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Defining Consciousness
Hans Ricke
Sunday, 24 May 2009 05:48 UTC
The special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies is now available here and I would like to discuss it in small portions to avoid another thread that is too huge to be read.
My first proposal is the editorial written by Chris Nunn
added 17 June 2009 14:08 UTC
Dear all, seeing how this discussion evolves I would like to keep this thread confined to two subtopics: 1. discussing Chris Nunn’s editorial and 2. discussing the general way how we want to discuss the whole special issue of the Journal of consciousness studies.
Let us open different threads for different other subtopics, e.g. articles. The big thread has quite often been criticized because of addressing too many aspects of this matter. So please, let us not fall back into the same track.
added 7 July 2009
As of today this thread will be locked for a few days. Hopefully there will be a new discussion about one of the articles soon.
added 31 July 2009
apparently there is no interest in discussing more articles of the special issue here. Thread will again be locked. If anyone is interested please notify me by a personal message.
updatded 8 September 2009
You will find two links that are related to the definition of consciousness below. The respective threads may be found this way.
Both threads have been part of a major effort of this forum dedicated to the definition of Consciousness.
Yours friendly
Hans
Two Links related to the definition of conciousness
1. the discussion of our JCS article
2. a very long thread about defining consciousness
Updated 09 September 2009 09:35 UTC
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Dear Hans:
There will be a philosophical Conference in Edinburgh in July about the same theme, but with a different, metaphysical approach (below). Many participants have published in earlier JCS editions.
Best
Alfredo
Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference 2009
The Metaphysics of Consciousness
An International conference in honour of
Timothy L. S. Sprigge (1932-2007)
University of Edinburgh, 7-9 July 2009What is consciousness? What is its place in the physical universe? How did it arise in the course of cosmic evolution? Can there be a genuine scientific understanding of consciousness? And is there such a thing as consciousness in the first place? These and other questions that immediately arise as soon as one begins to investigate the nature of consciousness and how it fits within a scientific view of reality will be addressed by this major international conference. They occupy a prominent place in contemporary studies in metaphysics and philosophy of mind worldwide, often involving complex interdisciplinary connections between philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence (informatics), biology, and cognitive neuroscience. At the same time, these questions play a fundamental role in the philosophies of great thinkers of the past such as, among others, Descartes, Leibniz, William James, Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. This conference will bring together systematically oriented historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers of mind to re-examine inherited views and spark fruitful lines of future inquiry. The conference is held in honour of the late Timothy L.S. Sprigge—one of Edinburgh’s most distinguished metaphysicians and author of insightful writings on the nature of consciousness.
Speakers:
Fred Adams
University of Delaware
Consciousness: Why and Where?
Ken Aizawa
Centenary College of Louisiana
How Consciousness Can Safely Emerge
Brenda Almond
University of Hull
Religious Consciousness: Revisiting the God of the Philosophers
Pierfrancesco Basile
University of Bern
It must be true—but how can it be? Some Remarks on Panpsychism and Mental Composition
Jason Brown
New York University Medical Center
What is a Mental State?
Andy Clark
University of Edinburgh
Locating the Conscious Mind
Stephen Clark
University of Liverpool
How to Become Unconscious
David Cockburn
University of East Anglia
Doubts About "Consciousness”
Tim Crane
University College London
Consciousness as Predicated of Human Beings
Barry Dainton
University of Liverpool
Phenomenal Holism
James Giles
University of Guam
The Metaphysics of Awareness in Taoist philosophy
Alastair Hannay
University of Oslo
Phenomenology versus Metaphysics
Jaegwon Kim
Brown University
Explaining Consciousness: From Emergentism to A Priori Physicalism
Julian Kiverstein
University of Edinburgh
The Metaphysics of Time Consciousness
Geoffrey Madell
University of Edinburgh
Substance Dualism: You Know it Makes Sense
Eduard Marbach
University of Bern
Is there a Metaphysics of Consciousness without a Phenomenology of Consciousness? Some thoughts derived from Husserl’s Philosophical Phenomenology
Leemon McHenry
California State University, Northridge
Sprigge’s Ontology of Consciousness
Brian P. McLaughlin
Rutgers University
Consciousness, Identity, and Explanation
Howard Robinson
Central European University, Budapest
Quality, Thought and Consciousness
William Seager
University of Toronto
Concessionary Dualism and Physicalism
Peter Simons
Trinity College Dublin
Consciousness for Four-Dimensionalists
Galen Strawson
University of Reading
Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument
Conference Committee
Pauline Phemister, Philosophy, Edinburgh (p.phemister@ed.ac.uk)
Leemon McHenry, Philosophy, California State University, Northridge (leemon.mchenry@csun.edu)
Jesper Kallestrup, Philosophy, Edinburgh (jesper.kallestrup@ed.ac.uk)
Julian Kiverstein, Philosophy, Edinburgh (julian.kiverstein@ed.ac.uk)
Pierfrancesco Basile, Philosophy, University of Bern (pierfrancesco.basile@philo.unibe.ch)The conference is sponsored by:
The Royal Institute of Philosophy
Mind Association
Scots Philosophical Club
The British Society for the History of Philosophy
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Worthy Otmar, so full of spleen
and rancour, hast thou not seen
that if talking is mere futility,
talking about talking has as little utility.I’m for Edinburgh bound.
But we were asked to opine on Chris Nunn’s editorial. The resume side is crisp and informative, with a few thoughts between the lines, as fully expected. The sting in the tail is the issue of ‘reportable mental contents’. This raises some problems of definition. Are unconscious brain processes ‘mental’? And are unconscious brain events correlating with outside world events ‘contents’ of anything? Do we have a tautology? Maybe this shows just how unclear we are about the meaning of ‘mental’ and ‘mind’. Why are unconscious brain processes not just brainal, rather than spinal or neural or pulmonary? At the end of the day I think there is a core idea behind the ‘mental’ usage, but it is often poorly formulated, particularly in relation to its domain (whatever personal model one may have) and the consistency of that domain in subsequent arguments about consciousness.
Related to this, and jumping to the end of the volume, I am impressed by Max Velmans’s comments on how not to define consciousness. In essence he is saying that we should keep to the idea of consciousness as experience and be agnostic about the relation to control. Reportability or other forms of output behaviour do link to consciousness but we should keep a very wide option open on what that link might be. A successful account of consciousness does not give it an ‘extra’ causal role so we need to make sure the causal arguments do not invoke something redundant.
This led me to think of something that was initially puzzling. If cortical neurons go on firing during sleep, why is their output not ‘reportable’. They are still connected to the glossopharngeal nerve motor neurons. Why do we not ‘report’ the black nothingness the cells are firing about? The answer presumably is that in sleep the pathways from these cells to the oropharynx are rendered impotent by inhibitory neurotransmitters. The glossopharyngeal motor neurons still operate to swallow saliva etc but do no talking. Does this then mean that the cortical neurons still form one or more impotent conscious domains, as they clearly do in dreams? I believe not, but it is hard to be sure why.
There is an awful lot more to define in our vocabulary than consciousness. However, the recent JCS volume does at least seem to nail the idea that the dominant, and perhaps most useful consensus meaning is purely experiential rather than anything to do with output, which may be a function of a domain or domains of different extent – maybe a brain in fact.
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Dear Jonathan,
Regarding “If cortical neurons go on firing during sleep, why is their output not ‘reportable’”, the cortical ‘dipoles’ that arise from dendritic oscillations and are responsible for the EEG signals, should still show up on the electrocorticography (ECoG). In fact, except in the case of alpha waves (which depend on the thalamus for its genesis, and is observed only in the awake state) and beta waves (also in the awake state); ‘rhythmic’ slow waves, alpha like ‘sleep spindles’, and even large ‘phasic bursts’ arising from pons to occipital cortex via lateral geniculate body (ponto-geniculo-occipital or PGO spikes) are found in different stages of sleep.Regarding “black nothingness”, the black of physics and physiology is probably not similar. Blind people don’t see black; they see “nothing”! (page 163, Ganong, medical physiology, 22nd. ed).
About “in sleep the pathways from these cells to the oropharynx are rendered impotent by inhibitory neurotransmitters. The glossopharyngeal motor neurons still operate to swallow saliva etc but do no talking”, the tone of neck muscles ‘slacken’ during REM sleep. There is also a ‘locus ceruleus’ (noradrenergic) dependent relative paralysis of voluntary activities.(page 196, Ganong, medical physiology, 22nd. ed). This may explain why we “swallow saliva etc but do no talking”.
The bottomline, I guess, we must not be confined and restricted by conventional knowledge, while we need them to guide us, they must not dictate us. Intuition is as important as logic, in this tricky field.
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Dear Amiya,
I am sorry but you seemed to have missed the point of each of my paragraphs.Chris Nunn uses ‘reportable’ to mean the ability to talk about experiences, or at least to be able to produce speech the content of which corresponds to that of the experience (the experience and the speech might have a shared cause, and there are bigger problems even if they are in series, as Velmans indicates). This has nothing to do with being able to record spike potentials with electrodes in a lab, which is how we know the cells are firing in the first place, and even less to do with dendritic potential oscillations.
I was referring to the black nothingness, metaphorically, of an experienceless situation. Clearly this is not the black of no EM radiation. I am unclear what a black of physiology would be. Am I not allowed a little poetic license? It rather seems that it is you who is confined to ‘conventional knowledge’, whatever that might be. I can recommend a degree in Art History, which is where I learnt how Lilliputian much academic knowledge is (and how it’s worse in science). Intuition and logic are of course both equally important: in the sense that science is conjecture and refutation. Intuition provides the conjectures. Logic provides the refutations and any intuition that does not survive logic must be rejected because it will prove unusable for predictive model building. The weakness of most neuroscience is not that it sticks to logic but that it fails to notice the deeper logical questions about the relation between experience and dynamics. When faced with the fact that most conventional models of consciousness are physically impossible it props up intuition with bogus defenses and refuses to admit that the result is totally unusable as science.
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Dear Jonathan:
Just my view on the issue you raised. The question is similar to: why does delta synchrony during dreamless sleep does not convey conscious reportable contents, while theta-alpha-beta-gamma synchronies during dreams and awakeness do? The answer, discussed in detail in my recent paper with Furlan in the Journal of Biological Physics, is that:
a) conscious perception depends on production of amplitude-modulated calcium waves in astrocytes;
b) the production of coherent AM calcium waves depend on widely synchronized glutamatergic output from neurons to astrocytes, and
c) delta frequencies do not afford the astrocytic mechanisms of AM wave generation to cross an activation threshold.Best
Alfredo
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Dear Otmar/Joseph/Tom/ETC:
From you reasoning, we shoud conclude that:
- instead of discussing biological theories of life, we should simply live;
- instead of discussing Political Science, we should simply participate in public life;
- instead of doing Computer Science, we sould simply use our computers, and so on.These arguments are fallacious, since:
- biological scientific knowledge can help us to live better;
- scientific study of Politics can help us to construct better political systems,
- computer science can help us to build better computers and to use our computers better.Did you replace Plato with Schopenhauer in your critical agenda?
Best
Alfredo
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I would like to enter the discussion, but I can’t still get your paper to read. If you have a final pdf version, then, please, drop it to my e-mail box.
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My dear Jonathan,
First of all I beg your pardon for replying so late. My computer lost its consciousness in the meanwhile! It seems you’ve taken offense on my using the term ‘conventional knowledge’. Please note that I mentioned ‘we’ in the sentence. I have little knowledge (and intention) to poke others. Most of the guys here are highly academic and respectable; I just shared my views. As you pointed it out, I really got wrong in the ‘reporting’ perspective, but your comment (“It rather seems that it is you who is confined to ‘conventional knowledge’, whatever that might be.”) was a bit hurting, something I didn’t quite expect.Regarding your suggestion about ‘a degree in Art History’, I presently have no intention in doing that. My degrees are quite sufficient for this part of the world (its logic and intuition again that matters).
Lastly, let me state that I do respect your knowledge and deliberations on the topic and I’ll continue reading them BUT think thrice before posting/commenting.
Best Regards
Amiya -
Dear Colleagues,
Defining consciousness is one the grand challenges of science and philosophy. But it is surprising that the research in consciousness is more divergent than convergent. Ofcourse I appreciate that it is probably still not clear in which direction to converge, but probably I can contribute here.
While thinking about defining consciousness and everything else, and the relation and depndency between these two, a good idea, rather a conjecture came to my mind. Its a beautiful idea.
I call the idea i.e. the conjecture, the “Connectionist Conjecture”. Its statement is: “The one and the only representation of Totality is the connectionist representation”. By “connectionist representation”, I mean, the representation in terms of entities and their relationships i.e. in terms of graphs of nodes and edges. By “Totality”, I mean everything. I distinctly feel and believe the fundamental and foundational beauty of this conjecture.
For our case, this implies that the most fundamental representaion of consciousness is the connectionist one and if consciousness can be defined in terms of the Connectionist Conjecture, then we will converge to the unified theory of consciousness. This is the path to convergence of theory of consciousness that I propose— i.e. the path of the Connectionist Conjecture. The path will converge because of the unfied representaion of the component concepts of consciousness (i.e. on a uniform platform of the connectionist representation).
Ofcourse, as an aside, I must mention that, this conjecture has the same fundamental and foundational role in defining the most important things (i.e. concepts) of “everything else”. And since consciousness is relevant only in terms of everything else, thus I propose that the Connectionist Conjecture be treated as the source for the so elusive convergent path for the unified theory and definition of consciousness.
All critical comments are welcome.
Thank you for your attention.
Debaprasad Mukherjee
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Hail all;
So very nice to see so many of my favorite personages squabbling here. Things are bound to get contentious when a definition of consciousness is the subject of debate. Imant Baruss pointed out in a previous issue of JCS that when we talk about consciousness we are, all of us, referencing a specific location on the matter/spirit, monist/dualist explanatory spectrum that best represents our own preconceived beliefs about reality – something we would naturally and instinctually be inclined to defend with irrational vigor.
I had the great pleasure and privilege of giving a talk entitled “A Conceptual Reorientation of Consciousness” directly after Imants on June 9th in Hong Kong at the Social Approaches to Consciousness one day conference organized by Charles Whitehead. I used Imants’ clarification of our confusion surrounding consciousness as a starting point. The matter/spirit explanatory spectrum confines us to an unnecessarily limited set of possible assumptions which Imants’ talk allowed me to explore and critique. I offered an alternative explanation of consciousness to provide a contrast to our common assumptions and to show something of what’s possible if we can look beyond matter/spirit inspired assumptions.
One of the main considerations I had when confronted with Imants’ findings is that if we are limiting our explanations to an insufficient explanatory framework then a definition of consciousness can itself expand that framework and be a significant aspect of a re-conceptualization of reality for the greater culture
-can transform our beliefs and behaviors. And that is one pragmatic aspect that has been missing from the conversation – the potential social and transformative impact of a definition of consciousness framed on its own terms rather than in relation to matter and spirit concepts.I have asked to post the written portion of my talk as a blog on this site in order to provide it for reference and discussion and am awaiting a response fr. the site organizers. Until then, I would be glad to forward it upon request. Thanks.
Best
CH
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