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Consciousness
I would like to start off with a thought experiment, especially for all the Star Trek fans:
?Imagine you want to go to the beautiful city of Cape Town for a holiday. You are offered a simple, free, almost instantaneous, and 100 percent safe way of getting there and back. All you have to do is step inside the box, press the button and ? The box is, of course, Parfit?s teletransporter. In making the journey every cell of your body and brain will be scanned and destroyed, and then replicated exactly as they were before, but in Cape Town. Would you press the button?? 1
A few examples of discussion items that I would like to address in this forum:
- What is consciousness? What does it mean to be conscious?
- Is there a soul?
- Does human free will emanate from the physical realm of the brain, or is it, fundamentally, a non-material substrate?
- How can we solve the mind-body problem?
- A bat?s sensory experience must be very different from that of a human. What does it feel to be a bat? Is your dog or cat conscious? Or how about worms, trees, flowers, or cells? Are atoms conscious? Is the universe conscious?
- Are we zombies (entities with no conscious experience and free will, but only behaving as if we do)?
- How can I ensure that the perceptions and feelings of your conscious experience are precisely the same as those of my conscious experience? Does the perception of the color ?red? look and feel the same to me as it does to you? What do you think is the solution to the problem of qualia?
- How did we come to possess consciousness, free will, experience, and qualia? Are these phenomena evolutionary by-products of random mutation and natural selection? How come evolution did not turn us into zombies?
- Is there always a conscious will in voluntary action?
- "The Matrix" movie fans: could a machine or computer ever be made to be conscious with free will?
- Are we brains in a vat?
- How do we explain multiple personalities, split brains, amnesia, coma, near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), altered states of consciousness, and other brain disorders and mysterious experiences?
- What, if any, are the neural correlates of consciousness that would explain any of the above?
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1. Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: An Introduction. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 111.
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has added a new journal?Until they came to a valley of the ants, an ant said, ?O ants, enter your homes, or else you will be crushed by Solomon and his soldiers, while they do not perceive.? He then smiled, amused at her statement. And he said, ?My Lord, help me be thankful for the blessings You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents, and to do the good work that pleases You, and admit me, by Your mercy, with Your righteous worshipers.?" -Quran 27:18-19
A few days ago, I left my bedroom?s window open to revel in the relatively cool breeze in an otherwise blistering hot and humid summer. The next day, I noticed in the living room a host of flies that apparently entered through the open window the other night. The flies would gather around the ravishing warmth of the light post in front of me. Startled and irritated, I crushed the frenzied flies to the wall, tactically, one by one.
A research article titled ?Order in Spontaneous Behavior? published in May 16, 2007 edition of the refereed science and medicine journal PLoS ONE www.plosone.org) presents some experimental evidence suggesting that fruit flies may have free will. A few news reports are posted below. More press coverage brembs.net). Researcher?s webpage brembs.net).
In my cat-and-mouse game with flies, what was quite interesting was that the more flies I killed, the more the other remaining flies would stay away from the light post. Did the flies learn that I would crush them to death if they came close to the light post? If so, was the altered response accompanied by the fly?s internal mental experience of free will? Is an ant or a fly a deterministic robot or an agent with free will? How about other insects and animals? If these creatures indeed have free will, then is their free will an expression of the brain?s neurochemistry alone, or a phenomenon that necessitates the existence of non-human ?souls?? The scrutinized fruit fly behavior might offer some interesting clues.
Nadeem
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Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices brembs.net/sciam)
Julie Steenhuysen
Scientific American Science News (May 15, 2007)
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A tiny fruit fly -- without any input from the outside world -- will spontaneously change directions, researchers said on Monday in a finding that just may rescue the notion that free will not only exists but is a basic function of the brain.
"Neuroscientists have been claiming free will doesn't exist," said Bjorn Brembs, a neurobiologist of the Free University Berlin in Germany who led the study.
The claim is based on work in the 1980s by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet of University of California San Francisco, who discovered that even before a person made a conscious decision to move, the brain had already started the process of movement.
Neuroscientists say this so-called "readiness potential" suggests that the brain simply responds to outside stimuli, and consciousness is just the brain's way of rationalizing actions the brain has already determined to take.
"There are many prominent people who claim the main function of the brain is to compute input to output," Brembs said in a telephone interview.
COMPLEX ROBOTS
But what if there was no input, Brembs wondered.
He and colleagues devised an experiment with fruit flies in which they were deprived of all external stimuli.
Animals, and particularly insects, are often seen as complex robots, responding only to external stimuli, said Brembs, whose work appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One.
The researchers placed a single fruit fly in a pure white chamber -- devoid of visual cues. The fly was fixed in place and its attempts to turn were recorded. Researchers repeated their experiment on many flies and analyzed the data using a series of complex mathematical models.
What they found was surprising.
Lacking external input, Brembs said he had expected a pattern of entirely random movement or noise -- akin to static on a radio that is tuned between stations. Instead, the flies showed a pattern of flight that was generated spontaneously by the brain and could not have been random.
"The decision for the fly to turn left or turn right, which it changes all the time, has to come from the design of the brain," Brembs said.
Brembs said the finding reveals a mechanism that could form the biological basis of free will.
"I don't think we've found consciousness in the fruit fly," he said. "It's like one of the first building blocks, without which you can't go on."
George Sugihara, a mathematical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who helped with the data analysis, said the pattern of variability shown by the fly's choices revealed a non-linear signature -- something typical of many biological processes.
"We show free will 'can' exist, but we do not 'prove' it does," Sugihara said.
"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.
He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism -- the brain as an input-output machine -- and utterly random behavior.
"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said.
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Do fruit flies have free will? www.eurekalert.org)
EurekAlert.org (May 15, 2007)
Scientists measure spontaneity in drosophila
Free will and true spontaneity exist ? in fruit flies. This is what scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
"Animals and especially insects are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external stimuli," says senior author Bj?rn Brembs from the Free University Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. "When scientists observe animals responding differently even to the same external stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex brain." Using a combination of automated behavior recording and sophisticated mathematical analyses, the international team of researchers showed for the first time that such variability cannot be due to simple random events but is generated spontaneously and non-randomly by the brain. These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance."
The researchers tethered fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in completely uniform white surroundings and recorded their turning behavior. In this setup, the flies do not receive any visual cues from the environment and since they are fixed in space, their turning attempts have no effect. Thus lacking any input, their behavior should resemble random noise, similar to a radio tuned between stations. However, the analysis showed that the temporal structure of fly behavior is very different from random noise. The researchers then tested a plethora of increasingly complex random computer models, all of which failed to adequately model fly behavior.
Only after the team analyzed the fly behavior with methods developed by co-authors George Sugihara and Chih-hao Hsieh from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego did they realize the origin of the fly's peculiar spontaneity. "We found that there must be an evolved function in the fly brain which leads to spontaneous variations in fly behavior" Sugihara said. "The results of our analysis indicate a mechanism which might be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will".
Our subjective notion of "Free Will" is an oxymoron: the term 'will' would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be 'free' if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity - which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie. "The question of whether or not we have free will appears to be posed the wrong way," says Brembs. "Instead, if we ask 'how close to free will are we"' one finds that this is precisely where humans and animals differ".
The next step will be to use genetics to localize and understand the brain circuits responsible for the spontaneous behavior. This step could lead directly to the development of robots with the capacity for spontaneous nonrandom behavior and may help combating disorders leading to compromised spontaneous behavioral variability in humans such as depression, schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder.
The research will appear in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
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has added a new journalScientists believe that for the past 20 years Sarah Scantlin was in a minimally conscious state www.kurzweilai.net), characterized by a low level of awareness.
Interview with her mother www.aapmr.org).
Her personal homepage www.sarahscantlin.com).
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has added a new journalSource: ?I think, therefore I am, I think,? The Economist, December 19, 2006.
Consciousness awaits its Einstein as researchers poke a stick in a very deep pond.
In a building that looks, from the outside, like the villain?s lair in an early James Bond film, a robot moves around. Called Darwin XI, it is the brainchild of Gerald Edelman. The building is the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and Dr Edelman is one of an eclectic group of researchers?some of them neurologists and some philosophers?who are trying to explain what is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the human brain: the nature of consciousness. His approach is to build machines run by computer programs that work the way he thinks that brains work, and then see what happens.
Consciousness is the core of an individual?s sense of self, yet, paradoxically, it is the most elusive concept in biology. Even framing the questions is difficult. Broadly, though, researchers have taken three approaches. One is the experimental method embraced by Dr Edelman. A second is to look for consciousness directly in the brain. The third is merely to sit and think about the question. Though empirical scientists sometimes scoff at it, this third method is not to be despised. After all, it was by sitting and thinking about some paradoxical results in physics that Albert Einstein was able to break out of the mental mould of classical physics and invent the non-commonsensical but scientifically successful theory of relativity.
Dr Edelman refers to his theory of consciousness as neural Darwinism. It combines two ideas. The first, as he charmingly puts it, is that ?neurons which fire together, wire together.? This process of mutual reinforcement provides the selective pressure that is the prerequisite for any Darwinian-based theory: to those neuronal networks that have shall be given, from those that have not, even what little they have shall be taken away. The resulting changes are the physical basis of learning.
The second part of Dr Edelman?s theory is an idea he calls re-entrant mapping. The process of learning can be viewed as one by which reality (as perceived by the senses) is transformed into a representation of reality. Mathematically, this transformation is described as mapping. In Dr Edelman?s model of the brain, however, there is a second process: the maps themselves are mapped by other groups of neurons. It is this phenomenon of different groups of neurons watching each other that he refers to as re-entrant mapping.
Whether neural Darwinism is truly a theory of consciousness is moot. It may not, for example, fully account for the feeling of actually experiencing things such as emotions that most people would think central to conscious experience. (Philosophers refer to such consciously experienced feelings as qualia.) As a theory of how brains work, though, it seems to have a lot going for it, for Dr Edelman has used it to construct a series of ever more complex robots that behave, in many ways, like animals. The latest, Darwin XI, has a range of senses: vision, hearing, touch and what Dr Edelman refers to as taste (but which is actually sensitivity to the electrical conductivity of what its ?taste? organs are in contact with). It also has whiskers.
Darwin XI can do a lot. It can, for example, learn to navigate mazes in search of rewards, in the way that a laboratory rat does. It can develop preferences, thanks to a pleasure centre that generates what Dr Edelmann calls good taste in response to those rewards. And it can forget those preferences if they are no longer rewarding.
Other robots are able to perform similar tricks, but they have to be trained specifically to do so. The computer that runs Darwin XI can work things out for itself. It is loaded with virtual neurons, the initial strength of whose synapses with one another is allocated by a random number generator, and left to get on with things. It does have a bit of pre-ordained neuro-anatomy (in particular, it has been fitted with the equivalent of a hippocampus) but, like the local specialisation in a real cortex observed by people like Dr Kanwisher, most of the specialisation in Darwin XI simply emerges. This happens through the formation of specialised groups of neurons that resemble the specialised locations seen in real brains. The researchers know this because they can track changes in the way the virtual neurons connect to each other.
So is Darwin XI conscious? Well, it cannot speak, so no one can ask it. But the answer probably depends on whether you think a rat is conscious. That illustrates a big part of the problem of consciousness: no one can agree on who has it, let alone what it is. In fact, the questions are linked. There is a general feeling that what is special about humans is to do not with their being clever, but their being conscious in a different way from most other animals.
The inward eye
One feature of human consciousness that students of the field suggest might be unique is an awareness of self. The idea that self-awareness might be specific to humans and a few close relatives resulted from an experiment done three decades ago by Gordon Gallup, who now works at the University of Albany in New York state. This showed that chimpanzees (and, as subsequently emerged, other great apes) share with humans the ability to recognise themselves in a mirror, whereas monkeys and various other reasonably intelligent species, such as dogs, do not. A few species that are not apes have also passed the mirror test, including elephants and dolphins. But most animals fail it.
All the species that have passed have something in common: abnormally large cerebral cortices relative to the rest of their brains. Whether self-awareness simply emerges from a large cortex or whether selection for it necessarily results in one is unclear. Perhaps it is both. What is interesting about Dr Edelman?s theory is that awareness of self is built into it. That, in essence, is what re-entrant mapping is.
Such self-awareness is not, however, indivisible. One treatment for serious epilepsy is to cut the corpus callosum and the other nervous connections between the two hemispheres of the brain, which stops the fit passing from one hemisphere to the other. This does not usually affect a person?s everyday behaviour, but sometimes the two hemispheres have completely different personalities, and where that happens the individual?s behaviour does change-indeed, he ceases to be an individual as the hemispheres fight for control of the body. The conflict often manifests itself in the person?s hands, each controlled by a different hemisphere, trying to do opposing things. One hand may try to put on a piece of clothing, for example, while the other tries to remove it.
Tales of mystery and imagination
At first sight such cases seem extraordinary. But they are merely striking illustrations of a broader point: that in the brain nothing is ever quite what it seems, and experience and common sense are little use when formulating theories about the self. Two of the lesion studies mentioned in the introduction to this survey, dealing with the inability to perceive motion and recognise faces, arise from the fact that visual experience, which for those who can see is the dominant form of conscious experience, is a complete fabrication. What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex.
Even those with healthy brains get a hint of this in the form of optical illusions. These are patterns that the image-reconstruction process finds it confusing to deal with. An even more obvious discord between reality and perception is colour. The world is not really coloured, it just looks that way because it is tremendously useful that it should, so the retina has cells that are particularly sensitive to three different wavelengths of light, and the brain weaves the signals from them together to create the phenomenon called colour.
Colours are good examples of qualia?the things that people feel that they are experiencing. Much of the philosophical side of the study of consciousness seeks either to explain qualia or to explain them away. They are at the heart of the question of dualism. For it is hard to ask what is generating them and what is perceiving them without concluding that the processes are separate.
Daniel Dennett, a doyen among philosophers of consciousness, disparagingly refers to the putative ?observing self? in this scenario as a homunculus. He calls the mental stage on which the qualia supposedly act out their play the Cartesian theatre, after Descartes, the philosopher who thought the soul resided in the pineal gland. And he points out that exactly the same problem applies to how the homunculus would perceive its own qualia. Turn the theatre into a cinema, though, and Antonio Damasio quite likes the analogy. His twist is to place the observing self in the film itself, rather than in the audience. That is not a particularly easy idea to grasp, but it does seem to bear some relationship to Dr Edelman?s idea of re-entrant mapping.
That something in the brain really is performing the role of an observing self is suggested by the work of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Libet used electroencephalography to look at brain activity during the process of making simple decisions such as when to move a finger. He showed that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it. In other words, the observer is just that: an observer, not a decider. This may explain the feeling that most people have experienced at one time or another of having deliberately done something that they had not actually wanted or intended to.
Though Dr Libet?s experiment is almost laughably simple, it pokes a stick in a very deep pond. A feeling of freedom to make conscious choices is at the heart of most people?s sense of themselves. Even Freud, who popularised the idea of the unconscious, believed that conscious free-willed thought could override unconscious desires. One way of interpreting Dr Libet?s work, though, could be that such free will is, like colour vision, simply a powerful illusion. An actor in a film, p erhaps. But an actor reading from somebody else?s script.
The truth, unsatisfactory though it is, is that no one really knows. Nor does anyone know where the next breakthrough will come from. Perhaps Dr Edelman, or one of his successors, will build a robot that can describe its own qualia-like experiences. Perhaps neuroanatomy will throw up a surprising, crucial observation. Or perhaps a bored, unregarded clerk will come to the rescue with an insight that dominates 21st-century thinking in the way that relativity dominated the 20th.
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has added a new journal?Say: Is there anyone among your idols who can initiate creation, then reproduce it? Say: God initiates the creation, then reproduces it. How then can you turn away?? -Quran 10:34
?And it is He who originates the creation, then reproduces it; and that is easy for Him. To Him belongs the loftiest similitude in the heavens and the earth, and He is the Almighty, the Most Wise.? -Quran 30:27
In ?Rethinking Deep Blue: Why a Computer Can't Reproduce a Mind? www.arn.org), the author takes up the defeat of world chess champion Gary Kasparov by IBM?s Deep Blue Supercomputer as a case study to explore issues in consciousness and AI (Artificial Intelligence). He discusses the Turing test of machine intelligence, introduces the notorious frame problem in AI research, and asks insightful questions challenging the view that it may be possible to program AI or a computer with consciousness and qualia (qualia are subjective mental states of sensory experience such as the sight of the color ?red? or the smell of coffee). I would also like to point out that I have found it amusing and insightful to ponder over Daniel Dennett?s illustration of the frame problem. In The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, Dennett demonstrated the frame problem by using an illustrative example of the progressively sophisticated programming of RxDy robots that attempt to retrieve their power supply battery sitting on a wagon with a time bomb (excerpt in Word - www.cogsys.ubc.ca).
Can the human mind ever be replicated? Human cognition involves a plethora of intricate faculties such as abstract thought, decision-making, logical reasoning, computation, problem solving, retroactive analysis, memory, judgment, intuition, creativity, visualization, perception, emotion, courage, fear, mercy, pleasure, qualia, free will, and so on. I maintain that the attempt to replicate in AI this entire mental enterprise of human cognition perhaps makes us best appreciate how phenomenally gifted our cognition is. So much for those conscious AI machines in The Matrix.
Nadeem