Raymond Tallis on the metaphysical limitations of neuroscience

Author Raymond Tallis reviews two new books about consciousness: Soul Dust: the Magic of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey and Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio. Tallis opens,

The republic of letters is in thrall to an unprecedented scientism. The word is out that human consciousness - from the most elementary tingle of sensation to the most sophisticated sense of self - is identical with neural activity in the human brain and that this extraordinary metaphysical discovery is underpinned by the latest findings in neuroscience. Given that the brain is an evolved organ, and, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, the neural explanation of human consciousness demands a Darwinian interpretation of our behaviour. The differences between human life in the library or the operating theatre and animal life in the jungle or the savannah are more apparent than real: at the most, matters of degree rather than kind.

These beliefs are based on elementary errors. Just because neural activity is a necessary condition of consciousness, it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of consciousness, still less that it is identical with it. And Darwinising human life confuses the organism Homo sapiens with the human person, biological roots with cultural leaves. Nevertheless, the coupling of neuromania and Darwinitis has given birth to emerging disciplines based on neuro-evolutionary approaches to human psychology, economics, social science, literary criticism, aesthetics, theology and the law.

These pseudo-disciplines are flourishing in academe and are covered extensively in the popular press, in articles usually accompanied by a brain scan (described by the writer Matt Crawford as a "fast-acting solvent of critical faculties"). Only last month, David Brooks asserted in the New Yorker that "brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy".

There are more cautious writers, but even for them the attraction of biologism seems irre­sistible. V S Ramachandran asserts correctly, in his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature, that humanity "transcends apehood to the same degree by which life transcends mundane chemistry and physics". Even so, he is prepared to claim that we enjoy Picasso's paintings for the same reason that gull chicks prefer fake maternal beaks with an excess of markings to the real thing: they are "superstimuli". Both books under review acknowledge the uniqueness of human beings but relapse repeatedly into accounts of the mind, self and consciousness that appeal to a mixture of neuroscience and evolutionary theory. Despite the ingenuity and erudition of the authors, they serve only to illustrate the shortcomings of neuroscientific attempts to capture human consciousness and human nature.

Read the rest.

David Chalmers: Consciousness is not substrate dependent

A popular argument against uploads and whole brain emulation is that consciousness is somehow rooted in the physical, biological realm. Back in 1995, philosopher David Chalmers addressed this problem in his seminal paper, "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia." His abstract reads,

It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. That is, the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties according to some lawful relation. There are two key questions about this relation. The first concerns the strength of the laws: are they logically or metaphysically necessary, so that consciousness is nothing "over and above" the underlying physical process, or are they merely contingent laws like the law of gravity? This question about the strength of the psychophysical link is the basis for debates over physicalism and property dualism. The second question concerns the shape of the laws: precisely how do phenomenal properties depend on physical properties? What sort of physical properties enter into the laws' antecedents, for instance; consequently, what sort of physical systems can give rise to conscious experience? It is this second question that I address in this paper.

Chalmers sets up a series of arguments and thought experiments which point to the conclusion that functional organization suffices for conscious experience, what he calls nonreductive functionalism. He argues that conscious experience is determined by functional organization without necessarily being reducible to functional organization. This bodes well for the AI and whole brain emulation camp.

Chalmers concludes:

In any case, the conclusion is a strong one. It tells us that systems that duplicate our functional organization will be conscious even if they are made of silicon, constructed out of water-pipes, or instantiated in an entire population. The arguments in this paper can thus be seen as offering support to some of the ambitions of artificial intelligence. The arguments also make progress in constraining the principles in virtue of which consciousness depends on the physical. If successful, they show that biochemical and other non-organizational properties are at best indirectly relevant to the instantiation of experience, relevant only insofar as they play a role in determining functional organization.

Of course, the principle of organizational invariance is not the last word in constructing a theory of conscious experience. There are many unanswered questions: we would like to know just what sort of organization gives rise to experience, and what sort of experience we should expect a given organization to give rise to. Further, the principle is not cast at the right level to be a truly fundamental theory of consciousness; eventually, we would like to construct a fundamental theory that has the principle as a consequence. In the meantime, the principle acts as a strong constraint on an ultimate theory.

Entire paper.

Andy Clark: Supersizing the Mind

There's a new book by Andy Clark worth checking out: Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. This will be of interest to readers of this blog in that it's a discussion of the so-called "extended mind."

Description:

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind , Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Be sure to read Jerry Fodor's review from the London Review of Books and David Chalmer's comments.

What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness?

One of my readers recently made the comment on my recent protopanpsychism re-post: "...it is not clear what the evolutionary advantage is of subjective states and therefore how they evolved."

To answer the question I will borrow a quote from neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman:

The evolutionary advantage is quite clear. Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan. Let's take a lioness ready to attack an antelope. She crouches down. She sees the prey. She's forming an image of the size of the prey and its speed, and of course, she's planning a jump. Now suppose I have two animals: one like our lioness, has that thing we call consciousness; the other only gets the signals. It's just about dusk, and all of a sudden the wind shifts and there's a whooshing sound of the sort a tiger might make when moving through the green grass, and the conscious animal runs like hell but the other one doesn't. Well, guess why? Because the animal that's conscious has integrated the image of a tiger. The ability to consider alternative images in an explicit way is definitely evolutionarily advantageous.

Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn't assume uploads - A SentDev Classic

Despite grandiose and cocksure proclamations to the contrary, consciousness is still a hard problem in science. Aside from (currently) untestable theories and philosophical musings, how matter organizes itself such that it is capable of experiencing subjectivity and qualia is an utter mystery.

Compounding the problem is the widespread tendency to interchangbily use the terms intelligence and consciousness. While related, these terms describe two very different phenomena. My calculator and computer are examples of intelligence. My ability to use language and deductive reasoning to help me write this article are other examples of intelligence. But my ability to subjectively experience the phenomenon known as 'sweetness,' or to sense the colour red, or the feeling I get as time passes, are endowments brought about by my conscious awareness.

There are arguably two major philosophical approaches to the issue of consciousness -- they are 'philosophical' because we still don't possess the requisite scientific vernacular to address its true underpinnings. These proto-scientific approaches are known as dualism and emergence.

The first and most traditional argument is the idea of vitalism or dualism. This perspective suggests that the essence of consciousness lies outside the brain, perhaps as some ethereal soul or spirit. Consequently, its proponents suggest that consciousness lies outside knowable science.

Cartesian dualism fits within this category of thinking – the notion that the only thing that can truly be known is the presence of personal subjectivity and that everything external to that may be a fabrication or hallucination (see Descarte’s Meditations on First Philosophy and his ‘Evil Daemon’ argument). While existentially interesting (or is that disturbing?), Descartes’s argument violates Popperian notions of testability and smacks of Gnosticism and radical skepticism (these are fascinating topics in their own right that lie outside the scope of this discussion, and can include such conundrums as the brain-in-the-vat and simulation problems).

The other broad approach to the issue of consciousness is emergence theory, the idea that self-awareness and qualia can arise from complex computational dynamics in the brain. The critical assumption here is that mind’s architecture is largely computational, but that consciousness emerges through the concert of myriad neuronal interactions. In this sense, consciousness is an epiphenomenon or metaphenomenon of the brain's machinations.

This approach to cognition is clearly essential, but it is not sufficient. Indeed, the mind almost certainly utilizes its computational or functionalist aspects, most of which go completely unnoticed by the conscious agent at the top of the processing hierarchy. Today’s computers, which have inspired comparisons to the brain, crunch numbers but are in no way self-reflexive about their work; consequently, they can partly account for human intelligence, but make relatively poor models as approximations or metaphors for consciousness engines.

At the same time, it almost seems like a cop-out to suggest that increased complexity in such systems will result in consciousness, which is, qualitatively speaking, a horse of a different colour.

Now, I wouldn’t want to dismiss emergence theory outright. There’s something very satisfying about this idea, particularly considering how this might have come about through natural selection. It may very well turn out that that emergence does in fact account for consciousness.

That said about dualism and emergence, there is a third, albeit controversial, perspective that should be considered: panprotopsychism. This is the notion that essential features or precursors of consciousness are fundamental components of reality which are accessed by brain processes. In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all parts of matter involve mind. Neuroscientist Stuart Hameroff, a proponent of this view, argues that consciousness is related to a fundamental, irreducible component of physical reality, akin to phenomenon like mass, spin or charge. According to this view, the basis of consciousness can be found in an additional fundamental force of nature not unlike gravity or electromagnetism. This would be something like an elementary (self)-sentience or awareness. As Hameroff notes, "these components just are."

Panpsychism has a long a varied history. Back during the time of the Greeks, philosophers like Democritus contended that a basic and fundamental form of consciousness was a quality of all matter – what they called 'atomism.' Later, Baruch Spinoza would argue along similar lines -- that atoms and their subatomic components have subjective, mental attributes.

Relatedly, Buddhist atomists like Dharmakirti argued that the only thing that exists are Buddhist atoms (described as being point-sized, durationless, and made of energy) and states of consciousness. Similarly, Gottfried Leibniz and A. N. Whitehead believed that systems ordinarily considered to be physical were constructed in some sense from more basic mental entities – what are now referred to in process philosophy as 'Whitehead occasions.'

Bertrand Russell put forth the idea of "neutral monism," which described a common underlying entity, neither physical nor mental, that gave rise to both. Bishop Berkeley suggested that consciousness creates reality and that consciousness is "all there is." Berkeley's famous dictum was "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived").

Theoretical physicist John A. Wheeler has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe, and David Chalmers has proposed a double-aspect theory in which information has both physical and experiential aspects.

While these ideas vary, they do explore the interplay between what is regarded as reality and consciousness. Whitehead in particular saw the universe not as being comprised of 'things' but of 'events.' In this sense reality is a kind of process where consciousness emerges from temporal chains of occasions.

If this sounds somewhat analogous to what quantum mechanics tells us, you’re not far off the mark. A number of thinkers have picked up on Whitehead’s idea as it relates to quantum physics, including Abner Shimony and Roger Penrose. This has lead to the development of what is known as quantum consciousness theory, which postulates the idea that consciousness is indelibly tied to quantum processes – that the brain is essentially a quantum computer utilized by an observer to “decohere” quantum superposition. Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules.

Penrose’s ideas have been met with much scorn, not least of which for his assertion that there are non-computational or non-algorithmic aspects to consciousness. This suggestion has lead thinkers like Hameroff and Penrose to conclude that mature AI as it is typically presumed (i.e. that it is also endowed with artificial consciousness) is a pipe-dream.

If they’re right, however, this poses a significant problem for those who believe that uploading (or mind transfer) awaits humanity in the future -- the opinion that consciousness is not substrate dependant, and that a fully sapient agent can exist as an uploaded being in a supercomputer. Many transhumanist expectations, from radical life extension to Jupiter Brains, are dependant on this assumption.

But what if consciousness is in fact substrate specific and can only be experienced in the analog arena? What if there is no digital or algorithmic equivalent to consciousness like Penrose suggests? Having consciousness arise in a classical Von Neumann architecture may be as impossible as splitting the atom in a virtual environment by using ones and zeros.

As possible consolation, however, the fact of the matter is that under the Penrose/Hameroff premise, the brain is a quantum computer – which if quantum theorists like David Deutsch have their way, will eventually come to fruition. If a quantum computer comprised of biological matter could arise through autonomous evolutionary processes, then I would have to think that intelligences like our own will eventually come to figure it out. If this is the case, then it may be possible to engineer subjectivity outside of our grey matter. Quantum computers could also be useful for running simulations of quantum mechanics, an idea that goes back to Richard Feynman; he observed that there is no known algorithm for simulating quantum systems on a classical computer and suggested to study the use of a quantum computer for this purpose. One has to wonder if the same logic applies to the potential for quantum computers to run consciousness simulations.

Given the extreme computational power and speed of quantum computers, I can’t even become to fathom what a conscious agent would do within such an architecture.

All bets are off once a conscious superintelligence starts to engage in selective decoherence.

References:

Stuart Hameroff: "Consciousness, Whitehead and quantum computation in the brain: Panprotopsychism meets the physics of fundamental spacetime geometry"
John Holbo: "Fragments of Parallax"
Wikipedia

This article originally appeared on Sentient Developments on October 25, 2006.

Nick Herbert on psychedelics, consciousness and science

The parallels between Herbert's experiences and those of Eastern philosophies are quite interesting.

Provocative quote, "Scientists and old people should have access to any drugs they want."

Free will pwnd

Unconscious decisions in the brain: A team of scientists has unravelled how the brain unconsciously prepares our decisions.

Already several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings." (Nature Neuroscience, April 13th 2008)

The rise of 'biocentrism'

There's a provocative article over at Astroroach: "A Biocentric and Holographic Universe." The general idea behind biocentrism is that our cosmology and metaphysics cannot ignore the important interplay between conscious observers and quantum effects. As Robert Lanza notes,

"The trees and snow evaporate when we’re sleeping. The kitchen disappears when we’re in the bathroom. When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting—the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness—or into waves of probability. The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe. We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence."

This fits in very nicely with not just the revealing sciences, but with the foundations of consciousness-centric Buddhist metaphysics as well.