Consciousness a discussion Praveen Paritosh Week 8 Fall 2004 CogSci 207 Thursday November 18 2004 What do you think Being able to analyze your own thoughts actions Without explicit analysis Animals with little memory Animals conscious since they make survival judgements Comatose Episodic memory central to consciousness Virtual vs Real Consciousness what else besides self model Language and consciousness Are we being held back by a humanist morality Cognitively closed to articulating about consciousness Matrix TMNT consciousness The having of perceptions thoughts and feelings awareness The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self consciousness to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon it is impossible to specify what it is what it does or why it evolved Nothing worth reading has been written on it Stuart Sutherland The International Dictionary of Psychology As recently as a few years ago if one raised the subject of consciousness in cognitive science discussions it was generally regarded as a form of bad taste and graduate students who are always attuned to the social mores of their disciplines would roll their eyes at the ceiling and assume expressions of mild disgust John Searle For many years after James penned The Principles of Psychology most cognitive scientists have ignored consciousness as did almost all neuroscientists The problem was felt to be either purely philosophical or too elusive to study experimentally In our opinion such timidity is ridiculous Francis Crick and Christopher Koch 1992 Pat Hayes summary of the philosophical debate about consciousness Maybe THIS is how consciousness works yaddah yaddah Pschaw I can imagine something just like that without it being conscious I don t think you can Oh no Let me tell you I can imagine something which is just like you an exact copy right down to the atoms and it behaves just like you and it even believes what you believe and wants what you want but it s not conscious It s just a zombie So there That seems impossible to me You just havn t got enough imagination that s all Why do consciousness Consciousness is a natural phenomenon If our theory of the universe does not explain consciousness then maybe we do not have a good theory of the universe Legal implications actus non facit reum nici mens sit rea as a vicious will without a vicious act is no civil crime so on the other hand an unwarranted act without a vicious will is no crime at all Blackstone David Chalmers Consciousness What are the phenomenon Easy Problems Third person data The Hard problem Firse person data Processes and behavior Subjective experiences Ontology extension What will his answer look like Third person data Wakefulness Perceptual discrimination Integrated control Access self monitoring Verbal Reports Focused attention Data re underlying brain processes The easy problems First person data Visual experiences Other sensory experiences Bodily sensations Mental imagery Emotional experiences Stream of occurrent thought e g color depth e g sound taste e g pain orgasm e g recalled visual images e g happiness anger e g reflection decision All are states of subjective experience there is something it is like to have these states The hard problem Example Musical Processing Third person data Sound wave patterns Processes in auditory cortex Behavioral reactions Verbal reports actual and potential First person data Musical experience Chalmer s Proposal consciousness is a fundamental property of matter fundamental in the sense that it cannot be reduced to anything else like mass and charge John Searle Consciousness as a neurobiological problem We are conscious We know for a fact that the brain processes cause all that we associate with consciousness So lets find the Neural Correlates of Consciousness NCC Some questions in this research program How do brain processes cause conscious states How are conscious states realized in brain structures Is consciousness localized in certain regions of the brain or is it a global phenomenon If it is localized where Is it at the level of neurons and synapses or higher functional levels like neuronal maps Edelman 1992 or clouds of neurons Freeman 1995 or below the level of neurons to the levels of microtubles Penrose 1994 John Searle Essential feature of consciousness Unified qualitative subjectivity Qualitativeness the qualitative feel of a conscious state Subjectivity Conscious states have first person ontology Unity There is one unified conscious field Split brain patients Gazzaniga 1998 two centers of consciousness communicating imperfectly The Binding problem e g how do anatomically separate neurons specialized for such things as line angle and color all contribute to a single unified conscious visual experience of the object Crick 1994 Neural firings in the general range of 40 Hz in thalamocortical system Searle Two approaches to understanding NCC Building block model for instance what it feels to see Red Taste coffee Can be studied separately Blindsight V1 damage can report but no awareness Binocular rivalry Gestalt Switching same perceptual input leading to different subjective experiences one at a time NCC of vision Searle Building block theory might be wrong Unified field theory cant study separate aspects of consciousness separately to explain it Key idea In order to have visual or any specific type of conscious experience we have to be conscious already What we need to study is the conscious brain vs the nonconscious brain Daniel Dennett Capture content of conscious states by a functional account of what we can do with them Otherwise you are just positing a witness in the cartesian theater confronting this contentful state Now what Virtual machine a serial information processing mechanism which is implemented on some kind of neural hardware Paul Churchland recurrent neural network substrate The Joycean machine An implication of Dennett s view is that animals and human are not conscious in the same way there is something more about our consciousness Modeling Consciousness Step 1 Allow the system to be able to talk about itself I Many different aspects of self bodily location I am not in Kansas locus of narrative memory I recall reading Proust epistemic agent I know I left it here somewhere social agent Do