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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.
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.
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.
I'd say that an irreversible cessation of consciousness is actually a pretty solid definition of death, myself. Of course being conscious or not is not a measure of being alive in and of itself, or we'd all be dead every time we went to sleep.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
> "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.
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.
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.
It's all part of the movement towards State management of who lives and dies, based of course on political ideology and revenue.
First, consciousness is not sapience. This result has nothing to do with self-awareness or intellect. I suspect that a conscious dog in the device would probably rate about the same as a conscious, healthy human being but that study literally hasn't been done.
Secondly, if you honestly believe that an abstract philosophical stance on the ethics of infanticide is an actual point of policy or ethics in the general population, you really need to stop taking your ethics tuition from the Telegraph.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
We still need a way to have high certainty that the loss of consciousness is irreversible for the current person. We have a hard enough time telling if someone is currently conscious, yet alone if they can regain it once lost.
Well, exactly, and this research really doesn't have anything to do with that except that you could wire someone up to it and log if they "woke up" at any point.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I think one of the big questions about consciousness is in what sense it is "real", besides the subjective experience. (Or the ability to have a subjective experience). What are the essential qualities needed for such an emergent process to exist?
There are some non-junk non-New Agey type theories about the universe in some sense being conscious (labeled Panpsychism), though I don't buy into them personally. The argument is that all objects have some level of consciousness, some more than others due to some kind of emergence from complexity. But, again, what the exact conditions these are that increase the level of consciousness is the big question.
Happy people make bad consumers.
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?
I suspect that to comprehend consciousness we will have to add "state" to the traditional notions of matter and energy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's all part of the movement towards State management of who lives and dies, based of course on political ideology and revenue.
Such abuse is in fact possible, but right now it's your insurance company's actuary and your wallet that determine who lives and who dies.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
"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 ... 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.
What you said isn't "Truth", in an objective way. It's your personal subjective truth that you map out onto reality in the hopes that it is True. What I'd like to ask you is: why do you need to believe that conscious is nothing more than a side effect of an emergent neural network? What about materialistic reductionism is so important to you that you must advocate for it being the Truth?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
In some dreams try try to prove to myself I am conscious, then realize its a dream later.
Yeah, so? Aren't you doing the same, AC? Show me an "objective" truth, and I will show you an ostensibly subjective facet of a much larger truth.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Sure, but it turns out that we are fairly bad at determining reversibility. Usually we fail at it in cases of brain trauma but we have also been known to fail at it in cases involving resuscitation.
"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.