Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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Properties of a conscious entity
Hans Ricke
Saturday, 30 August 2008 05:07 UTC
Dear all,
I just have split this off the “quest” thread: because it is one of the most interesting theoretical topics.
What are the properties of a part, an entity within human beings, that enables consciousness? Can a network of cells have these properties? Can a single cell have these properties? What other conceivable structures could “do the trick?”
Yours friendly
Hans
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Dear all,
Let me give a first shot myself.
The question arises from the two proposals from Arnold and Jonathan, from general theoretical considerations that go back at least to William James.
I am just looking at human beings and how consciousness can be located within us. A cell from all we know is an entity, an entity that is receptive and responsive an many ways, so we can safely assume that both properties are present in cells.
Can a network of cells have these properties?
If an input would come to this network, let us assume a thought. This thought would come in a certain form, a physiological form. I think in the first go we could assume that it would be an electrical signal. Let us assume the thought is “time”. Where would this signal be received within a network? It could be received in one of the cells up to all of them. If one that is similar to Jonathan’s solution. If it is more than one, we have a problem.
A problem, because if more than one cell receives the signal, one more step is required before the conscious experience could happen, one more step of integration.
Where and how would this step of integration happen? And where after the integration would than the conscious experience happen?
I see this as a distinguishable task and not how a network can solve it.
My view is by the way that receptivity and conscious experience must happen simultaneously. And not first reception and then experience.
There can be a gap between reception and response of course.So I would argue, the basic and essential properties of a conscious entity that could be envisioned as the part within human beings where consciousness happens are:
1. receptivity
2. experienceAre there other properties that make sense and should be added?
Yours friendly
Hans -
Hans stated,
….“the part within human beings where consciousness happens are:
1. receptivity
2. experience
Are there other properties that make sense and should be added?”…..Hans, I think “receptivity” really means the ability to receive or interact in some way ergo is inherent part and parcel of the minimal “experience” ergo minimal experiential consciousness is at minimum one or more of the following six kinds of interference, as suggested by Fuller;
….."There are six fundamentally unique patterns of the resultants of interferences.
1. Tangential avoidance 2. Modulated noninterference (Frequency Modulation) 3. Reflection 4. Refraction 5. Smash-up (Explosion) 6. Critical Proximity (The Minimum Knot)…The first is a tangential avoidance, like knitting needles slipping by one another.
….The second is modulated noninterference, as in frequency modulation.
….The third is reflection, which results from a relatively direct impact and a rebound at an acute angle.
…. The fourth, which is refraction, results from a glancing impact and an obtuse angle of deflection.
…..The fifth is a smash-up, which results in several parts of one or the other interfering bodies going away from one another in a plurality of angular directions (as in an explosion).
…..The sixth is a going-the-same-way, “critical-proximity,” attraction link-up such as that established between the coordinated orbiting of Earth and Moon around the Sun.
1. Tangential avoidance 2. Modulated noninterference (Frequency Modulation)3. Reflection
4. Refraction
5. Smash-up (Explosion) 6. Critical Proximity (The Minimum Knot)"…… RYbo -
Dear Hans,
Your resume is excellent. A network, or group, of cells cannot co-experience the combined inputs of the group unless the neuron doctrine is violated – essentially because there is no such thing as ‘co-receptivity’. If the neuron doctrine can be violated it is unclear why we have neurons like the ones we have.You have said that you are unclear how even a cell could be aware of a human experience. This, I agree, is not easy. However, changes in cell membranes can spread fast enough for each input to a dendritic tree to modulate the effects of every other input within the time frame between firing spikes. I think it is therefore reasonably legitimate to consider events in one cell as a single causal juncture with many inputs determining the timing of one output. For a group of cells there is very clearly no single juncture. Beyond this ontological arguments may be more speculative, but this does seem at least a simple way forward.
The key point is that all inputs in a pattern which is to affect any output (report) from a system as an entire pattern must all influence at least one event. They must ‘cone down’ on a juncture. Experience cannot precede that juncture unless we believe that an intervention just before the juncture could ‘rewrite the past’. The juncture has to be an event in a cell.
I now realize that there is an interesting spin off of the argument so far. In order for many different patterns to stimulate many different outputs in behaviour the motor apparatus will need complex instructions and a single cell cannot give sufficiently complex instructions in the time available. It can only send out one sort of signal and there is no time to encode in a complex time sequence. Thus, the original logical argument not only requires experience to be in single cells, it also requires there to be thousands of copies of that experience. The motor apparatus is informed by an appropriate pattern of responses from many cells. Apart from anything else this begins to make sense of why so many millions of cells are firing at once in a brain. It also makes sense of the complexity of dendrites.
In simple terms, it all boils down to the brain wanting to be complex and quick. Coding in time is too late. So coding is done by setting up hugely complex cellular junctures and by having vast numbers of these so that their vast pattern recognizing capacity can be encoded in patterns of output – which in turn become complex patterns of input into the next bank of cells in the motor apparatus. In any other sort of computational model neuronal anatomy is a complete puzzle.
Best wishes
Jo
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I should probably respond to Alfredo here. So, dear Alfredo:
I fail to see what is concrete about laws about traditional cultural concepts like ‘person’ in the context of a scientific analysis. Science replaces folklore concepts like person, life or God with ideas that provide more reliable predictions. Cells may be a discovery late in human history, but do we go back to ‘vapours’ as cause of plague?
In what sense is a colony of human cells an ‘individual living system’? How does such a concept help us? It is far from neutral. It assumes an outdated ontology. We discovered that ‘atoms’ are not in fact the fundamental units of physics. We moved on. Why cannot we move on from ‘individuals’. It may be as painful as realizing you have apes as ancestors but we got over that!
I remain puzzled why you feel that billions of spectators create pandemonium. Each might have a particular perspective (receptive field) but none of these perspectives would conflict. Each will respond according to the way it has been programmed by learning – which is really the same thing as ‘co-ordination and hierarchy’ – the orders of a sergeant major are much the same as Hebbian reinforcement.
I would be interested to know which bits of spatial, population or temporal coding SCC does not fit with. Some examples would be worth discussing. Chris Nunn said he doubted that a single cell could support enough input for a conscious episode but he seemed satisfied with the response based on the combinatorial options of 40,000 inputs and some short term ‘spine-tuning’ etc. Jim Olds, who actually works on post synaptic integration had no problem.
Lets hear the details of the problems with spatial, temporal and population coding.
Best wishes
Jo
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Dear Jonathan:
Jo: I fail to see what is concrete about laws about traditional cultural concepts like ‘person’ in the context of a scientific analysis. Science replaces folklore concepts like person, life or God with ideas that provide more reliable predictions.
Alfredo: I am not arguing for folklore wisdom against science, I am arguing from the perspective of human sciences, e.g. Law Sciences.
Jo: Cells may be a discovery late in human history, but do we go back to ‘vapours’ as cause of plague?
Alfredo: Any theory of consciousness should refer to a phenomenon that exists since our species appeared in this world. Before we knew that cells exist a human individual was already considered to be conscious. But OK, I made a weak point here.
Jo: In what sense is a colony of human cells an ‘individual living system’?
Alfredo: As long as they establish bonds that keep the system alive, or as long as they are “autopoietic”.
Jo: How does such a concept help us? It is far from neutral. It assumes an outdated ontology. We discovered that ‘atoms’ are not in fact the fundamental units of physics. We moved on. Why cannot we move on from ‘individuals’. It may be as painful as realizing you have apes as ancestors but we got over that!
Alfredo: The ontology is very updated in the human sciences! Also: the discovery of sub-atomic particles does not imply that all atomic phenomena could be reduced to sub-atomic factors.
Jo: I remain puzzled why you feel that billions of spectators create pandemonium. Each might have a particular perspective (receptive field) but none of these perspectives would conflict.
Alfredo: The pandemonium means that the singular “conscious experience” of each single cell cannot be reliably copied to another cell. Therefore your solution to the binding problem fails, since it was based on the idea of having many copies of a conscious episode.
Jo: Each will respond according to the way it has been programmed by learning – which is really the same thing as ‘co-ordination and hierarchy’ – the orders of a sergeant major are much the same as Hebbian reinforcement.
Alfredo: Hebbian learning is a process that occurs between two or more cells, creating assemblies that display increased sensitivity to associative stimuli. The formation of such assemblies, with astrocyte and other connections besides the traditional axon, has been considered as a challenge to the Neuron Doctrine…
Jo: I would be interested to know which bits of spatial, population or temporal coding SCC does not fit with.
Alfredo: This is not exactly the issue. The issue is that many theorists believe that information in the brain (also conscious information) is encoded in collections of cells, not in the single cell. Peter Cariani, for instance, makes a strong case for collective temporal coding in the auditory system (you can check his Web page or the message he sent to BPCC some time ago). Walter Freeman also argues for collective spatial coding. For these authors, who make serious empirical research, the electric activity of single cells alone is meaningless. I know that your hypothesis is not based on electrical activity, but on phonon modes. Are phonon modes tangential to electric activity? If they are related, and electrical activity of the single neurons is meaningless, then phonon modes may also be meaningless (I do not believe they are meaningless, but for a different reason; they may participate in signal trasduction pathways that involve a collective of cells).
Jo: Some examples would be worth discussing. Chris Nunn said he doubted that a single cell could support enough input for a conscious episode but he seemed satisfied with the response based on the combinatorial options of 40,000 inputs and some short term ‘spine-tuning’ etc. Jim Olds, who actually works on post synaptic integration had no problem.
Lets hear the details of the problems with spatial, temporal and population coding.Alfredo: The problem is that not all single cells necessarily have access to the variety of information necessary to compose a conscious episode. Each cell may have the computational capacity to encode a conscious episode, but the infomation may not arrive to them. Even prefrontal neurons may not have access to all the information patterns that participate in a conscious episode.
This is an empirical issue amenable to divergent interpretations. Prefrontal neurons seem to be active in all kinds of conscious processing, but this activity (as measured in fMRI) does not mean that they are receiving information from the whole CNS.Best
Alfredo
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Dear Alfredo,
I remain unconvinced that you have revealed cracks in the single cell consciousness (SCC) fabric:
A person is a useful concept in law, but we were not talking about law. Autopoiesis does not help. My wife and I have established bonds that keep us alive. Without me she would probably still be in hospital and might have died. She noticed the little cancer on my back that I had removed. We are an autopoeitic couple of parents in an autopoietic family in an autopoietic community. None of these things are relevant to the issue of the sentient unit. A living unit can be anything from a kidney in a transplant ambulance to NATO.
You suggest that experiences are ‘copied’ in SCC. There is no copying. Thousands of cells receive inputs from branches of the axons of the same prior set of cells. So each has a copy of the input, but there is no ‘copying of experience’. You might say that the input to each of these receiving cells is a bit different. It will be different in layout, but it will be of identical significance because it can only ‘mean’ what the stimulus determining the input means. The experience in each cell might be deemed different in ‘feel’ if that were a legitimate idea, but it is not because experiences can never be compared between two subjects. The solution to the binding problem is fine.
Peter Cariani’s main argument is that rate coding is not the whole story. ‘Faster equals stronger’ is not always true. This seems fairly obvious. Rate coding is appropriate for peripheral pain, but would be hopeless for pitch discrimination. What I have seen of his writing on temporal coding makes complete sense in terms of input to primary and secondary sensory cortices. The reportable consciousness of SCC belongs to cells further on with multimodal inputs – getting Marr’s full 3D percept, way beyond Hubel and Weisel.
The electrical activity of single cells cannot be meaningless even for Cariani or Freeman. If one is meaningless, 1000 are meaningless. SCC requires banks of cells to send data because we want more than thousands of copies so there must be multiplying relays. The error in Freeman’s approach is to assume that lots of electrical signals all with the same meaning impinge on one ‘receiving unit’ which simply does not exist – this is neuroanatomical fact. He knows that so he hoped the Guiseppe Vitiello could help by going outside the neuron doctrine. But there is simply no need to do this and it totally destroys the benefit of parallel processing.
My hypothesis IS based on electrical activity, of a conventional neuron doctrine kind, but coupled to cellular acoustic modes. The electrical changes are meaningful to the acoustic mode, as they must be to something.
I have never suggested that all cells have access to all the information in a reportable percept. I have made that very clear in my writings, as you know. The reports of experiences made by healthy bodies are perhaps most likely to best reflect events in certain dorsolateral prefrontal cells. But in a sense they reflect events in all sorts of other cells involved in output tasks. There are complexities in this area. It is not so easily addressed empirically because blockage of the effects of one group of cells leads to another group taking over as ‘second best’.
Best
Jo
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Dear all,
I want to clarify my objection that a network of cells. e.g. the retinoid system could be conscious, could have consciousness.
I am assuming a network of one million neurons which we can easily put in an array of 1000 by 1000 to make it simple. This network receives informational content from various imputs, mainly if not only from other parts of the brain. This input is further processed and shaped until the content, that will appear in an individual’s consciousness, is ready to go.
Now what will happen? And where within this array will it happen?
If one cell will do the trick, we are close to Jonathan’s solution. If more than one cell: how would they do the trick? They are not a unit and cannot experience together!
So that would be a question that Arnold or other supporters of different neural network models would have to answer.Yours friendly
Hans -
Hans and all,
Hans wrote;
“I am assuming a network of one million neurons which we can easily put in an array of 1000 by 1000 to make it simple. This network receives informational content from various imputs, mainly if not only from other parts of the brain. This input is further processed and shaped until the content, that will appear in an individual’s consciousness, is ready to go.
Now what will happen? And where within this array will it happen?
If one cell will do the trick, we are close to Jonathan’s solution. If more than one cell: how would they do the trick? They are not a unit and cannot experience together!
So that would be a question that Arnold or other supporters of different neural network models would have to answer.”This is how multiple cells in a complex neuronal network do the trick. Because of the particular biophysical structure and dynamics of the retinoid system, it functions as a neuronal collective (Trehub 1969, 1971). The retinoid 3D collective is the biological unit that constitutes our conscious content/phenomenal experience. The global excitation pattern in the retinoid representation of of our phenomenal world is decomposed by selective attention (the heuristic self-locus) and then projected in parallel to a complex of non-conscious cognitive mechanisms for pattern detection, learning, classification, semantic processing, imaging, planning, motor actions, etc.; and then these pre-conscious mechanisms back-project in feedback to the retinoid system for further enrichment of conscious content. Believe me, this requires a lot of neuronal machinery! For the minimal details see Trehub 1991.
Trehub (1969). A Markov model for for modulation periods in brain output. Biophysical Journal.
Trehub (1971). The brain as a parallel coherent detector. Science.
Trehub (1991). The Cognitive Brain. MIT Press.
Best,
Arnold
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Hans states,
…“What are the properties of a part, an entity within human beings, that enables consciousness? Can a network of cells have these properties? Can a single cell have these properties?”…
Hans or others, are you familiar with Bruce liptons ideas, as follows?
…"Cellular Consciousness by Dr. Bruce Lipton
The following document was written by Dr. Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D. ©
2001 (Reprinted from Bridges, 2001 Vol 12(1):5).…"Though a human is comprised of over fifty trillion cells, there
are no physiologic functions in our bodies that were not already pre-
existing in the biology of the single, nucleated (eukaryotic) cell.…Single-celled organisms, such as the amoeba or paramecium, possess
the cytological equivalents of a digestive system, an excretory
system, a respiratory system, a musculoskeletal system, an immune
system, a reproductive system and a cardiovascular system, among
others. In the humans, these physiologic functions are associated
with the activity of specific organs.…. These same physiologic processes are carried out in cells by
diminutive organ systems called organelles."Rybo
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Dear Arnold,
you wrote:“The retinoid 3D collective is the biological unit that constitutes our conscious content/phenomenal experience.”
Please do not bypass the question I want to pin down. A network is not a unit! If you see it as a unit, you have to give a model how a network can experience.
Where in the network does the conscious experience take place and how?
You bring up a “global excitation pattern” which is reasonable.
What is lacking severely is how and where is this excitation experienced?
Yours friendly
Hans
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