Consciousness May Be the Product of Carefully Balanced Chaos (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical. But the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a bit easier to measure. In a new study (abstract) of how anesthetic drugs affect the brain, researchers suggest that our experience of reality is the product of a delicate balance of connectivity between neurons—too much or too little and consciousness slips away. During wakeful consciousness, participants’ brains generated “a flurry of ever-changing activity”, and the fMRI showed a multitude of overlapping networks activating as the brain integrated its surroundings and generated a moment to moment “flow of consciousness.” After the propofol kicked in, brain networks had reduced connectivity and much less variability over time. The brain seemed to be stuck in a rut—using the same pathways over and over again.

Comments

Gibberish

[nintendoeats]

"The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical."

I have a philosophy degree and I have no idea what this sentence means. I think they mean whether consciousness is the product of a deterministic process or some kind of dualism (a soul, whatever that is). Either way, the experience of consciousness must be objective because what the thinker experiences IS the consciousness. In fact, I would argue that consciousness is the only thing that can be experienced objectively, since all other senses and experiences are filtered through consciousness. Cogito ergo sum and all that jazz.

But that's all rubbish anyway because as far as I'm concerned the question itself doesn't make sense.

Re:Gibberish

[alvinrod]

but the more we know, the more it goes towards "some kind of dualism", although certainly not a religious one

I'd have to ask where you're getting this from. It's one thing to suggest that science does not yet have a good answer and so the actual mechanism are unclear, but it is quite another to suggest that a lack of understanding suggests a kind of mysticism that people refer to as dualism. In fact, I think that as we progress we'll eventually find that consciousness is hardly unique, but is merely that result of having enough sophisticated hardware wired together in the correct way. We're only scraping at the crust in terms of understanding the human brain and as our tools and knowledge improves, so too will our ability to make better hypotheses.

We're also approaching answers to these questions with computers. I recall a story were researchers were able to model a simple brain in software and use a hardware interface to simulate the body by using sensor feedback to represent input to the software brain. It turned out that this robot behaved quite similarly to the organism which is was modeled after. In time we'll be able to build more complex robots that more closely model our own selves, and I suspect that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the way our brains are physically arranged.

We're increasingly finding more support for this as personality traits (empathy, aggressiveness, etc.) or other characteristics (sexual attraction, gender perception) are tied to different areas or the physical arrangements of parts of the brain. There's still a lot of work to be done to fully understand how the mechanism works, and studies that can show a casual relationship still need to be conducted, but we're getting closer and technological advances will allow us to conduct the types of experiments in the future, that are not currently possible.

What will become more interesting is when humans unlock the knowledge required to build advanced consciousnesses or to modify our own biology in such a way to free ourselves from evolutionary baggage that often clouds or consciousness or manifests itself in other undesirable ways. Eventually consciousness will be no more remarkable than phototropism.

Re:Gibberish

[nintendoeats]

Consciousness cannot be defined as an awareness of one's immediate surroundings because

A: It is possible to have a consciousness that exists in a vacuum.
B: It is possible for that consciousness to believe that it is not in a vacuum because its method of detecting the outside world is faulty.
C: A and B both being the case, qualification as a consciousness must not require knowledge of anything outside itself.

Because of this, and some other sticking points, there is no test for whether or not something else is "conscious". In fact, we don't really know what consciousness is, only that there is some bundle of qualities which we call consciousness not all of which we can define or be aware of but which be believe must exist.

Re:Gibberish

[alvinrod]

Your position is certainly not a scientific one and you are rather severely misinformed about what software can do (most people are).

Can you point out a specific problem with any part of what I've stated or demonstrate with sufficient proof that it won't work or cannot be done, not just now, but also at no point in the future?

The problem is there is still absolutely no indication that human-equivalent intelligence can be implemented in machines.

At one point in human history there was no indication that humans would be able to travel through outer space either. It was squarely in the realm of fiction and human fancy or utterly beyond our ability to conceive of considering it possible because we could not yet fly through the air or rapidly travel over land without the aid of other animals.

There is no credible theory how it can be done.

What's to stop someone from building a hardware approximation using circuitry or other approaches that models the human brain? We know that we don't possess the technology to do that right now, but that's different from claiming that it's completely impossible. Even if you can't build an exact hardware approximation (assuming you can manipulate cells in a controlled way, we wouldn't even have to use different materials so it's not even a requirement to use a computer if you can learn how to create brain cells and get them to arrange themselves in a particular pattern), if you can build hardware that's powerful enough to allow software emulation of a larger brain, what would stop us from being able to conduct this experiment? We might someday attempt to test this hypotheses and find that the it is wrong, but proposing a hypotheses (there's nothing special about consciousness, it's merely an emergent property of the physical construction of our brains, much like water freezing is simply a consequence of how molecules of water behave at low temperatures. We might not know exactly why it happens, but it can be empirically demonstrated to occur under precise conditions.) is definitely science so long as the hypotheses is testable. Just because we currently lack the ability to actually perform the test doesn't mean that it's not science.

You seem to be arguing from a perspective of just because something hasn't yet been done it can never be done, while not demonstrating any formal proof as to why. To even declare it definitively impossible would require a far greater understanding of how the universe operates than we currently have available. Furthermore, we don't even need computers or software to test this theory if we can gain knowledge which allows scientists to construct and study primitive brains (of which we have enough living examples of to already perform rudimentary experiments). Do you also believe that such knowledge is also forever beyond our grasp and if so, why specifically? What is so special about it that we'll never be able to understand it more than other fields of knowledge that provide us a better understanding of the universe?

Re:Gibberish

[bluegutang]

I have a philosophy degree and I have no idea what this sentence means.

That's a common danger with philosophy degrees, you can never be sure what anything means any more...

Re:Or, it might simply be...

[kheldan]

..feedback loop

That's what I was just thinking. Every system in a biological organism is a negative-feedback loop, isn't it? Self-regulating? Why shouldn't the human brain work the same way on a fundamental level? Drugs that we use work because it alters the loop characteristics, right?

New?

[Hognoxious]

I thought it was pretty much established that anything interesting happens on the border between chaos and stagnation. Had an old book about it once.

Re:Or, it might simply be...

[peragrin]

A feedback loop with some amazing pattern recognition abilities. A little bit of fuzzy logic for memory storage.

That bieng said I don't think we will ever have our memories downloaded or uploaded. Every persons brain maps out uniquely. Can you image a hard drive that randomly scattered data,Yet could still sort through it?

Re:Or, it might simply be...

[Dread_ed]

From the description in the article it would seem that consciousness is an emergent phenomena based on the interactions of multiple networks in the brain. Turn off the interactions (as they did with propofol) and the emergent phenomena (consciousness) dissipates. Or better stated, consciousness is not inherent in a part of the brain, but a result of the interactions of the different systems of the brain.

If there are drugs that can inhibit or change the operation of some of these networks individually it would be interesting to see how the other networks are affected, and also to explore how consciousness is affected. The resiliency of consciousness, coupled with its plasticity speaks to a complex system where multiple, simple, and similar components interact chaotically. Tinkering with those networks individually could lead to some profound insights about the nature of consciousness, both objectively and subjectively.