendmiller @WiringtheBrain @jiahongbo @PessoaBrain @ShahabBakht @Neurograce @DrYohanJohn @jaanaru
Okay. How do ordinary verbs help you decide whether a person is in an unconscious coma vs locked-in syndrome? Imagine you don't have access to any brain scanning tech. Then what do you do? Then imagine future brain scanning tech that is more sensitive than what we have now.
A related issue: how can we definitively claim that there is no subjectivity associated with dreamless sleep? Perhaps only memory is disrupted?
@DrYohanJohn ordinary verbs just help formulation of clear claims. I think the studies aiming to show intentional behavior in vegetative state patients can provide good evidence of their being aware in the sense of hearing instructions. But if one wanted to entertain a case where there’s no such evidence except some activity as detected by whatever imaging modality we can imagine and then asked whether said entity was aware in some sense, what would “awareness” mean there as identifying a biological phenomenon? There’s no ordinary sense of awareness that would make much sense of that scenario, well maybe dreaming. Barring that, at that point, our metaphysics comes into play to formulate these edge cases. I’m not saying there aren’t hard problems in the ordinary sense of hard! But I think things went off the rail when we let philosophers talk about HARD problems.
But work through the locked-in case. How can the mere lack of access to a device determine whether someone is conscious or not?
Here is where pure instrumentalism (inherent in scientific methodology) seems to break down, in my opinion. Which is why I think we should simultaneously admit that the hard problem is worth asking, and that scientists can't answer it.
"How can the mere lack of access to a device determine whether someone is conscious or not?"
I didn't make such a claim. The claim was that (good) evidence of behavior is sufficient for evidence of awareness in the sense that the patient heard your instructions, in the ordinary category of hearing.
But now walk back from *that* case. With that as a starting point, it is now intelligible to consider a case just like *that* but where the agent is not able to move their body in anyway. This is where the mental actions of the Owens study on VS patients is a helpful data point: they tried to show evidence of intentional imagination in their patients, mental versus bodily action.
But walk back from that: could there be someone who couldn't even do *that* (mental actions), that is not act in any sense, yet be conscious?
At this point, this question now depends on each person's understanding of "awareness" as a term of art. And some of those understandings do not, I think, lead to good questions (the traditional philosophical problematic).
@WiringtheBrain @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
It's an interesting idea that "consciousness" may be required for humans as a "system" to "operate". The trouble is each of the quoted terms are very open to different definitions. It's even hard to define "life". I certainly don't think life and consciousness are synonymous (i.e. bacteria are usually considered "alive" but seldom considered "conscious" but pretty much any definition).
Despite this ambiguity, I really like the idea you imply that we should move towards more functional conceptualisations of these terms. One neat advantage of this is it may aid in better interrogation of the phenomena.
@WiringtheBrain
Man I think you're on the right track again!
Tell PUP that even though they didn't like my book I can write a blurb in your book, that way I can get it faster!
@kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
@ShahabBakht @jerlich @kendmiller @Neurograce @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust @jiahongbo @WiringtheBrain @wandell @PessoaBrain @LeslieKay @jaanaru @anilkseth I think one thing that is missing here is how much the phenomenon/problem has been defined by introspective measurement when we’ve given introspection a free pass, accepting people’s report without working up the data. This has changed with work on meta cognition but that’s a narrow form of introspection that glances at much of the traditional phenomena. So many of the problems we have start with a Cartesian attitude towards the introspective data. If we begin with what is introspectively reliable, most of the issues regarding phenomenal consciousness are addressed in standard experimental cognitive neuroscience. If we start there the world of consciousness looks much more tractable. Again, see an entry by Wu in SEP (The Neuroscience of Consciousness) a philosopher who sees much more hope in clarity, once the empirical questions are better defined.
@attninaction @ShahabBakht @jerlich @kendmiller @Neurograce @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust @jiahongbo @WiringtheBrain @wandell @PessoaBrain @LeslieKay @jaanaru @anilkseth "The Neuroscience of Consciousness" should be a blank page.
@attninaction @ShahabBakht @jerlich @kendmiller @Neurograce @DrYohanJohn @NicoleCRust @jiahongbo @WiringtheBrain @wandell @PessoaBrain @LeslieKay @jaanaru @anilkseth as the late, great Eric Schwartz used to say, any such theory is blah blah blah followed by "and then a miracle happens"
Hehe... I borrowed the "c-word" term from The Schwartz. :)
@DrYohanJohn nice! do you still have that poster you made of his list of fallacies in computational neuroscience? I'd love to share it with some folks
I have the pdfs. Was planning to turn it into a thread and a blog post. I can email them to you.
I also turned his pentagon of neuroscience into a blog post.
@DrYohanJohn yes pls Johan! tony@complexionsoftware.com
@skarthik @DrYohanJohn Karthik, omg so good to hear from you!
Hi Tony! Long long time, great to hear from you too!
@skarthik @DrYohanJohn I trust your research has been progressing "excrementally" Karthik! 😂
@skarthik @DrYohanJohn yeah the best thing I've done since then is to go into software engineering, where we use Slack & Giphy to communicate. So many quips, so little time!
@PessoaBrain I certainly see the analogy and I can hope we are simply a paradigm shift away. However I feel the analogous path of resolve for consciousness is illusionism. Essentially with life we said "oh there's not really something magic here, it's just molecules following the normal laws of physics" and illusionists say something similar about consciousness. The reason that doesn't land is that the *only* thing I'm certain of is I have subjective experience.
Like Grace points out, subjective experience is a critical defender against radical illusionism, and personally I'm partial to radical empiricism: take subjective data seriously.
The illusion is imo not about C as such, but how C presents itself to us (in terms of C).
The data for how C/Mind self-organises, the process of 'moving' (inference/flow/dynamics) and the space in which they move, should have some invariant motif across individuals/systems.
@PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
Pat Churchland argues that the two problems are similar.
The Hornswaggle Problem. J of Consc Studies 1996.
"holdover from dualism": there's a lot of appeal to the idea that "nothing like this (gesturing at one's favorite scientific explanations) is going to explain "what it's like"". That idea can be construed as a *premise* in Descartes (Discourse 5).
@PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
Imo the holdover from Dualism is just a reflection of the limits of the current scientific paradigm. Indeed a problem of organisation and the problem of movement/change is intimately related.
The issue is imo mainly the difficulty of obtaining data for C equivalent to observable physical signals for life: How does the mind self-organise & adaptively move?
@PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn
@ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
It seems to me that every biological theory of consciousness has a common element. A critical amount of cortical activity has to synchronize. That won't solve the "hard" problem but are we that far away from the "easy" problem? Do we need to solve the hard problem? Isn't worrying about subjective experience a little narcissistic?
@ekmiller @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
with all due respect, synchronization is not a common element of theories of consciousness.
I did my PhD on these issues with Wolf Singer and Lucia Melloni. The evidence for synchrony is overrated.
It's ok if we disagree here, I simply wanted to add this note so that younger people would know that there is actually no such consensus.
For a ref, see the section "gamma synchrony" here https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.22
@jaanaru @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
I didn't say "gamma synchrony" of even rhythmic synchrony per se. But whether it is the High-Order theories of consciousness, the Global Workspace Theory, Recurrent/Predictive models, or IIT, they all say the same thing: Consciousness depends on "metarepresentations" that stretch across cortex.
@ekmiller @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
Thanks! I guess it is always good to clarify the terms (surely you'd agree that synchronization in your initial post could have been seen as referring to rhythmic synchrony).
And while we're at it, there is also no need to assume that cortex must be the key to consciousness. :)
Thanks for the discussion!
@jaanaru @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
I was trying to avoid "integration" because it is associated with IIT. It may not be gamma synchrony and it may not be straightforward but my bet is that rhythmic synchrony will be key.
@ekmiller @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
Btw I can completely understand where you are coming from with this bet: I bet my PhD on this idea ... I went specifically to work with Singer and Melloni to nail this.
After that, I've been much more skeptical.
@jaanaru @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
The more we learn about cognition, the more rhythmic it looks. It may not be straightforward but I suspect consciousness will be the same.
@kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @PessoaBrain @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay
I used to see a fundamental gap between the scientific method and the ability to study the pure-qualia aspect of consciousness, but if we take objectivity to mean intersubjectively demonstrable, then it's merely unknown, not methodologically excluded. Scientists can systematically assess their consciousness relative to, e.g., neuroscientific data and analyze.