I’ve found it hard to keep this blog going, but I know that a constant flow of interesting Posts is needed. So I am delighted to welcome Dr. Alfredo Pereira, Jr., from Brazil, and Dr. Nathan Munn from the University of Montana. They will help keep things lively.

It’s important to remember that we have a constant flow of scientific articles bearing on consciousness, volition, and self, the three core ideas for this blog. Plus anything else we think about. We will also link this blog to a little Web Village on Conscious Brains. So there will be both News and Readers/Commentators, we hope and trust.

BJB

Alfredo and Nathan - please feel free to Post as the urge takes you…

IS IT QUANTUM? - Reply from Baars :https://sites.google.com/site/conseminar/url/to/link/to (for scientific and teaching materials on consciousness and the brain).

Thank you both for your comments.

I am going to be posting weekly - apologies for allowing this good start to languish for so long! I think the answer is to use it regularly, and then to link the entries to other online activities, including my own. I will also be updating my Wikipedia entry and websites.

In answer to Dr. Fontoira in-depth case for a quantum notion of consciousness, this idea has been hotly discussed. It continues to be, with some good scientists finding it attractive, but the majority being skeptical.

I count myself as a skeptic, but I hope an openminded one.

Here are the reasons to be skeptical about QM notions of consciousness.

1. Are there unconscious brain events?

This used to be hotly debated in psychology and brain science. It is not any longer. The evidence for unconscious brain processes is simply overwhelming. You must simply look at the literature. I discuss it in Baars & Gage, Cognition, Brain & Consciousness: An Introduction to Cognitive Science (2007, Elsevier/ Academic Press), and in my more introductory book, from Oxford 1997, “In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind.”

But you can simply search in PubMed or Google Scholar under “unconscious brain” and that will bring up multiple research articles. To simplify radically, our brains are unconscious of

• memories while they are stored, vast body of information*;

• highly practiced automatic skills (traditionally called HABITS) associated with basal ganglia and cerebellum*;

• major aspects of sensory systems, such as the “dorsal stream” of vision*;

• motivationally excluded materials, which used to be extremely controversial in science, but it is now clear on the evidence that people do a vast amount of selective control of what they will be conscious of, and correspondingly, the things they avoid being conscious of*;

• broadly speaking, subcortical, spinal and peripheral neuronal processes*.

2. QM AND CONSCIOUSNESS.

There are several proposals that consciousness depends upon quantum-mechanical processes. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff are a famous source of that hypothesis. There are others. The basic counterarguments are these.

a. The burden of proof is on the proposer in science, and there is currently no peruasisve evidence FOR the QM notion.

b. QM is taken to be explanatory of the so-called “Hard Problem” in philosophy of consciousness, which arguably does not exist.

Thus Gerald M. Edelman has argued that it does not, as did Francis Crick and his co-author, Christof Koch.

c. IF QM somehow explains the Hard Problem (which is the old mind-body problem, i.e., how does conscious experience relate to physical nature, the body and the brain?), then we are trying to explain one unknown by another unknown.

Quantum mysteries are taken to account for Mind-Body mysteries, which does not look like a step in the right direction. Or as my favorite science parodist Terry Pratchett might put it, “Let’s call it Quantum!” is NOT an explanation.

d. Finally, and most specifically, QM phenomena are studied at extremes of temperature and spatial resolution that are not routinely observed in the brain.

That goes especially for temperature. QM phenomena are found near 0 degrees Kelvin. Physiological temperatures are way above that.

So - I don’t really think there are many closed issues in science.

We used to think that DNA was a completely protected molecule, and that something like “epigenetics” wasn’t possible. That was wrong.

We used to think all kinds of things in science that we now know better. (We hope!).

So I would not exclude QM accounts of consciousness in principle, forever and ever. We are inductivists, we wait for evidence.

I would say there is no evidence I’ve seen at this time that appears to be persuasive, thought Prof. Stuart Hameroff has some very clever ideas on QM in nerve cells.

Also, there are some strong counterarguments. If we ever find body-temperature QM phenomena, we’ll have to take another look!

The very word “consciousness” used to be something of a taboo in the scientific world. But today a growing number of well-known scientists have joined the quest to understand it. The list includes Nobelist Gerald Edelman, Christof Koch, Rodolfo Llinas, Antonio Damasio, and many others. A specialized journal has been running for a decade-and-a-half. A scientific organization, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness , has been holding international conferences for almost as long. Mainstream journals in psychology, brain science, neurology and neighboring fields have joined in.

Twelve years ago Francis Crick published an introductory article in Nature, saying that “the problem of the neural basis of consciousness looks ever more tractable as neurobiologists delve into the process of visual perception”. Crick spent the last decades of his productive life pursuing the notoriously tricky problem of the conscious brain. It was Crick who strongly encouraged pioneering studies on visual consciousness, notably by Nikos Logothetis and his team , using binocular rivalry in macaque monkeys. That continues to be a very productive stream of work today.

Binocular rivalry is an attractive paradigm for the following reason. Try this experiment: Hold one pencil (or another small object) in front of your right eye, and an identical pencil in front of your left eye, both at the same distance, a few inches from each eye. Now see if you can “fuse” the two identical pencils into a single conscious pencil. That simulates binocular vision in nature: We constantly fuse nearly identical views of the same objects in the world around us. We do it so smoothly that we rarely even realize which of our two separate eyes is the dominant or “conscious” one.

But now try a variation. Hold a pencil in front of one eye, and a pen with a different color and shape in front of the other. Do they fuse into a single conscious percept? Not if the experiment is done carefully. The two images will compete with each other if they cannot be perceptually fused. When two images compete, one tends to be conscious for some time, while the other is suppressed. What happens to the suppressed input? We have good evidence that the unconscious stimulus is still processed to quite a high level in the brain.

Thus the brain receives two nearly identical stimuli, one of which is conscious, the other unconscious. We can now ask the question, “What is the difference between two very similar brain events when only one is reportable as conscious?” Binocular rivalry is the double-slit experiment in the experimental study of consciousness.
Experiments like this have put visual consciousness on the map. Many other methods have now been added. But it’s not just visual awareness alone; we can study consciousness as a state via sleep versus waking, coma and general anesthesia. Or we can study medical conditions like narcolepsy, and the brain chemistry of new “wakefulness” drugs like provigil. We can explore profound puzzles like “blindsight,” the ability of patients with damage to the first visual cortex to spot certain visual events and still hotly deny that they ever really saw them. Other patients lack emotional feelings, or bodily sensations, or the ability to see motion or certain kinds of objects. There are dozens of conditions that dissociate conscious from unconscious brain events. Those natural and experimental dissociations make it possible to study consciousness “as such.”

Today, a PubMed search for “consciousness” brings up 23,142 articles. Not all of them are about consciousness as the major focus, but many are. Then there are the scientific synonyms like “explicit” vs. “implicit cognition,” “supra-” vs. “subliminal stimulation,” “aware” vs. “unaware” conditions and many more. As Science magazine wrote in its 2005 anniverary issue, the “biological basis of consciousness” is now often considered one of the top unsolved problems in science. Unsolved, but not necessarily unsolvable.

Consciousness is back, after a long absence .

This blog - A Conscious Brain - turns the spotlight on a number of recent discoveries and ideas, in a really fun and fast-moving field of science. There is now marked empirical progress, and theories are emerging. It’s still early days; when it comes to the conscious brain we may be living in the early age of science. Yes, we are collecting better evidence, but without a Newton or Copernicus to show how it makes sense. Yet consciousness science is finally back on track. New findings appear every month, testable issues are debated, and normal, healthy science is beginning to grow.

We don’t know that human (or animal) consciousness can ever be understood — but we’ll never know unless we try. That’s what A Conscious Brain is about.