Talking Science

[coalescent]

It's almost a point of honour with me to go to the most science-related events I can find at any given literary festival. Today I went to two.

First up: Colin Blakemore, Guy Claxton and Steven Rose talking about the conscious and unconscious mind. Rose's position was strictly materialist, Claxton's was more poetic, and Blakemore was moderating.

Rose argued that we are atoms, molecules, and neurons only; there is no need to hypothesise the existence of a soul. However, he argued that even if we could record the state of the brain with perfect accuracy at a given moment, and therefore understand the relation of a given action to a given brain state, we probably wouldn't be able to go the other way. He felt that there's a many-to-one correspondence; due to variations in development and personal history, no two people will have the same brain state for even a very simple action, and quite possibly no person will have the same brain state for the same action at two different times. As a result, knowing the state of the brain is unlikely to ever be truly predictive.

(Blakemore argued at this point that this must be wrong in some way, because knowing the state of the brain and predicting action is what our conscious mind actually does at some points. I'm not quite sure his argument works.)

Claxton, on the other hand, wasn't quite ready to pension off God. He was more interesting in talking about how people have tried to explain the conscious and particularly unconscious mind throughout history, suggesting that many stories of supernatural phenomena can be attributed to a need to explain unexpected actions of our mind--the times when people are more evil (or more random, or even more good) than we expect. And as stories, they have a social role that persists even if we know their basis to be untrue. Talking about frontal lobes, he felt, would not have the same resonance.

On the question of 'what is consciousness', unsurprisingly nobody had a clear answer, although there was some debate about free will and human agency. On this Claxton was the more pessimistic (for certain values of pessimistic); to him consciousness is an accompaniment to a sufficiently complex brain, something that sits on top of our firing neurons and responds to it, but does not direct it in any significant way. He further argued (in a somewhat Baxterian fashion) that consciousness isn't even particularly useful; Rose felt that asking whether, for example, the panel could still take place if humans had no conscious mind was a meaningless question, a category error, but Claxton said that if you couldn't imagine it it somehow represented a failure of the imagination.

Rose was a bit torn about how useful it was to debate questions of consciousness at all, in fact. On the one hand he pointed out that neuroscience is now where genetics was a quarter of a century ago, and that it has as profound a potential to alter our lives as that discipline, and that we should be debating questions of how its findings are going to be applied and controlled now. On the other hand, he was wary of the hype that could result, and at one point suggested that the correct thing to do might be to not talk about it at all until the situation became clearer.

The second event, Andrew Parker talking about the role colour has played in evolution, was less satisfying. The central story of his presentation--that of the Australian Blue Frog, Litoria caerulea was interesting. This is a frog that uses a combination of physical colour--a layer of cells that preferentially scatters blue wavelengths of light--combined with pigmented colour--a layer of cells containing a yellow pigment--to achieve effective camouflage--an overall yellow colour. But the way he presented the story was unnecessarily roundabout, and not in-depth enough for my taste. One good thing, that I don't think about the implications of enough: he reminded me that colour is entirely a virtual reality. It's a meaning applied to the world by our minds, seeing a given wavelength of light as 'red' or 'blue', not an inherent property of the world.

Comments

[andrewducker]

In my (extremely simplified) opinion, consciousness is the reflexive bit of the brain that deals with abstract concepts. It's the deductive bit that sits on top of the main, inductive, areas of the brain, putting together concepts based on the observations those areas make, and feeding back when it makes a logical connection between things that the purely reactive areas can't.

I don't think it's in any way 'in charge' of the rest of the brain, and I think people's inductive areas frequently overrule it, leading to people saying things like "I was out of control." and "I don't know why I did it." and "I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn't help myself.", but I do think that it exerts pressure.

I don't think consciousness comes from a sufficently complex et of neurons - I think it comes specifically from an arrangement of neurons that can work in abstract, deductive ways (like the human forebrain, and that of various other mammals).

I think the reason that we have such problems with AI is that you need both inductive and deductive thought and computers are _terrible_ at induction - being basically deduction machines. Also, most of the AI researchers are extremely geeky, and therefore focussed on logic, believing that's what intelligence is.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I think that consciousness lies by definition outside of the realm of science - this is not a criticism of science. Science attempts to build predictive theory on the basis of the phenomena of which we are conscious - in Popperian terms, a scientific statement is one which can in principle be refuted by experience, but hasn't been.

Thus science can't reflexively 'explain' or theorise about the state which gives it validity. Or, again in Popperian terms, no theory of consciouness can be refuted by conscious experience.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

If a chair is a subjective entity then a chair is my sense of a chair i.e. my every interaction and experience (which is the same thing really) of all things I delineate as chair.

Therefore it follows that, if a chair is my sense of a chair, then I am my sense of my self.

I would say that my "self" is my constant interaction with my environment, defined above as being my sense of my environment.

So, really, the "I" would be my sense of my sense of my environment i.e. an abstraction of my sense of my environment, my meta-sense of my environment.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I think I agree with you ;)

[andrewducker]

If you have a sense of self then you are, indeed, self-conscious :->

In Diaspora (my favourite of Greg Egan's novels), an AI is granted citizenship rights when they achieve self-consciousness, as their expanding understnging and modelling of the world takes themselves into account.

[andrewducker]

But we can be conscious of our own consciousness. And we can be conscious of each other's consciousnesses. We can perform experiments on them and examine the different states of consciousness and how they interact and come to be. Therefore it's very much inside the realm of science.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I think that what you are describing is the content of consciousness, which is a proper study for science. Also, I don't think we can directly experience another's consciousness - it's just a (highly likely) hypothesis.

[andrewducker]

Why do we need to directly experience something in order to study it? We study al sorts of things in psychology (for instance) that aren't directly experinced.

I'm not seeing what's special about consciousness that makes it unstudiable.