Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness (A perspective)

steve001

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At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences.

One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness.

He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.
In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.

Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.

Beyond the mystics

Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness.

Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.

It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.

No longer the sole purview of philosophers and mystics, consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists from across a variety of different fields, each, it seems, with their own theories about what consciousness is and how it arises from the brain.
In many religions, consciousness is closely tied to the ancient notion of the soul, the idea that in each of us, there exists an immaterial essence that survives death and perhaps even predates birth. It was believed that the soul was what allowed us to think and feel, remember and reason.

Our personality, our individuality and our humanity were all believed to originate from the soul.

Nowadays, these things are generally attributed to physical processes in the brain, but exactly how chemical and electrical signals between trillions of brain cells called neurons are transformed into thoughts, emotions and a sense of self is still unknown.

"Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what's in the brain and consciousness," says David Chalmers, a philosophy professor and Director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. "The question is what kind of explanation that will give you. We want more than correlation, we want explanation -- how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That's the big mystery."

Just accept it
Chalmers is best known for distinguishing between the 'easy' problems of consciousness and the 'hard' problem.

The easy problems are those that deal with functions and behaviors associated with consciousness and include questions such as these: How does perception occur? How does the brain bind different kinds of sensory information together to produce the illusion of a seamless experience?

"Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences," Chalmers says.

The hard problem for Chalmers is that of subjective experience.

"You have a different kind of experience -- a different quality of experience -- when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate," Chalmers told LiveScience. "Whenever you're conscious, whenever you have a subjective experience, it feels like something."

According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is an irreducible aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass.

"Those things in a way didn't need to evolve," said Chalmers. "They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along."

Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to something else, Chalmers believes consciousness should simply be taken for granted, the way that space and time and mass are in physics. According to this view, a theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about this idea, however.

'Not very helpful'

"It's not very helpful," said Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University.

"You can't do very much with it," Greenfield points out. "It's the last resort, because what can you possibly do with that idea? You can't prove it or disprove it, and you can't test it. It doesn't offer an explanation, or any enlightenment, or any answers about why people feel the way they feel."

Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists -- most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague Christof Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech -- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain.

Important for Greenfield's theory is a distinction between 'consciousness' and 'mind,' terms that she says many of her colleagues use interchangeably, but which she believes are two entirely different concepts.

"You talk about losing your mind or blowing your mind or being out of your mind, but those things don't necessarily entail a loss of consciousness," Greenfield said in a telephone interview. "Similarly, when you lose your consciousness, when you go to sleep at night or when you're anesthetized, you don't really think that you're really going to be losing your mind."

Like the wetness of water

According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique.

But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.

For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.

Mind and consciousness are connected in Greenfield's theory because the strength of a conscious experience is determined by the mind and the strength of its existing neuronal connections -- connections forged from past experiences.

Part of the mystery and excitement about consciousness is that scientists don't know what form the final answer will take.

"If I said to you I'd solved the hard problem, you wouldn't be able to guess whether it would be a formula, a model, a sensation, or a drug," said Greenfield. "What would I be giving you?"
http://www.livescience.com/366-great-minds-grasp-consciousness.html
 
For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus -- either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory -- triggers a chain
reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.
I look forward to the day when psi phenomena like remote viewing are indeed proven (as I believe they will be). Because then all theories of brain generated consciousness will be required to account for stimulus that causes brains to perceive objects, events, or thoughts that occur remotely (in the past and or future) with no local input from the 5 senses.

Cheers,
Bill
 
I look forward to the day when psi phenomena like remote viewing are indeed proven (as I believe they will be). Because then all theories of brain generated consciousness will be required to account for stimulus that causes brains to perceive objects, events, or thoughts that occur remotely (in the past and or future) with no local input from the 5 senses.

Cheers,
Bill
Now that's a hard problem to solve.
 
But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of -- that is, they emerge from -- the actions of individual molecules.

Consciousness being emergent in the way liquidity is emergent was, IMO, successfully countered by Strawson in 'Realistic Monism':

You can get liquidity from non-liquid molecules as easily as you can get a cricket team from eleven things that are not cricket teams. In God’s physics, it would have to be just as plain how you get experiential phenomena from wholly non-experiential phenomena. But this is what boggles the human mind. We have, once again, no difficulty with the idea that liquid phenomena (which are wholly P phenomena) are emergent properties of wholly non-liquid phenomena (which are wholly P phenomena). But when we return to the case of experience, and look for an analogy of the right size or momentousness, as it were, it seems that we can’t make do with things like liquidity, where we move wholly within a completely conceptually homogeneous (non-heterogeneous) set of notions. We need an analogy on a wholly different scale if we are to get any imaginative grip on the supposed move from the non-experiential to the experiential.

Also, summary of Strawson's position at Quantum Mind

The liquidity of water is a common example of emergence. The individual atoms or molecules do not have the property of liquidity, but a sufficient number of molecules at an appropriate temperature do have this property. However, this emergence can be explained in terms of, or reduced to, the charges on the molecules.

From this he argues that any emergent phenomena, denoted here as ‘Y’, is wholly dependent on what it emerges from, denoted here as ‘X’. All features of ‘Y’ need to be capable of being traced back to ‘X’. In fact, if this is not the case, ‘Y’ could not be described as emergent. It is pointed out that such total dependence is true of the liquidity of water example.

Strawson suggests that the idea of something emerging from something to which its features could not be traced back only gained currency because it was the only way of reconciling physicalism with non-experiental matter when discussing consciousness. He also argues that if we are prepared to accept a physics violation such as the experiental arising out of the non-experiental, we are saying that physical laws or even mathematical rules do not hold universally.

Strawson rebuts the claim that his theory is a revival of the debunked nineteenth century idea of ‘vitalism’. He argues that we cannot draw a parallel between the problem of life and the problem of experience. Life reduces to physics via chemistry, and there is no need for further explanation, or invoking anything experiental, to understand how an organism as such survives. He also claims that seventeenth and eighteenth century thinking had no problem with the idea of life, but did already have a problem with subjective experience.
 
So let's get this right - great minds stumble over consciousness, while lesser minds can't see what the fuss is!

Dare I ask what your approach to consciousness is?

David
 
I think when the same guy who wants to get the magic out of consciousness discussions is telling us puppets possess consciousness, it's clear you have a group of people who want to reduce the characteristics of consciousness to fit into a tidy materialist box.

Strawson mentions this opportunistic reductionism in the aforementioned Realistic Monism - Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism:

Dennett conceals this move by looking-glassing the word ‘consciousness’ (his term for experience) and then insisting that he does believe that consciousness exists (to looking- glass a term is to use a term in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means — see Strawson, 2005). As far as I can understand them, Dretske, Tye, Lycan and Reyare among those who do the same.It seems that they still dream of giving a reductive analysis of the experiential in non-experiential terms.This, however, amounts to denying the existence of experience, because the nature of (real) experience can no more be specified in wholly non-experiential terms than the nature of the (real) non-experiential can be specified in wholly experiential terms.
 
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