Are there any working theories as to how human sentience is possible? Obviously, at this time we have absolutely no idea how it is possible that two pounds of organic chemicals can be arranged in such a manner that it becomes cognizant of it’s own existence—so I’m not asking for an explanation of consciousness. What I want to know is if there are even any theories as to how it is possible. If so, is anybody engaging in original research in this field, and are they being taken seriously and have they published? I’ve been hanging around psychologists all my life—clinical, physiological, social—you name it, and I’ve never once heard any of them even so much as discuss a working hypothesis which would attempt to explain sentience.
I remember reading an article in the Los Angeles Times several years ago about a neurosurgeon at UCLA (a black guy) who is or was considered to one of the world’s leading authorities on neurosurgery. The article mentioned that his life goal was to determine the molecular basis of consciousness. Does anybody know who this is, and if he has made any inroads yet in his efforts?
Er—the first sentence in the second paragraph should read: who is or was considered to be. Are they ever going to enable the edit feature on this message board?
One clarification here. The notion of Cogito Ergo Sum isn’t limited to just humans. Monkeys clearly at least are aware that they think, and exist.
As how life could become cognizant of its own existence, the obvious explanation is evolution. Lower life forms, such as plants, while they exist and live aren’t able to contemplate their existence. Thus they evolve slowly, and this is just all by random chance. However, when by luck evolution resulted in creatures that were aware of their own existence, then it was more than just luck. Such creatures could do things on their own to increase their chance of survival and procreation. Now skill was part of the evolutionary equations, rather than just luck. Toss skill into the mix, and after a billion or so years creatures can evolve to the point they can do a lot. Learn how to cultivate land, sail the seas, and even some day create computers and global communications networks. Of course they may also learn how to create things like nuclear weapons. Which may mean evolution ultimately leads to disaster.
Note “fL”. While life evolving may be common in the universe, humans may be the only beings in it capable of radio communication. Maybe all creatures that develop radio quickly blow themselves up.
I consider my above explanation as to how life could become cognizant of its own existence adequate. As for the actual mechanism of how this works, I’d expect THAT is a question that won’t be answered soon.
You mean this board has this feature, and it is not enabled? If so, SHAME ON YOU moderators. If the issue is the concern of posters “rewriting history” to change their arguments to be more favorable to them, this is just a problem with this board software. On one forum I frequent (Webmasterworld) the software has a neat feature that if you botch a post and quickly spot it, you can edit it. However, after a short period of time, I can no longer edit my posts. (I’ve never timed this, but it seems like no more than an hour.)
Anyway, getting back to the topic at hand, what I’m really trying to ask is whether or not anybody has a working theory which seeks to explain the molecular basis of consciousness. The fact that consciousness exists, and that it evolved as a necessary environmental adaptation mechanism seems intuitively apparent. But what I’m really driving at is whether or not anybody has suggested a mechanism by which consciousness itself is physically possible.
There are many. Cognitive neuroscience and cognitive philosophy are full of them. I’d read Daniel Dennett’s works.
Mind you, though, Cogito Ergo Sum is not about sentience. Sentience is assumed by Descartes. The line derives from questioning whether Decartes is who he thinks he is, or if all his sensory input is being fed to him by a “malicious demon” (modern readers can update this to “he is a ‘brain in a vat’”). He reasons that he must exist since he thinks.
Hey, I made up a working theory of where human sentience came from!
I did it in a first-year anatomy (possibly physiology) class, when they led us through the brain’s reflex connections, neuro-transmitters, feedback mechanisms such as the ones that let you walk (without falling over, at a speed appropriate to the situation, while thinking of something else, etc), and so on. Your body does a lot of inter-active procedures in preparation for reproduction–hormonal, circulatory, motivational, and so on, most of them managed by neurons, and their existence brings itself to your consciousness, rather than your consciousness deciding to bring them about.
Same for flight or fight, food-seeking, and so forth. We may all have found ourselves having actions and ideas that bubble up from the non-conscious part of us.
All the various neuronal activities and functions are so large and busy that sentience could be explained as the froth on the surface: just a side-effect of your brain’s capacity.
Unfortunately, this idea of mine hasn’t been taken seriously, possibly because I never researched or published it.
Oh, and it doesn’t approach the subject on the molecular level, except for the use of the word ‘neuro-transmitter’.
Cognition is a vast, global field and there are perhaps as many individual “explanations of consciousness” as there are cognitive scientists!
However, almost all of them share a great many elements in common. We have senses and memory. An enormous amount can be explained in terms of these two elements, with the brain acting as a device which receives sensory input and sorts it into differentlevelsof memory, while simultaneously retrieving memories in order to cross-file and process them and give them “meaning” or “context”. (This process might well require chemical emotion as a moderator to acheive anything like “our” consciousness.) When I sit here “being conscious”, I consider that receiving senses and sorting them into memory is largely all that “I” (a unique string of memories) am doing.
There are many good books out there. I recommend Daniel Dennet, Steven Pinker, Jerry Fodor, Susan Greenfield, Chris Frith and Roger Penrose for some different views.
As for your “molecular basis”, Washoe, that is perhaps the challenge of the millennium, but great strides have been taken in explaining memory and senses in terms of molecules (PDF).
