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Attention and consciousness
Hans Ricke
Friday, 16 May 2008 05:57 UTC
Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya are trying to establish a major statement about attention and consciousness which can be followed up on Scholarpedia which seems to be a great website anyway.
Christof has pointed these things out in Tucson and will also eloborate on it in Taipeh.
I have reluctance against the statement that there can be attention without consciousness, which is an extraordinary claim in my opinion. The evidence they give here can be read in more depth in an article by Jiang et al. . This article by Buschman and Miller may by interesting as well for a discussion.
As this is a huge topic with some history one can also browse David Chalmers collection
Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya have published their view and obviously there are important statements from Bernard Baars, Stanislas Dehaene and Victor Lamme to name a few.
The claim that there may be attention without consciousness is possibly stretching the understanding of terms too much in a “lab-direction” which ultimately loses connection with a common and sensible understanding of the terms. I doubt that it is meaningful to say someone attends to an objects when in reality there is only an unsuccessful attempt to attend by looking in the direction of that object. We also have to acknowledge natural limitations: visual attention is obviously not naturally to be performed the way binocular rivalry tests suggest. What naturally happens is a kind of competition between different contents of consciousness and attention. This process of competition has voluntary and involuntary aspects. Research should support an understanding that enables people to be aware and attend to the contents that are relevant and important in their lives and the conditions they are in. Obviouslly both attention and awareness can be distracted, which may be not only unwanted but even dangerous.
Updated 16 May 2008 06:15 UTC
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Dear Hans:
Many thanks for creating this Forum with several useful links, and for highlighting a classical issue in consciousness debates.
Scholarpedia still does not have an entry on Consciousness, but it has a good one on Cognition and Emotion by Luiz Pessoa.
There is also an entry on Attention and Consciousness by Koch and Tsuchiya, where you linked to the page “Attention Without Consciousness”.
I confess that I still do not have a stable opinion about this issue and will wait for pro and con arguments here to help me with the decision.
I would like to make you a question based on your posting to the Forum on Visual Consciousness: do you think consciousness without attention (i.e. top-down signaling from “higher” to “lower” processing circuits) is possible?Best,
Alfredo
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There is the beginnings of a movement towards the idea that Attention is the process by which we direct data between memory areas. The question becomes are we talking about the same attention system as those who believe that attention requires consciousness? or is there a difference in the mechanisms that make this type of direction possible?
Evidence at the neural level, is that the same mechanisms that are used for directing attention consciously are used at lower levels of processing. If this is true, then it is the people who insist that consciousness is required for attention, that must eventually give way.
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Thanks Ottmar, that is quite a bit different from what I was saying, but still open to the idea that consciousness at some level comes and goes, and what is left, thinks it is conscious, even if it demonstratably fails to express consciousness.
That Deer in the headlights stare, actually might be an indication of consciousness being stalled, rather than a lack of consciousness however. One of the theories of consciousness is that it is a way that the mind resolves selection issues. The student in that case, is madly trying to resolve the issue that they want to answer the question and look good, but don’t know enough to synthesize an answer. So they are in the case where they apply consciousness to the problem, and it won’t resolve. Because they are not prepared nothing they can do will resolve the problem, until the teacher relents and passes on to another student. Once the pressure is off, they can step back from their need to look good, (perhaps because it is already lost) and can try to recover some aplumb.
The difference between this approach, and the one you suggest is substantial, because in your approach, the body consciousness binds together the consciousness, while it is gone, but in this other approach it need not be body consciousness that binds together the sense of being conscious, merely a control illusion, that blurs the distinction say between Awareness and Consciousness, so that when you look back on it, you assume that you were conscious when you were only aware.
I am looking in my model at an attention system, that has graded levels of control, in which Consciousness is merely a higher level of control than awareness. One of the aspects of the particular model that I use, is that it is motivated to some extent by bias of selection via emotive means, so the Deer in the headlights stare, can be explained by emotive controls blocking the successful completion of the cognition needed to answer the question with the least wrong answer. As someone who often froze up when the question was put in an manner I was not familiar with, I can attest that the stare doesn’t always mean the student doesn’t know the answer at some level, just that it isn’t known in a way that connects to the question.
How many times have you heard a disgusted “I knew that” mumbled by a student when someone else answered the question, and they realized that they really did know the answer but hadn’t come up with it, when questioned?
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But, if as I say there is a graded control system, and only one grade of control is actually conscious, then sleep walking is just the operation of the less conscious state, Which will not be able to resolve as complicated a set of responses. So in my model the question does not become one of whether there is a body consciousness or not, but whether there is an unconscious state capable of moving at this reduced level of function without invoking consciousness.
I maintain that such a control mechanism exists, and that therefore we do not need body consciousness to explain sleep walking.
I maintain that Automation under the direction of Intension is sufficient and that such activities do not require consciousness.
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Well Ottmar, you have an interesting idea of consciuosness.
First of all, I don’t think anyone has ever been able to prove that cells are all conscious. Can you tell me how someone would be able to do so?
You might assume that all cells are conscious, but then you run afoul of Occam’s Razor.
My own personal belief is that consciousness, as we humans know it, is limited to the higher Vertebrates like Mammals and Birds. There is some question in my mind as to whether a lizard is conscious. There might be other forms of consciousness, but they would be based on different principles than our own, and so we can’t abstract from our own experience of consciousness any rules as to how they would develop. I guess this answers to some extent the limits to which I would project the “We” in my earlier statement.
As to whether or not Attention means Conscious or Unconscious, I am arguing that under my definition of Attention, Consciousness is not required until the upper levels of control are reached, and therefore does not need to be assumed to be associated with every stage of consciousness.
As to whether or not consciousness is associated with the EGO, first we must assign some neural correlates to EGO, then I can talk to you about the associated connections. Since I am unaware of NC of EGO, I cannot comment on the connection of consciousness to EGO. At least we know that there is a connection between the NC of Attention and Consciousness.
What is the connection between EGO and Attention?
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OOPS, I said with every state of consciousness, when I meant to say with every state of attention, my appologies, sometimes terms get mixed up when I go to write them down.
Ottmar, Are you NOT, a higher vertebrate? You have a spine, and homosapiens is classified as a Mammal. So why do you stress that you are an animal?
When you say you have experienced many things but consciousness is not one of them, how do you know you are conscious, if you do not experience something that is associated with consciousness, like awareness?
As for the Lizard, yes, I think there might be criteria that would determine that most lizards are NOT conscious. However they have not yet been elucidated if only because I have not felt the issue of whether or not a lizard is conscious is important enough for me to spend time determining it.
You wonder what principles are used in Consciousness Studies, but there is not just one form of consciousness studies, there are a number of schools of thought that each have their own principles that they tend to agree on internally, but which have different principles than other schools.
For instance a good percentage of the people who post here belong to a group of authors for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, they have a different viewpoint than the group of authors for Consciousness and Cognition Journal which is also a group of authors that publish on consciousness studies.
You seem to have a problem with experiencing consciousness. Is it not then something that we can experience? I admit that my idea that you have to tell yourself that you are experiencing something means that there might be a reflexive step missing when we are conscious, that would limit our ability to experience consciousness, but there is no reason why we can’t supply that reflexive step as part of the analysis of consciousness, and so we can tell that we were probably conscious at some time or other, by our experience during that time, and the artifacts of consciousness that show up in our introspection about that time. This is of course not to say that our experience of when we are conscious is accurate, since the criteria for determining the difference between awareness and consciousness has not yet been published.
On your description of ego, I find it interesting that you would assume that the EGO is a homunculus. (I.E. the observer that looks at the cartesian theater in the mind.) Also I am amused that you think the EGO lies outside the brain.
What if the brain doesn’t work that way, What if there is not one cartesian theater of the mind, but instead many smaller representations, what if there is not one observer, but a control system that creates the illusion of a single observer. Where then would your EGO be? What would it look like? could we find Neural Correlates for it? Would we recognize them if we found them? This is a fundamental question, that separates those that believe in spirits from those that believe in physics as the basis for brain function.
I also find it is amusing that you assume that no connection to consciousness has been found in NCC. Frankly my belief is that if this is true, it is because we have too many NCC because we can’t separate consciousness from awareness. So when we attempt to find NCC we try to put too large a set of requirements on too small a part of the equation.
First we have to define the difference between consciousness and awareness, then and only then, can we find the neural correlates that are different for consciousness and awareness.
By the way, I have intentionally not attempted to separate attention from the Unconscious, because much of attention is unconscious. The possible exception is a layer of control that sits above intention and awareness where volition first becomes possible.
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Cute Ottmar, so accepting that we fall within the animal kingdom somehow negates our worth as people? Perhaps you have a bias against animals? You depersonalize animals so that you can… what… eat meat? I eat meat, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t think my dog was intelligent, and had consciousness. So somehow because he couldn’t talk back, he is less than conscious?
Everyone knows that most cows have pretty limited intelligence and pretty limited consciousness, which is why few of us cry over a cheezeburger. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t experience pain. But somehow you want to draw a line in the sand, and separate us from animals. Bernie Baars has written that there is no significant difference in the mechanisms of the brain between humans and our closest animal cousins. Do you think he wrote that in order to degrade humans, or because he literally hadn’t seen a significant difference?
Don’t get me wrong, I think that human consciousness has something more than animal consciousness, but I think we need to get the model right for animal consciousness before we try for human consciousness, and if DNA is any judge we will find only subtle differences between the two models.
That does not mean that it does not make a profound difference to our lives, but that the mechanisms are subtle. Subtle Mechanisms don’t seem to be your forte’.
You say you cannot distinguish consciousness from experience, but I think you are wrong, I think we haven’t been doing so, but it is mostly because we didn’t know what to look for, to separate awareness from consciousness. Consciusness is actually a richer experience than awareness because we have done more processing, and therefore there is more meaning to it.
An example of what I mean, was just being discussed with Dr. LaBerge last week, he claims that Awareness comes with a sense of self. I argued that I am aware quite often when I do not have a sense of self, but when I look back on the awareness, there is a sense of self added to the basic log of what happened. What I suggested was that interspection was a function of consciousness, and so looking back on awareness always adds a layer of interpretation to the log in the sense of emotional and meta-cognitive signals that help us interpret the awareness. One of these signals is the sense of self, that he has noted associated with awareness.
Detection of this added level of interpretation, constitutes proof that we are not merely aware anymore.
As for a criterion for detecting consciousness. Well unless you accept the statement above, you are going to have problems, did you know that according to the latest JCS Issue there are more than 40 definitions for consciousness?
Obviously as long as people keep expanding the number of definitions that there are, they are not going to agree on a consensus definition, and so no test is going to be accepted by all of them.You ask if I am a politician. Well no, I am not. You claim I am not answering the questions but you are asking me the wrong questions, I am not a philosopher, I am an architect building a model that might explain the memory. If you ask me about my architecture, I can answer the questions no problem, but if you insist on asking questions that have nothing to do with my architecture, my answers will have little to do with what you are asking, because you are pushing me out of my comfort zone. Besides you don’t really listen to my answers anyway, you have your own theory, and you don’t want me to confuse things with the facts. Especially if they are technical.
The Ego you describe is an illusion created by the brains control system, in order to simplify control. There is no one “Self” looking in or out. If only because the brain is massively parallel, and so has to simulate a self, in order to give it a single POV from which to calculate how to react to the environment. Dennett suggested that there had to be some sort of “Virtual Machine” that converted a massively parallel architecture into a serial architecture in order to achieve consciousness. But it turns out that what is really needed is for the brain to create an illusion of a serial control system.
Whether or not you accept the term homunculis, your definition of EGO places it squarely in the place of the Homunculis of classic Philosophy, and so your theory of how the EGO works, must have the exact same problems that have caused philosophers to attack the homunculis. Yes Homunculis has been taken as a derogatory term, because despite the fact that philosophers have warned against all forms of homuncular theories, people persist in using them. Somehow you seem to think that by calling it an EGO instead of a homunculis, and pretending some Quantum Physical aspect to it, that it is somehow different, but you have merely replaced the spirit with Quantum Mechanics in a classic Homuncular argument, and complain when I label it what it is?
I don’t grant you your oversimplified assumptions. I just don’t choose to react to them.
As for Criteria, Forms and Principles, well I have stated them in my architecture as I expand on it, but you found them too technical to study, and so you have missed them. Consciousness as I see it, is an extension of my memory theory, attention theory, and control theory. So when I apply a criteria, form or principle to my memory theory, it informs my consciousness theory. But I can see why you would want to claim that I haven’t given you text and verse, you seem to want the principles without the information on how they need to be applied.
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It is nice that this thread has been reactivated. May I remind though, that it’s purpose is to discuss certain aspects of attention AND consciousness. I have linked to papers by Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya mainly. I would be great to read them and refer to them.
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Otmar Pokorny Wrote:
“What they are calling ‘attention’ in the scholarpedia article, is simply body consciousness. When the master sargent yells attention, it is not your mind that snaps to attention, but your body”.
Body Consciousness? There must be an invisible body with an invisible brain with “invisible warts, moles and all..”. The only possibility for that is Dark Matter and its chemistry.
4. One might ask: “Is there a bio dark-matter”?
5. Will this bio dark matter be made of axion-like particles?
6. Will these dark bio-particles come in three groups to
correspond to electrons, protons and neutrons?7. Will monopoles or something similar be the force-
particles for axions?8. Can these type of axions have spins similar to the
fermions?9. Will they result in Dark Matter Chemistries?
10.Will Dark Matter Chemistries lead to the " Invisible Homo
sapiens?"11.Will there be a differential distribution of these bio
dark-particles to account for the taxonomic differences?12.Will stabilities of dark taxonomic-bodies depend on the
number of the kinds of bio dark-particles?13.If plants have only one type, and animals two types and
humans three types then these stabilities will be in the
ratio 3^1:3^2: 3^3 (3:9:27) where the base 3 refer to the
number of fermion-types (electrons, protons, neutrons)
and the powers correspond to the number of the types of
bio dark-particles. Plants emit 9 times more than humans.14. These stabilities will be reflected in the biophoton
emission rates, if biophotons result by interraction
(dissociation) of bioaxion-fermion spin-bonds.15. The experimental values determined globally show that
plants emit about 10 times more biophotons than
humans in close agrrement with the predicted value.16. Decoupling of the ‘dark’ body from the ‘light’ body
will leave the ‘dark’ body at a relatively negative
energy state (-E=mc^2). It will require more than that
to ‘raise’ it to any operational level.17. Chaneling and similar paranormal phenomena may be
by ‘dark-matter beings’ already at a higher energy
state.GOOGLE: for MIND MATTER; THE INVISIBLE HOMO sAPIENS; EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALISM; DARK BIOLOGY; even DARK POLITICS!!
Philip Benjamin
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Ottmar wrote: “And in response to Hans request to control the discussion I would say I am exploring not certain aspects of attention and consciousness, but attempting to establish a common ground to be able to establish such a discussion.”
In other words Ottmar you are off topic!
I am sorry Hans, but no matter how hard I try to stay on topic, Ottmar is always pulling me off topic, so that there is no discussion at all, unless I drift off of topic. I’ll try to ignore him more and speak to the topic.
Phillip I have to say, that what you are talking about Dark-biology strikes a chord with me, If I am correct Dark Matter has to have evolved, and it is entirely likely that an analog of biology has been formed, but I see no reason to assume dark matter takes the same forms as light matter. Unfortunately to discuss this here would be off topic. So I will forbear the discussion.
What we are supposed to be talking about, as Hans has so rightly reminded us, is the issue of whether or not attention implies consciousness, or if there are types of attention that do not.
One of the issues he mentioned is the concept that failing to attend to an element because our body automatically oriented on it, is not the same as concentrating on the object.
We could say that Orienting, is a weak type of attention, while Concentration is a Strong type of attention. Hans, asks, does not calling weak attention the same word as Strong attention take away from the definition of Strong Attention?
To counter this, let me ask the question in reverse, Does orienting towards a subject not indicate to us, that the individual is attempting to attend to it? In other words Hans is basing his definition on success at attending to an object, while the proponents of weak attention are basing their definitions on the attempt. Since the attempt is based on instinct not conscious choice, although you can consciously choose not to react if you have advance notice of the stimuli, weak attention proponents say that consciousness is not required for attention, and even orienting can be a part of it.
So for there to be an issue worthy of discussion, there should be some barrier to weak attention that keeps it from becoming strong attention until consciousness is applied. If such existed it would probably be in the form of a different mechanism for weak attention than is found for strong attention, but, as near as I can tell, the exact same mechanism is used for both, at least in the intermediate stages, shall we say medium weak attention where Intention is involved instead of Volition. Naturally I am already on the books as suggesting that Hans is being Naive when he assumes that there is some causal link between consciousness and attention, Instead, I suggest there is a causal link between attention and Consciousness, and that Strong Attention Proponents must therefore eventually give way to weak Attention proponents. But that is of course only my own opinion, and a possible trend that some scientists are following.
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