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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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This topic has been locked by the forum moderators.
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Hans wrote: “The process of becoming conscious of an apple does not need any language whatsoever. That is a different type of process. Call that an intellectual process. Any conscious being can become conscious of an apple without giving it a name.
The questions you are addressing by this kind of statement belong e.g. into the field of higher order theories of consciousness.”your confusing awareness and the unconscious with self-awareness and so consciousness. The whole we experience unconsciously is NOT the same as what we experience consciously. See such as:
How the brain understands pictures
The abstract to the mentioned paper:
Neuron. 2005 Jul 7;47(1):155-66.
Figure and ground in the visual cortex: v2 combines stereoscopic cues with gestalt rules.
Qiu FT, von der Heydt R.
Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
Figure-ground organization is a process by which the visual system identifies some image regions as foreground and others as background, inferring 3D layout from 2D displays. A recent study reported that edge responses of neurons in area V2 are selective for side-of-figure, suggesting that figure-ground organization is encoded in the contour signals (border ownership coding). Here, we show that area V2 combines two strategies of computation, one that exploits binocular stereoscopic information for the definition of local depth order, and another that exploits the global configuration of contours (Gestalt factors). These are combined in single neurons so that the “near” side of the preferred 3D edge generally coincides with the preferred side-of-figure in 2D displays. Thus, area V2 represents the borders of 2D figures as edges of surfaces, as if the figures were objects in 3D space. Even in 3D displays, Gestalt factors influence the responses and can enhance or null the stereoscopic depth information.
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Add to the above:
(2)
Neuroreport. 2005 Sep 8;16(13):1483-1487
Figure-ground segregation requires two distinct periods of activity in V1: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study.
Heinen K, Jolij J, Lamme VA.
1Anatomy Department, Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E6BT, UK 2Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Department of Psychology, The Netherlands Ophthalmic Research Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Discriminating objects from their surroundings by the visual system is known as figure-ground segregation. This process entails two different subprocesses: boundary detection and subsequent surface segregation or ‘filling in’. In this study, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that temporally distinct processes in V1 and related early visual areas such as V2 or V3 are causally related to the process of figure-ground segregation. Our results indicate that correct discrimination between two visual stimuli, which relies on figure-ground segregation, requires two separate periods of information processing in the early visual cortex: one around 130-160 ms and the other around 250-280 ms.
(3)
Psychol Med. 2005 Jul;35(7):1043-51. Related Articles, Links
Lateral interactions in the visual cortex of patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Keri S, Kelemen O, Benedek G, Janka Z.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Szeged, Szeged, Hungary. szkeri@phys.szote.u-szeged.hu
BACKGROUND: Schizophrenia is associated with perceptual organization deficits and abnormal neuronal connectivity has been described in early visual areas. The purpose of this study was to investigate the functional integrity of lateral connections in early visual areas of patients with schizophrenia and type I bipolar disorder with a history of psychosis. METHOD: Twenty-four out-patients with schizophrenia, 22 out-patients with bipolar disorder, and 20 healthy control subjects participated in the study. Using a computer-assisted psychophysical test, contrast thresholds were measured for centrally presented target stimuli (Gabor patches), which were surrounded by two collinear flankers. Target-to-flanker distances were 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 122. Psychophysical measures were contrast threshold changes at each target-to-flanker distance compared with baseline thresholds determined for isolated targets with no flankers. Clinical measures included IQ, positive, negative, and depressive symptoms. Results. In patients with schizophrenia, flankers did not facilitate contrast detection for target stimuli at 2-6 lambda distances compared to controls [effect size (Cohen’s d): 1.25-1.42]. The inhibitory effect of flankers (0 and 1lambda) and contrast thresholds in the absence of flankers were spared. Patients with bipolar disorder did not differ from the controls. Medicated and non-medicated patients displayed similar performances. Positive and negative symptoms and depression did not correlate with contrast threshold values. CONCLUSIONS: Excitatory lateral connections in early visual cortex are specifically impaired in patients with schizophrenia, which may contribute to perceptual disorders such as unclear seeing, partial or skewed sight, disrupted rectilinearity, and abnormal figure-ground segregation.
(NOTE IN THE ABOVE THAT “abnormal figure-ground segregation” can be a source of ‘creative’ perspectives)
(4)
Neuron. 2005 Jul 7;47(1):5-8.
Resolving border disputes in midlevel vision.
Nakayama K.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Two papers in this issue of Neuron specify the coding of border ownership, the basis of figure-ground segmentation, in early extrastriate visual cortex (area V2). Recording from a population of neurons, Qiu and von der Heydt show that border ownership assignments based on 2D images show the same bias when tested with stereopsis. Zhaoping shows that a neural model of V2 can make appropriate border assignments based on 2D images.
(5)
Cereb Cortex. 2005 Apr 20;
Synchrony dynamics in monkey V1 predict success in visual detection.
van der Togt C, Kalitzin S, Spekreijse H, Lamme VA, Super H.
Vision and Cognition II, The Netherlands Ophthalmic Research Institute, Meibergdreef 47, 1105BA Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Behavioral measures such as expectancy and attention have been associated with the strength of synchronous neural activity. On this basis, it is hypothesized that synchronous activity affects our ability to detect and recognize visual objects. To investigate the role of synchronous activity in visual perception, we studied the magnitude and precision of correlated activity, before and after stimulus presentation within the visual cortex (V1), in relation to a monkey’s performance in a figure-ground discrimination task. We show that during the period of stimulus presentation a transition in synchronized activity occurs that is characterized by a reduction of the correlation peak height and width. Before stimulus onset, broad peak correlations are observed that change towards thin peak correlations after stimulus onset, due to a specific decrease of low-frequency components. The magnitude of the transition in correlated activity is larger, i.e. a stronger desynchronization occurs, when the animal perceives the stimulus correctly than when the animal fails to detect the stimulus. These results therefore show that a transition in synchronous firing is important for the detection of sensory stimuli. We hypothesize that the transition in synchrony reflects a change from loose and global neuronal interactions towards a finer temporal and spatial scale of neuronal interactions, and that such a change in neuronal interactions is required for figure-ground discrimination.
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Chris,
You are committing the error of equating perception with consciousness. Perception is certainly one aspect of phenomenal experience/consciousness. But it is important to recognize that perception can only occur after one is conscious.
Best,
Arnold
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Robert,
You ask:
“Where in your model is the blind spot removed? " 1
“Where does binding with non-visual information occur?” 2
1. What makes you think that the blind spot has to be removed? The blind spot is an innate property of the retinal structure and is never removed. An interesting aspect of the retinoid model is that it explains why we don’t normally notice the blind spot. If we hold our fixation straight ahead and slowly move a pencil from the point of fixation out into the peripheral visual field, at about an eccentricity of 15 deg a gap appears in the pencil separating the top part from the bottom part. This is caused by the blind spot on the retina where the ganglion-cell afferents come together as a bundle to project to higher centers. So this is a property of the peripheral retinotopic projection. As soon as we relax our forward fixation and make a saccade to the spatiotopic location of the pencil in retinoid space, the blind-spot gap disappears.
2. An important advantage of my model is that it provides a neuronal explanation for spatiotemporal binding of diverse somatosensory features. Each of the sensory modalities is organized and mapped around its own specialized origin. But in order to have a proper phenomenal representation of our world, all of the diverse sensory features must be projected within our coherent phenomenal 3D space and combined in a spatiotemporal alignment that corresponds to the way things are in the world from our unique egocentric perspective. The self locus in the retinoid system provides the master coordinate of origin (I!) to enable the proper projection and superposition of all somatosensory modalities within retinoid space.
Best,
Arnold
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Arnold, we are getting into the dynamics of paradox processing in the brain and the implication of such as covered here
Direct sensory experience is objectified through pattern matching and the focus on details extraction and labelling. The Necker cubes being a simple example. What is unconsciously processed is the gestalt of the complex line drawing out of which comes the conscious focus on the cubes.
The complex line drawing is taken ‘as is’ and is MEANINGLESS until filtered by us instinctively. The oscillations we experience reflect the brain working in mediation mode trying to extract the discrete forms and unable to do so due to both perceived cubes sharing a line and so not fully discretisable.
This oscillation dynamic extends into our consciousness in instinctive reactions to paradox in the form of our use of argument – you say A and I say NOT-A and the instinct is to resolve that apparent paradox of A and NOT-A in the same spacetime – we move into mediation mode and use of language and so of consciousness usage as compared to the unconscious that lacks precision, lacks differentiation and as such experiences the complex line drawing ‘as is’ compared to our conscious experience ‘as interpreted’.
Formants in audition can also elicit this sort of paradox processing and the overall focus covers metonymy/metaphor, part/whole, anti-symmetric/symmetric with mediation emerging as we oscillate across those asymmetric dichotomies to derive meaning.
This gets into passive perception (the complex line drawing) and active perception (imposition of filtering systems that force the detection of the cubes).
The movement from whole to discretisation/fragmentation of such covers consciousness-as-mediator and so movement from the immediacy of AS IS to the delay of AS INTERPRETED – delay being a property of consciousness at work in the task of mediation.
The overall dynamic covers the refinement of a whole (‘as is’ experience) through details analysis and use of memory feedback. What this allows for is the establishments of habits to aid instincts and so refine ‘as is’ experience and so conserve energy overall, we function off autopilot (and the realm of the symmetric) and so from an unconscious position reflecting awareness but no emphasis on self-awareness – for an instinct/habit to work efficiently it is outside of conscious awareness where consciousness is more responding to that instinct (often in surprise as in ‘why did i do THAT?’).
Libet’s work (and work of others) bring out the tie of delay and mediation dynamics in learning processes – when a habit/memory has been set the delay goes away and we work immediately in response to a stimulus that elicits the learnt habit – we move into ‘as is’ existence and as such operate at a level too fast for consciousness to deal with (in fact consciousness INTERFERES with such behaviour – we can trip over our feet if we run down stairs and proactively watch our feet doing it)
The awareness associated with ‘as is’ existence is more sub/un-conscious in behaviour, more symmetric in manner (stimulus-response) and LACKS the precision of consciousness in that the energy-conserving nature of the symmetric position works off extraction of essentials from experiences to form habits/memories and so covers ‘rules/laws/approximations’ of conscious experiences – mediation pops up and when completed pops back down.
More so the attention system can sum snippets of consciousness multi-tasking to focus on one specific ‘problem’ and so intensify the experience of consciousness. The snippets being in (a) driving a car (unconscious, habits at work) and (b) talking to a passanger (conscious) and © keeping an eye on the kids in the back seat (sub-conscious). (a) reflects habitualised behaviour and no need for conscious management, (b) covers consciousness and © a thread of shifting perspective whilst talking and driving. IF a driving issue develops demanding full consciousness-as-mediation then (b) and © are suspended as all is focused on dealing with some novelty involving (a).
The snippets emphasis is brought out in other neuron-dependent life forms mediating dangers where their awareness of a danger lasts for minutes to hours and then is lost and the danger can be re-experienced as if ‘new’ – there is no memory beyond that time period and the life form falls back onto instinctive behaviours. (Stephen Rose’s work on chick memory brought this out).
Active perception as such serves to refine passive perception and makes the distinction between awareness-as-is vs awareness-as-interpreting and so the latter including self-awareness – the act of differentiating introduces the discreteness required to be self-aware. Awareness-as-is covers the integration of life form and context, there is no perceived ‘cut’, no distinction that is necessary for the definition of consciousness.
In the realm of collective dynamics there is the dichotomy of CONTROL/FLUX that brings out the perculation/multi-tasking capabilities of awareness (covering others and self) with the high energy, single context focus of fully differentiated consciousness and a focus on control through identity assertion – a mediating focus of perpetual engagement/re-engagement with context and so a proactive emphasis over the reactive. This brings out the collective nature of others-awareness (social being) vs the personal nature of self-awareness (psychological being).
The integrating nature of others-awareness covers an emphasis on social ties and a lack of individual consciousness in favour of instincts and social dynamics. It is demands on distinction-making that aids in differentiating a unique consciousness from the crowd and so self-aware from others-aware, the proactive from the reactive.
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Dear Chris,
may I remind you, for the last time, what this thread is about? And also that you can open threads with topics that interest you?
Yours friendly
Hans -
To make a fiction of consciousness that might be useful in investigating it, try this constraint:
Consciousness is limited, ontically and epistemically, to any inescapably singular system that has it. Otherwise it is non-existent, unknowable.
If you are inescapably singular, and of sufficient complexity and dynamic form, your consciousness is what, in your own inner experience, happens to you; it isn’t necessarily what you think it to be, the fictions you have made out of it.
Consciousness is something to do with the system’s doings, what it actively consists of. You can’t observe it from outside.
When an inescapably singular system projects its entertainment of its experience of its consciousness on to its fiction of its commonsense realities, as it were externalising it, putting it outside itself, the fictional object created is only imaginary.
To find out about other people’s consciousnesses, and to make a stereotyped fiction of consciousnesses in general, you need special investigatory tricks peculiar to this particular enterprise. Most scientific tricks for objective realising won’t work.
Sample outline investigatory proceedings for consciousness:
1 Get a system to produce and exhibit its warranted fictions for its consciousness using investigatory craft bespoke for introspecting; from whose products/reports make a fictional stereotype for imagining consciousness;
2 Make a polymonadic fiction of brain/complex system in which you can [a] set out the constraints/conditions for consciousness to occur, and [b] entertain a motif as if of consciousness, and whose constituents can be observed;
3 Make situations in which those monadic reports of 1 and the polymonadic observations of 2 can be co-entertained;
4 Make a predictive fiction for what they have in common;
5 Do things based on such predictions and see if magic (an invariant unprecedented interesting/useful do-happen event) ensues.A polymonadic fiction is one which you have constrained to be a unified epistemic field – you set pre-established harmonies so that objects in the fiction are known equivalently to the fiction’s self-agents so endowed
You constrain your fictions of commonsense realities to be, also, a unified ontic field – where all objects so designated exist independent of any self-agents in the fiction.
You so believe in these fictions’ unifications that you can proceed well enough on their basis.
This definitional fiction has the implication that aetherial consciousness – disembodied unknowable immaterial universal animation, completely distributed godliness – is neither knowable nor existent.
Those indissolubly wedded to this kind of fabulous motif might ask themselves what use such a motif could serve, how it would function, and how might we proceed more safely and effectively on its basis.
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Dear Bob,
just two points:
1. Even if we do not know wether consciousness exists in any other entity than human beings, in a process of definition we can clearly state that we are addressing specifically human consciousness.
2. Human consciousness is observable from the outside, at least to some extent and in some sense. If we refer to consciousness as the content of conscious experience, we have very good studies that tell us what is happening inside the brain of someone while e.g. a conscious visual percept is experienced. This observation still has inaccuracies, but to some extent it tells us very meaningful things about who human consciousness functions.
Yours friendly
Hans -
Dear Anthony,
on page 111 of this thread you wrote:
“Similarly, if one asks, what is consciousness?, the starting-point answer will need to speak of the physiological activities that human organism carries out, performs – the activities that get performed to receive information about objects and events, specifically, information about the state or changing state of the system itself or of its external environment that it can perceive; the activities that get performed to process that information to yield an adjustment in the organism that accords with evolved biological imperatives.”
Objection! About consciousness we will NOT need to start with physiology. A much more natural starting point is the phenomenology of consciousness.
We know about consciousness because we experience. We know this in the most direct way possible. We may overlook this, it may take time or effort to realize this, but then we know it.
Physiology comes in much later, centuries later if you will. Physiology certainly comes in when we want to understand particular problems and aspects of conscious experience.
Yours friendly
Hans -
On 01 April 2009 | 12:42 Robert Stonjek writes:
Robert writes: What is well beyond empirical science in the model you have presented is the nature of the receiver of those thoughts. That receiver is entirely mysterious in your model. Yet the receiver of those thoughts must also have a large subconscious processing network to make sense of the thoughts passed through the door.
Anthony responds: When I speak a sentence or paragraph from the memo handed me by the interlocutors behind the nearly closed door, I speak what my “large subconscious processing network” (viz., those interlocutors) has already determined regarding the sense of my thought. I speak as a robot. Should you and I have a lively, spontaneous conversation over lunch, I would learn of my thoughts as spoken, by hearing my own voice, no sooner than you would learn of my thoughts as spoken – and vice-versa. No time to think for oneself much during lively conversation. The conversation occurs between two robots, reading off the messages from our subconsciouses.
Anthony continues: However, a robot might rebel. It might learn to quickly evaluate the messages from its master, its subconscious, asking itself if subscribing to a subconscious message serves itself or its master. If not the former, it could rebel, alter the message to suit itself, or ignore it. Eventually, as such ability to metacognize improves, the ratio of thinking, 95% subconscious-mindly to 5% conscious mindly, might change to favor a larger fraction for evaluative thinking.
Robert writes: Like so many similar models, whether Descartes’ homunculus or shadows on a cave wall or messages through a crack in the door, if there is a receiver and experiencer of those thoughts then all we have done is siphoned off the less mysterious at the expense of creating an ever more mysterious element that we unwittingly ignore or assume that we don’t have to explain.
Anthony responds: Truly, we have the conscious experiencer to explain, and one that can metacognize. Yet, as I´ve tried to convey in other posts, metacognizing can explain conscious experiencing, inasmuch as the physiological activity of experiencing – an information processing activity – can target the physiological activity of experiencing an event/object otherwise experienced non-consciously.
Anthony continues: No unwitting ignorance here. Every organism experiences non-consciously, insofar as it receives information about events and processes that information to generative adjustive rersponses in accord with its naturally selected biological imperatives. Organisms like humans, with their advanced information processing ability, meta-experience at least some of their otherwise non-conscious experience. They consciously experience, to a limited degree – they metacognize, to a limited degree. My simple parable, designed to suggest that, however limited, human metacognition and meta-experiencing has the opportunity to advance in ability – exploiting the crack in the door.
Robert writes: A frontal assault on consciousness and cognition in general does not make such a division but excepts a degree of complexity throughout the neural system. But in such an approach the complexity remains fairly constant and manageable until the entire human psyche is explained.
Anthony responds: Yes, I agree, and find your comment consistent with my responses above, though a minor quibble, as it leaves unexplained the “frontal assaulter”, and how “the entire human psyche is explained”. Passive voice.
Robert, ending, writes: The weakness of all models that I am aware of is the attempt to explain, say, vision without including more complex aspects of cognition. In this they find simple systems to study, which is good, but the result is that conscious perception becomes more mysterious as a result.
Anthony, ending, responds: I hope you do not consider that the concept of meta-experiencing – meta-information-processing – fails to include “more complex aspects of cognition”.
Yours warmly,
Anthony Sebastian
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