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The quest for a definition of the term 'consciousness'
Hans Ricke
Saturday, 17 May 2008 08:55 UTC
Arnold chose this expression of a quest to refer to what I am doing elsewhere, in fact almost fulltime since a while.
And he also gave his own definition, which is a remarkable one :
“I suggest the following succinct definition:
Consciousness is a transparent phenomenal experience of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective."
My actual concern is the situation that no generally agreed upon definition or a set of definitions exists within the fields of science that are working on the phenomenon of consciousness. This missing definition could be a kind of minimal consensus, with very few properties, but even that does not seem to exist.
There are many different views on this matter:
Thomas Metzinger: – an ill-defined term
David Chalmers: – we need more definitions
Christof Koch: – we just need a rough definition
Max Velmans: – we follow the common usage in which the term “consciousness” is synonymous with “awareness” or “conscious awareness”
Andrew Brook: – It is unlikely that consciousness studies will ever achieve a sound scientific footing with such an imprecise and ungainly conceptual toolbox
( these statements – Chalmers and Koch – not to be taken literally, but from how I remember the talks )
My idea that a well founded group of veteran consciousness researchers should be locked up like in a ‘conclave’ until they have come up with some sensible agreement has not been entirely embraced, which may be due to many reasons.
I still think this task is overdue and the current situation is almost embarrassing and it is the obligation of those people who want to establish a science of consciousness.
So getting back to Arnold’s definition I do not think it is possible to find wider agreement upon a definition like that. Also I believe a process of definition will need a longer determined effort, in which properties will be included others will be excluded. As long as there is not even undisputed wether consciousness is a real or an illusiory phenomenon, as long as there is still unlclear wether consciousness is only receptive or as well active, we are facing quite some task, but I think it is worth going for it.
references:
Max Velmans on Defining Consciousness
Andrew Brook on Terminology of Consciousness
John Searle on Consciousness
Thomas Metzinger on The Problem of Consciousness
Robert van Gulick on Consciousness
Rocco Gennaro on Consciousness
David M. Rosenthal on Concepts and Definitions of Consciousness
Please note this:
Hi all,
even though there were some interesting new turns last week, we have decided to lock this thread for several reasons. We may reopen it when the special edition of the Journal of Consciousness Studies covering this topic is out.
Meanwhile the thread stays locked and pinned. If you want to continue certain lines of thought please open a new thread for this.
Yours friendly
Hans
Updated 07 April 2009 06:50 UTC
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I agree with Costa’s comments. I also think that reading Revonsuo’s book Inner Presence (MIT Press, 2006) will give a good perspective on the “hard problem”.
Arnold
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Below I reproduce the Abstract of a Poster to be presented at the ASSC 2008 meeting. It offers us important insights (as the title says) about mathematics and similar symbolic thinking ativities.
The Poster is available at the ASSC siteAlfredo
Most Important Insights About Consciousness
Nathan Batalion, Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture (PIC) Department, Binghamton University, USA
Akin to the experience of Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist at Harvard who had a stroke and then shared the experience (You-Tube presentation “How It Feels To Have A Stroke”) I was a math prodigy with a philosophic bent who later suffered a left-brain meltdown. I had a high fever and suddenly became aphasic (unable to speak in whole sentences and think mathematically). The odds of being a prodigy and later developing aphasia (plus recovering) are so minuscule I may be the only person on Earth able to communicate such a joint experience. In the process my whole worldview changed “day and night.” The most important insight was that the flow between my brain hemispheres or “consciousness” was my life’s essence. To fail to understand this risked not fathoming what kept me alive or prevented serious ailments in me, others, and nature. Functionally, however, what was this consciousness really? Because it ties us to everything, consciousness’ definition may appear impossible to close in on. Philosophers and scientists have tried brilliantly to outline its functions, metaphysics, contents, aspects, qualia, and neural correlates. However, my second key insight appeared as such a closing in. I saw how consciousness forms a universal relationship of connection, again both within myself, others and nature. To be conscious of X was simply to connect to X. As childishly simple as this may sound, this has revolutionary implications. For example, nothing was more absolutely certain for me than using math symbols to gain truths. After this aphasia, that belief was broken. A third key insight arose that math symbols, demythologized, are tools for separating elements of consciousness. In evolving physics and chemistry they do not guide us towards consciousness’ essence. If too deeply used to redesign nature mechanically, we also create eco-crises that threaten life. Not surprisingly, we further see epidemics like life-threatening cancers. Such dark shadows, amid explosive technological progress, are anomalies. Inescapable anomalies force us to challenge and change core paradigms. Here there is a hope of rescuing ourselves and the planet, and as we move towards a higher integrity and depth of understanding.
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Dear Arnold:
I am sorry if I gave the impression that my summary could be the “official” balance of the discussion. I leave this task for Hans, who is conducting this Forum.
Regarding sentience, I consider it as mere sensibility to stimuli patterns. I am adept of the third definition, stating that consciousness is structured sentience connected to attribution of meaning (which occurs in the 3D spatial and temporal framework mentioned in my other definitory attempts) and with the control of action. Therefore I consider sentience as a necessary but not sufficient factor for consciousness.
Best
Alfredo
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" The most important insight was that the flow between my brain hemispheres or “consciousness” was my life’s essence. To fail to understand this risked not fathoming what kept me alive or prevented serious ailments in me, others, and nature"
this covers my IDM focus on meaning derivation and with it the emergence of consciousness as an agent of mediation – this expressed in the oscillations across the hemispheres essential for deriving meaning of the novel/complex
The ASYMMETRIC nature manifest is due to the ASYMMETRIC nature of the hemispheres where they cover particular/general aka anti-symmetry/symmetry – this DICHOTOMY, being asymmetric, in fact manifests a trichotomy and so mediation dynamics.
This realm of asymmetry is the source of language and that includes Mathematics – IOW we can identify the neurological roots of mathematics by understanding self-referencing of dichotomies, ESPECIALLY asymmetric ones.
The ROOTS of the oscillations are in simple paradox processing where the oscillations in such reflect our brains mediating across part/whole dynamics as it we try to ‘pin down’ meaning but cannot.
Click here to experience sensory paradox
From the focus on paradox processing comes the ‘fact’ we are born to argue and in doing so elicit meaning and on into languages – the dynamics covered in my Categories of Mediation
Chris.
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Dear Chris and All:
In this Forum we should try to focus on the issue of defining consciousness, a difficult and elusive task that needs our cooperation in order to have a productive result.
Chris’ posts often refer to his model, but he still did not propose a definition (sorry if I missed something).
I suggest that from now on everybody posting to this Forum should briefly state his/her definition of consciousness and only after doing so to bring new ideas/evidence for the discussion. Otherwise, we are at the risk of raising too many ideas and not being able to integrate them collectively.Best Regards
Alfredo Pereira Jr.
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Alfredo wrote : “Chris’ posts often refer to his model, but he still did not propose a definition (sorry if I missed something).”
Yes, IMHO you have missed A LOT. The material covers the source of meaning and as such covers all POSSIBLE descriptions of the concept of “consciousness”. No matter what terms you use, what methods you propose, they will all conform to the generic categories of meaning defined by the IDM material. The examples I have given in the text are 64 in number and EACH of those has 64 aspects. OR we can self-reference and jump from 64 to 4096 or 16+million or just fall back to eight or two.
SO, we have definitions of consciousness that in fact cover an ASPECT of the WHOLE where the WHOLE is a set of POTENTIALS or CLASSES applicable to the notion of “Consciousness” from a scientific perspective (as in derived from a mechanism and so repeatable. THEN comes uniqueness in the development of unique expressions, instances of the classes)
What this brings out is (a) the TOPOLOGICAL (symmetry bias) foundations of consciousness, in combination with (b) the MEREOLOGICAL (anti-symmetry bias) foundations of consciousness. The COMBINATION of these gives us asymmetry and so the EXPRESSION of consciousness in the form of mediation.
The set of classes take us from relational space focus to object space focus and a mix in between but the oscillations in the brain reflect consciousness as dependent on the new/complex to swing it in to action – otherwise we work off autopilot, our instincts.
We can even determine the PURPOSE of each class and so STYLES of consciousness used in dealing with reality. As such the definition of the notion of consciousness is HUGE, at this primitive level alone covers 64 classes and each is specialist as well as generalist in that each can serve as a ground from which to develop.
So, Alfredo, my material can give you all of the POSSIBLE definitions of consciousness IN GENERAL, or more so the unconscious seedings of your conscious expressions ;-)
It is then LOCAL CONTEXT that will select one form over others, be it your personal preferences or current academic dogma or some social/religious determination!
Your struggles will be due to you NOT focusing on what is POSSIBLE in deriving understanding GIVEN the dynamics of the neurology and in particular self-referencing. The IDM material covers that and so sets down generic categories defining “consciousness” with a large set of properties all defined by analogy to the other classes; this being a property of self-referencing.
To start with I can give you 64 acceptable definitions of consciousness, or I can reduce that to 8 or increase it to 4096. What would you like?
The CONSTANT underneath all of these definitions is that they come out of asymmetry and brain oscillations. The categories derived from such reflect a property of self-referencing, autology. The autological lets any self-referencing system to describe itself IN GENERAL and finer details then tie that down to some local context; but from a science perspective the first step is to identify the template for consciousness and the neurology, and psychology, indicates that that comes out of mediation dynamics.
Chris.
Categories of Mediation -
Hans,
You wrote:
“If we would quantify the space thoughts take compared to visual and auditive content of consciousness, say during a normal day of a healthy person, we would probably find major differences in populations depending on their culture.”
I agree, but at the same time I would say that much of human thought is non-conscious thought/cognition. Thoughts of which we are conscious are typically in the form of images, sub-vocal phonological expressions, or (mainly in the case of the deaf) proprioceptive patterns associated with meaningful gestures. These are all part of our inner world just as you say. But in the context of our understanding of phenomenal experience/consciousness these conscious thoughts of our inner world are manifested within the same biological brain system that manifests the outside world to us. So, unless you are willing to defend dualism, our phenomenal experiences of the outside world and our phenomenal experiences of our inside world are all part of our global phenomenal world experienced from our privileged egocentric perspective, and happening within the same system of neuronal mechanisms (the retinoid system, according to my theory).
Best,
Arnold
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Chalkboard illustrations of artificial neural networks and computational models of brain function often depict a vastly oversimplified “stick figure” model of a generic cartoon neuron—a hastily drawn circle represents the cell body; a few short lines coming in from the left with plus and minus signs scattered about them represent a multiplicity of excitatory and inhibitory dendrites; a single line exiting to the right represents the axon. With this humble conceptual model in place, entire fields of neurobiological and artificial intelligence open up to the reflective mind like flowers in the morning light.
I propose that before we attempt to reduce consciousness to a verbal definition, we spend some time trying to imagine the “Ding an sich,” the thing itself—what it is, what it is made of, what its purpose is, and how it came to be. If we can agree upon the features possessed by such a rudimentary “cartoon conscious being—if, by judicious use of Occam’s razor, we can establish a preliminary understanding of what biophysical structures sustain it, what energetic force it is most likely composed of, and what physical laws and properties it exploits—if we can establish its primary utility to the animal housing it—and finally, if we can trace, by means of established biophysical mechanisms, a plausible, non-teleological evolutionary trajectory that could account for such a rudimentary cartoon conscious being coming into existence, then we can begin to craft a meaningful, thorough, yet concise verbal definition of “the phenomenon formally known as consciousness.”
Just like the other prototypical qualia—“redness” or “sweetness”—whose chief attribute is an inability to be defined either objectively or subjectively as anything other than what they self-evidently are, “consciousness” is really barely a noun at all. It is simply the word “conscious” (which is a perfectly fine, easily grokked adjective, like “red” and “sweet”) masquerading as a noun, for unlike simple, self-respecting nouns, it has no non-tautological definition. Like redness and sweetness, though we all know what consciousness is, it slyly evades description.
We are not considering consciousness in the abstract—although, in deference to our panpsychic and quantum physical colleagues—proto-consciousness, something like bare awareness, must be a constituent property of the physical universe, because, well, without stepping foot outside of the physical universe, here it is in all its glory beaming from within my very brain. We are rather considering embodied consciousness, sensorium consciousness, what it is like to be a normative human being in the waking state, aware of whatever visual, auditory, somatosensory, olfactory, gustatory, and mental percepts are currently present to his senses. Can we make a rudimentary, stick figure cartoon of such a conscious being’s experience that we can all agree, at least provisionally, to agree upon?
The animal I have in mind is represented by a large oval. Its organs of motility (fins, legs, or wings) are illustrated by a couple of lines protruding from its sides. It has a single sense organ, an eye (more about that later) with which it can discriminate either of two objects (or their absence): the jaggedness of the teeth of an approaching predator and the roundness of the fruit the animal feeds upon. It flees the aversive, pursues the attractive, and adaptively ignores the insignificant. So far, there is no need for consciousness. These formulaic response patterns to stereotypical percepts can all be handled by simple neural networks of, let’s say, a few tens of thousands of neurons arranged in a retinotopic cartoon cortical map at the back of the animal’s brain.
The cartoon eye evolved from a primitive eyespot, made up of, say, several thousand photon detecting cells that can do nothing more than inform the animal of the presence or absence of light. An adaptive random mutation causes the eyespot to buckle in, forming a cup. The shadow cast by the edge of the cup provides a great deal more information to the animal about the direction of the source of light, which it would be inclined to move toward as a more likely source of edible vegetable matter, including the luscious fruit upon which its sighted progeny will one day exclusively feed. The eyespot continues to collapse inward, becoming an ever more precise light source locator, like the oculus of the Pantheon that indicates by a circle of light upon the floor the precise location of the sun in the sky. Eventually, what began as an incurvate eyespot becomes a “camera obscura,” (first described by Aristotle as a darkened room with a small aperture in the light-tight door that casts an inverted image of stationary and moving objects in the outer world upon the opposite wall). In a similar manner, the incurvate visual cortex, at the back of the spheroid skull, maps a precise retinotopic image of the outside world in the form of a luminous hemispheric electromagnetic field presentation produced by the intermittent pixelated firings of visual cortex neurons stimulated by objects appearing in the visual field.
The cartoon animal is now ready to be inhabited by consciousness. The biophysical structural scaffolding of the cartoon sensorium is complete; Cupid (Eros)—representing the physical body—through the ineluctable force of evolution, has prepared a palace for Psyche, his energetic, yet reluctant bride. Purposelessly and non-teleologically, consciousness has been bequeathed a viable physical framework, an intermediate structure that links the pre-conscious to the conscious animal form.
Several hundred million years later, we exist as electromagnetic entities, beings of light, housed in a physical body, a spherical, multisensory presentation of electromagnetic imagery covering the entire cerebral cortex, neurons like pixels sparkling their patterns of sight and sound in an ocean of crystal-clear cerebral interstitial fluid, surrounded by a transparent membrane, all immersed in a grotto of crystal-clear cerebral spinal fluid, glistening, shimmering with inwardly visible light. It is the spherical topology of the presentation itself, hemmed in by the spheroid cortex (from L. “bark” or “rind”) surrounding us from all sides, that is the primary source of the illusion of the sensorium from which we infer the existence of a separate, central self.
The topology of conscious experience corresponds in broad strokes to a 180° reversed map of the large-scale architecture of the cerebral cortex. In fact the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to have executed their awkward rearrangement so as to allow the hemispheres of the sensorium to be in proper orientation to the preexistent visual cortex, in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. In other words, Psyche rides the brain backward and experiences the whole rind of the cortex as the volumetric confine of her egocentric sensorium.
Coupled with the visual percept of the approaching teeth of a predator, the brain uses particular concoctions of neurotransmitters to frighten and motivate consciousness into action through unpleasant chaotic neuronal oscillations or other aversive brain states. When Psyche correctly decides to flee, she is then rewarded with a much more pleasant inner experience. The visual percept of rounded fruit becomes coupled through evolutionary processes with hedonic neurotransmitters whose pleasurable effects are further amplified when she adaptively initiates a closer approach.
This cartoon conscious being provides a plausible “just so” story and gives us something tangible to begin to define. Poke as many holes in it as you like; it’s only a piñata, after all. But I do challenge you to consider what your own cartoon conscious being would look like and how it would fare when subjected to the scrutiny of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy and several decades of thorough and ruthless introspection. From my own cartoon model I would propose the following definition [to follow in a subsequent post after marinading a bit longer in my mind], which is similar in many respects to the definition that appears to have evolved so gracefully in the course of this forum; namely:
a) Consciousness is structured sentience,
b) that evolved in human beings to a spatial 3-D and temporal egocentric framework,
c) that is used to control action,
d) that occurs in a natural, social and cultural environment.
Since the human body loses no mass at death, and mass and energy is all there is to work with (and since we want this endeavor to be taken seriously by the scientific community), I propose that we stipulate that consciousness must be, by the simple process of elimination, an energetic phenomenon of the quantum electromagnetic field, held in place by biological matter but not consisting of it. The strong and weak nuclear forces are confined to the nucleus of the atom; the gravitational force is far too diffuse and weak to enmesh with biological systems. The electromagnetic force, however, is responsible for generating nearly all biological structures and processes. The Penrose-Hameroff model with its quantum coherent microtubules and self collapsing quantum wave functions nicely fills the bill and is hands down the best theoretical physics to provide a substrate platform for consciousness.
I would of course like to see the “spatial 3-D and temporal egocentric framework” tied down to the physical brain in reverse orientation, left to right and front to back, but this is perhaps more than the average bear can swallow.
I would like to define consciousness as being primarily sensuous, and only secondarily mental. This is counterintuitive to the present audience, perhaps, identified as we self-selected consciousness hounds are with our ideas, words, and concepts. But nothing is as stunning and overpowering as pure sensuous reality. No memory or thought-form is ever as vivid and colorful as whatever visual scene or sonic space now surrounds you. From an evolutionary standpoint, we may assume that not that long ago our forefathers thought not much at all, and were as fully sensuous in their conscious experience as any other animal must, by default, be.
This post is getting tiresomely long; I beg your forgiveness. Just wanted to throw in my two cents.
If you want to read a much fuller presentation of these and other ideas, stop by my website, PsychesPalace.com, and read a couple of chapters from the book, or look it up on Google’s book search. Psyche’s Palace: How the Brain Generates the Light of the Soul.
Yours friendly (I like that, Hans!),
David Holmes
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Neuroimaging: Free will? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, 410 – 411 (June 2008) | doi:10.1038/nrn2404
Recent findings have shown that activity in two non-motor-related cortical areas can predict the outcome of a movement decision up to 10 seconds before an individual becomes aware of the decision.
The question of whether humans have free will has been discussed for centuries by philosophers and religious scholars, and more recently by neuroscientists. Haynes and colleagues have now added fuel to the debate by showing that activity in two non-motor-related cortical areas can predict the outcome of a movement decision up to 10 seconds before an individual becomes aware of the decision.
Volunteers were placed in a functional MRI scanner and were asked to press a button with either their left or their right index finger whenever they wanted to. Throughout the experiment the volunteers watched a screen that showed a succession of letters, and they had to remember the letter that was presented on the screen at the moment they made the decision which button to press. This revealed that most of the decisions were consciously formed 1 second before the motor response was executed.
The authors then analyzed the activity in different brain areas during the time preceding the button press, using pattern-based decoders. This type of analysis can detect ‘signature’ patterns of activity that are associated with a particular decision. The authors found such patterns of activity in Brodmann area 10 and in the parietal cortex (the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex) — areas that are thought to be involved in executive function and self-processing — and the patterns predicted with high accuracy which button would be pressed. Intriguingly, the signatures appeared up to 7 seconds before the volunteers consciously chose their motor response. Because the haemodynamic blood-oxygen-level-dependent response is thought to represent neuronal activity that occurred about 3 seconds earlier, this finding suggests that activity in the two areas encodes decisions approximately 10 seconds before they enter consciousness.
Activity patterns that were observed in the supplemental and presupplemental motor area approximately 5 seconds prior to a decision entering awareness predicted its timing, indicating that different brain areas might be involved in forming the intention to make a movement and deciding when to make it.
Although it is hard to imagine that our decisions might be made subconsciously, these findings have important implications. Can people be held accountable for their actions if they do not become aware of their decisions until after they are made? You decide.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER
1. Soon, C. S. et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neurosci. 11, 543-545 (2008)
FURTHER READING
1. Haynes, J. -D. & Rees, G. Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans. Nature Rev. Neurosci. 7, 523-534 (2006) -
Dear Bob M.:
Excellent Abstract, it indicates beyond doubt that consciousness has a role in the control of action, call it “Free Will” or just “decision”.
What do you think Jonathan?Best Regards
Alfredo
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