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New Tool To Measure Consciousness
bmahersciwriter writes "The line between consciousness and non-consciousness is thin, hard to define and, as the Terri Schiavo case taught us, often rife with ethical quandaries. A research team is developing a tool that will be able to quantify just how conscious a person is, which could prove to be quite useful for research and clinical practices. From the article: 'The metric relies on the idea that consciousness involves widespread communication between different areas of the brain, with each region performing specialized functions. Loss of consciousness during sleep or anaesthesia, or from brain injury, may be caused by the disengagement of brain regions from one another.'"
To determine if you're eligible to vote. Or have kids. Or be allowed outside your cage.
congress
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
I wonder how long till my ATC (Average Time Conscious) shows up in my annual review...
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
Now we can fool around with those Tibetian monks who claim they can hear us when they're meditating. Yeah right...
Unless my memory is grossly faulty here, Schiavo was considered an atypically unambiguous case medically (with massive amounts of brain that just weren't present anymore, much less electrically active or not); but was a sordid story in messy family feuds being adopted by culture warriors, diagnosis-by-video being performed by histrionic congressmen, and whatnot.
A better understanding of the neurological correlates of consciousness would certainly be a welcome development; but it would never have saved that farce.
When the complexity of the mechanism falls below a certain threshold, it makes sense that consciousness is not generated/emerged/attached/whatever anymore. Fascinating research, and may be a first step into finding out what consciousness actually is (current state of research: nobody has a clue).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I wonder how us folks on the autism spectrum would measure,.. and how an individual's reading changes under different circumstances.
Consciousness is defined as, roughly, conscious personal experience. Nervous system-bearing organisms have it and tables don't.
The thing is, when considered as a phenomena itself, it's kind of weird.
It seems to inflict on some forms of matter (nervous systems) something non-corporeal and unnecessary. Newtons laws and QM don't need it to account for why anything at the particle level happens- we'd all be mouthing the same words, making the motions , living the same lives and generating the same collective world history without it according the our best developed theories of matter energy and causation.
In theory, we could all be as mindless and devoid of consciousness as tables and from an outside observer's POV, nothing would change in our lives, our speech or all of human history.
But it's not like that.
We *know* we have conscious experience. Suppose you're a well adjusted modern scientist who doesn't busy himself with fanciful notions of non-corporeal "stuff" (a contradiction in terms , in fact). You';re a thorough-going materialist. What does the fact of conscious experience imply for you?
It implies that conscious experience is a fact about material, perhaps suitably organized. Beyond the fact that *that is just weird* a basic question is- what characteristics of material organization gives rise to it ? Are there degrees of it. Minsky asserted (Society of Mind) that thermostats have a primitive form of it (they react to their environment in a feedbacky kind of way). This is not a far out thought and in fact seems to be even a necessity for materialists.
The point is, here is a guy talking about consciousness as though he knew what it was, and now we're going to learn more about it. He's not unusual, this is staple fare.
As if. The fact that conscious experience exists and we're all very familiar with it and infer its presence all the time in, say , dogs and cats, shouldn't be taken to mean that we understand it in any significant way, and when I say "it" I don't mean the biological underpinnings of it, I mean it as a phenomena , possibly disconnected from any kind of system specific underpinnings we're familiar with.
It may just be a fact about the universe that exists independently of what we call personal experience, just the way energy or other abstract, yet real *things* exist independently of any particular form, at least so far as our best current theories go.
Just saying. People throw this term "consciousness" around as if they know what it referred to. They don't. It's a a very basic, almost too basic, mystery. Mystery is where science begins, and you should not let yourself be separated from that feeling of the mysterious, the "out of our current conceptual grasp", by the self assured conceits of your time.
We believe in the results of science because, ultimately, we trust some combination of our senses and our brain based experience we call "thinking". We believe this combination gives us knowledge of things which are not our brains, but have an independent reality. I believe this. But this knowledge comes to us through consciousness and not through some other avenue.
One of the uncomfortable implications of this is people who claim to have a certain kind of universal knowledge or experience revealed to them by "spiritual or mystical" experience through which they come to know that the universe is somehow conscious can't just be poo pooed away. Considered in a certain way, that poo pooing would be one part of the brain, one function, one way of knowing, declaring its fiefdom of consciousness and understanding to be the ultimate judge of the reality of the outside world as processed by any other part.
Just saying- you need to be skeptical and realize that not everything someone claims is that deep a claim.
possible knowledge states by all parts of the brain
Consciousness is what one experiences when the parts of the brain's network are communicating with one another, a classic network effect. Consciousness is one of the attributes of value a system gets by exercising its existence.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
An article in the Atlantic earlier this year discussed a technology apparently widely employed by hospitals to monitor whether patients are experiencing "interoperative awareness" during surgery: a Bispectral Index (BIS) monitor, which performs a electroencephalogram continuously during surgery and checks it against patterns thought to indicate conscious awareness. In early testing, it looked like it could detect most cases of interoperative awareness and was quickly adopted in hospitals from around 2004, but its reliability is now in question and the device, though still widely used, is controversial.
From TFA, it seems this system is aimed at understanding brain damage and not at preventing interoperative awareness. Unfortunately the article doesn't give enough detail to know if the new tool is also based on EEG (I can't access the original study through the paywall). But, if it is, and if it gives a better sense of what patients are aware of, maybe it will have some use in the operating room as well.
The decision of whether a person is alive or dead is not easily made since it is an area of "fuzzy" logic - like when is a person bald? There is not bald, going bald, and bald, but it is hard to define a line of when they become bald. The same is true of a person that is dying vs dead. It used to be that heart death defined dead, now it is a combination of metrics.
The Summary states that "the metric relies on the idea" - and it is just an idea of theory.
Having to undergo surgery and having problems with the black-magic-art that anaesthesia is absolutely terrifies me and occupies more of my mind than it probably should. Anything that could potentially make that dark-art less ambiguous would be fantastic.
Terry Schiavo is a terrible example, because she was incapable of consciousness owing to a lack of a brain, which being dead had atrophied away. Her skull was literally empty save the cerebro-spinal fluid that had filled the void where her brain once was.
How probable is it that this method misses certain cases of consciousness in locked-in patients? The danger lies in the false sense of certainty it could create. When someone is unresponsive, currently we can't tell what goes on inside their brains. A new method that promises to eliminate this uncertainty could be abused to justify killing people.
> "The metric relies on the idea that consciousness involves widespread communication between different areas of the brain"
Dumb. Consciousness evolved in much simpler animals (which to be sure have most specialized areas) but massive brain is not required. Look for just another specialized nerve mode.
Also just one lobe is enough. Therefore communication between two lobes is unneeded.
Their idea seems more of leftover emergent behavior, of the woo woo type. Loss of consciousness happens without oxygen very rapidly; but nerves in general don't stop working that quickly. Therefore look to high energy processes of the kind that cease without oxygen in 10s or less.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Relevent Ted Talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness.html
Also it's rather funny at times.
Hello, Houston, we have a problem. Patient 388 has left Ward 3 and is on his way to the parking lot with a chair cushion, a bag of Cheetos, and part of Mrs. Hinston's wig. Please apprehend him and return him to his bed. Langley, out.
Support Mental Health. Or I'll kill you.
This reminds me of one night when I was on call at the hospital. There was a horrendous car accident and the paramedics were talking to me via the radio. First you must understand that I'm in the third world and most of the paramedics here are just glorified bus drivers. Anyway the guy on the radio informs me that one of the patients is breathing but not conscious. So I asked him for his Glasgow score. In medicine we use something called the Glasgow score to evaluate the severity of neurological damage. It's based on 3 separate metrics that are added together. Each metric has a score more or less from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum). So an awake, alert person scores 15, while an almost dead person scores a 3. The scale looks at the patients eyes (whether open spontaneously, whether the patient opens his eyes when asked to, or in the presence of painful stimulus, or doesn't open them at all, for example), motor ability and verbal ability. It easy to assess someone within a few seconds and give them a "score". And there's a general rule - "8 - intubate!". Anyway, the paramedic goes off the radio for a few moments and I can hear him conferring with his buddy. After a while he gets back to me and says "Doc, I'm sorry but we don't have a Glasgowmeter here with us..." It was a facepalm moment...
Anyway this device reminded me of that night and how those paramedics might have benefited from its use :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"We believe in the results of science because, ultimately, we trust some combination of our senses and our brain based experience we call "thinking". We believe this combination gives us knowledge of things which are not our brains, but have an independent reality. I believe this. But this knowledge comes to us through consciousness and not through some other avenue."
... Pffft. You can give drug to somebody, and they may dream of universal consciousness, gods, or pink elephant with carnivore teeth, but that aren't making any of thios real. Show me evidence for universal "cosnciousness" or such and I will start looking at it. Until then it is all bad trip on acid.
We do not believe in science because of our science, we trust science DESPITE our sense, because we get repeatable results. The rest of your post is the sme non sense as in "you can't trust your sense it is all in the brain blahblahblah" you might as well do the argument of the brain in jar.
The truth is consciousness is probably not anything "real" it is just the emerging process from all part of our brain neuron communicating to each other. Destroy the neuron, you destroy or change personality in various way.
As for your talk about universe consciousness
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
But it'll be very interesting to see what happens when they use it on the severely retarded and possibly find that they have at best the consciousness of a dog. The "ethics" of the medical profession are already starting to take a real downward spiral at the higher levels with people like Peter Singer (a respected "bioethicist" at Princeton) and now the Oxford Medical Journal saying that literal infanticide is no different than abortion.
This is what we pro-lifers mean when we talk about the "culture of death." If you asked the average woman about this, she'd think you're a complete monster for suggesting the existence of a "woman's right to kill a 6 week old infant." Yet this is what at least one wing of our ruling class is increasingly coming to believe is a real right. The average guy on the street has no idea how his simple understanding of an issue often is quite reasonable while our ruling class's take is just evil by comparison. Similarly, this is how you get the delta between what the Republican base feels Capitalism means and what the RNC feels Capitalism means which should explain to many why a lot of people vote the way they do seemingly "against their interests." What always matters is what the guy at the top thinks an issue means.
I think any vertebrate, while it's active, would pass this test. It's not a useful tool for determining human-level consciousness, just whether your brain is working and connected up right. My cats, for instance, probably have a fully functioning brains, are aware of and respond to their surroundings in a somewhat organized way, can care for their basic needs (hunt, find water, find places to sleep, fight, beg for food they don't really need). Their brains is no doubt as well connected as any human's, but they're stupid as hell by any human measurement.
On the other hand, there are people who are aware of their surroundings and can carry on a conversation with you, but some of the subsystems of their brains are damaged and there are things my cats can do that they can't. There are others who have little or no apparent impairment, but almost half their brain is dead.
You could reasonably suppose that all of the other solar system bodies behave according to as-yet-unknown laws that differ from our Earthly laws of motion yet conveniently provide exactly the same results. However to make that supposition would violate the rule of parsimony. Similarly it would violate the rule of parsimony to assume that other human beings happen to behave in exactly the same ways that we do, but lack the underlying internal drives.
A parsimonious assumption consistent with the available data is a reasonable assumption and, in almost all fields of knowledge, an entirely necessary one.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Be in no doubt, such 'research' has only one purpose- namely to justify the organ removal from Humans who are still alive at the time. All across the West, the elites are grooming their populations to accept new laws that turn ALL of us into organ donors by default (so-called opt out laws) in readiness for a final phase where opting-out is no longer an option.
What ordinary people do not know is that those that harvest organs DEMAND access to a still living Human body for maximum quality. Legal organ removal thus ideally targets Humans declared "brain dead" but whose bodies are otherwise mostly working and keeping most of the organs in good condition. Illegal organ removal (as is widely practised by Israel- the centre of this depraved crime) uses living subjects previously taken prisoner, or poor people paid tiny sums to give up part of their body.
Obviously, when the recipients of such organs are rich (Israel operates transplant hospitals in many nations, including South Africa, and offers the service mostly to rich Jews and Arabs) they would prefer an ideal match. Widespread DNA gathering projects in target nations exists to create lists of suitable "donors". Many "donors" neither have a genuine accident/illness nor agree to a pay-off. They are made available in ways you may easily imagine.
The desire is to groom the sheeple to accept increasing numbers of cover stories so that the organ transplant business can be allowed to operate more freely in first world nations, rather than hiding away in specialist hospitals in nations with no effective laws, like Turkey, South Africa, or much of the Middle east. One can read ever more common stories of people declared 'dead' awakening to find themselves in the process of having their organs harvested. When you are an ordinary person in hospital who has already been type-matched with a rich person awaiting a transplant, you would be a complete fool to think you welfare now matters.
So, the monsters want a device they can stick on your head and say "this person may seem alive, but actually we promise you he/she is really dead", providing legal justification that will stand up in court for their immediate ENFORCED removal of all the useful organs and tissues. In Britain, within a few years, it will be IMPOSSIBLE for the family of the 'dead' person to prevent organ 'donation', and the victim him/herself will have to spend a large sum before 'death' registering themselves as an opt-out, but even this won't help since hospitals will suffer ZERO PENALTIES if they 'accidentally' strip the organs anyway.
In the USA, the ONLY industrialised nation depraved enough to permit the widespread use of slaves within its borders, slaves were dissected alive in all the major US universities for 'medical research' and an attempt to gather useful items from their bodies. Medical science was far too primitive for most forms of body part re-use, but teeth were pulled from living slaves in an attempt to implant them into white recipients.
The medical community has a terrible record of abuse when laws and regulations prove to be slack. Transplants based on need, not wealth, taken from willing family donors or victims of genuine accidents/illness are a wonderful advance in medical science. But the potential for good does NOT eliminate the potential for evil. When money and profit is involved, transplant surgery ceases to be ethical in any way. The sum total of Humans aided by transplants is pitiful compared to the Humans that can be saved with trivial and cheap treatments in the Third World. If those that are currently abusing the situation cannot be stopped, it would be better that most forms of organ transplant were declared illegal for the good of Humanity. Otherwise, in the near future, if you or your children are a perfect match to some rich scumbag awaiting transplant surgery, you will end up providing your organs one way or another.
If the tech has value to someone, for any purpose, then it will not get buried. And even if someone did bury it, someone else would re-invent it. Scientific knowledge is funny that way.
If you think something must be done to prevent abuse, then your plan must include the fact that blocking the technology itself is impossible. Any plan that fails to recognize this fact is doomed to fail.
They should test this on Republicans - and find out they really are minimally conscious!
In some dreams try try to prove to myself I am conscious, then realize its a dream later.
"The line between consciousness and non-consciousness is thin, hard to define and, as the Terri Schiavo case taught us, often rife with political/religious quandaries"
FTFY
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.