What Is Consciousness?

Great Debates
301

A good follow up question to this: would a baby ever become conscious if he were placed in an isolation tank from birth until, say, age 5yo? There is debate about when exactly consciousness starts (a couple of months post partum? A couple of years?). But, we should agree that newborns are not conscious and 4 year-olds are conscious, so let’s say normal human consciousness starts at age 2, just for the hell of it. Do you think our test subject would be conscious at age 3yo, past normal conscious start time, while still in the tank?

I argue that he would not be conscious, because he has no memory or sensory input to reference. No map. This is in contradistinction to a fellow who developed consciousness normally, but later in life is put into the tank. I believe that guy is and will remain conscious, because he has memory of the outside world to reference, which the toddler lacks. Tank-baby = non-conscious; tank-toddler = non-conscious; tank-man = conscious. Does anyone disagree with this assessment?

The more profound question to consider: What about tank-boy?; will he become conscious? Tank-boy used to be tank-baby, then tank-toddler: little disagreement that he was non-conscious through those stages, correct? Then, he was fished out of the tank at age 5 and introduced, for the first time, to sensory input. The easy answer is “yes”, with sensory input, he can now sense that he is in an environment external to himself and he can differentiate himself from that external world. He’s now self-aware. Really?

I don’t believe he would become self-aware at that point (or any point thereafter). Tank-boy missed the normal developmental stage when we humans tie together all parts of consciousness into an integrated whole. It would be like trying to stuff yeast into a baked loaf of flatbread and expecting it to rise. It’s too late, you have to put the yeast in before putting it in the oven (I’m not a baker; I hope that’s an apt analogy).

Molineux’s Problem illustrates part of the problem (i.e. can sensory perception function properly after being delayed for a significant period of time), but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. I believe empirical data demonstrates unambiguously that integration of delayed visual perception with other perceptions (e.g. touch) is, at best, haphazard and unreliable.

But, we’re going further than Molineux in proposing a thought experiment case subject with no perception at all, not just sight. In fact, let’s go beyond the isolation tank to propose zero perception of any kind from conception to age 5. Will that person ever gain consciousness after the age of 5 with all of his senses suddenly turned on? I say “no”. What say you?

So, what does this have to do with strong AI and the computational philosophy of mind? Well, maybe nothing.

…or, maybe everything! :smiley:

If it’s true that you can’t become conscious with no sensory input during a set period of time during organic brain development, then that ups the ante for AI to achieve it by an order of magnitude, IMHO.

302

There is an interesting parallel in people who lose their sight and then have it restored. Such a person, who can see until, say, age six, but then goes blind…and then, at age thirty has his vision restored, will be able to see.

But someone blind from birth, who has his vision restored at age thirty…will not be able to “see.” He won’t be able to make sense of the visual input, but will only perceive a confusing kaleidoscope of color and motion.

So, alas, I think with consciousness. The child who is isolated from birth will never acquire the necessary formative experiences to have a meaningful mental self-existence.

The opposite, of course, is counseled as good child-rearing: make sure even newborn babies have a rich visual field, with mobiles, toys, lots of interactions with the parents, etc.

This also comes up in zoo-keeping. The San Diego Zoo had a polar bear that went insane from too-long isolation in too small an enclosure. The newer enclosure is larger, with a much more varied topography, and, in addition, the zookeepers engage the bears with puzzles, toys, surprises, and other things to engage their minds. (The keepers’ minds are engaged also!)

Grin! It’s all part of the big picture…unless it isn’t!

303

Trinopus,

The vision issue is an interesting point - not only do we learn to see, but the brain creates the paths that allow it to learn to see. In lab animals that have been blinded in one eye, the brain only connects to the eye with vision. It is not pre-wired.

Crane

304

The brain is wonderfully plastic. I know a blind guy who has one of those vibrating point sensor plate things, which he wears on his back, under his shirt. Little points of pressure vibrate against his skin, representing the light and dark pixels in a very low-resolution picture taken from a camera he wears on a headband.

What is astonishing to me (and to him!) is how this matrix of stimulation of points using the sense of touch so readily translates to a crude sense of “vision.”

(Comics fans will instantly think of Daredevil!)

The brain learns to re-assign one faculty to another purpose entirely.

Learning to interpret Morse Code would be another example.

305

It seems like the brain is wired to produce a 3D model and vision is just one of the tools, touch, body/motor position awareness during touch, sense of time (e.g. it took a long time to walk around that object, giving an impression of size) and maybe others all seem to add bits of information to the model.

306

Each of us is, in a sense, a bunch of blind men examining an elephant.

307

Or a singular blind man among a group of blind men. The elephant is very like a rope, said one. The elephant is very like a spear, said another. The elephant is like a snake, said yet another…

Speaking of consciousness, what did the Zen Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

“Make me one with everything.”

308

Old Sam Gross cartoon, where one of the blind men is feeling around on the ground behind where the elephant had been standing. “An elephant is soft and mushy.”

309

Exactement!

310

This plasticity is one reason why I am quite optimistic about the possiblity of direct neural interfacing at some point in the near future. Electrical impulses could be received directly by a user’s nervous system, communicating speech, visual images, even text or haptic information; even more interesting would be the possibility of sending data outward from the nervous system to a computer interface, or as speech, text or even images. I suppose the easiest way to send speech noiselessly would be some kind of subvocalisation, but sending images would probably need a link into the cortex iself.

Given this sort of linkage we could be sending and receiving data via direct neural links in a routine way fairly soon; I’m quite sure that most young people would have the required brain plasticity to make sense of the signals. At the very least I can imagine applications for people with speech dyspraxia and other incapacitating conditions.

It would be nice if this sort of direct link to the nervous system could give us a window into consciousness, but it seems quite probable that it won’t.

311

It might also make “external memory” available, where we could “look things up” with the same facility that we “remember” them today.

(My only quibble with thought-writing is that it will surely take a lot of learning. I’ve tried “writing” by dictating to a recorder, and the results have been rotten! I think in a very different way when writing than when speaking. But…this could surely be improved with practice.)

If you don’t mind my asking, why not? It seems to me this would be a huge advance in understanding the link between physical brain activity and thought processes. I wouldn’t want to suggest it would answer all the questions – indeed, it might easily raise more questions than it answers! – but surely it would give us some additional insight into the consciousness question…wouldn’t it?

(It also raises some very ugly spectres, such as direct-stimulus-to-brain brainwashing. Imagine putting a plug in a guy’s head, and, in twenty minutes, he believes in whatever religious, political, or ideological dogma that his captors desire. Ick…)

312

Well, I thought at first that direct neural interfacing would help us tap into the workings of the mind, but it seems more likely that it will just become an extension of the brain’s sensory and communicative apparatus. This could have some profound implications if it allows us to communicate with computers and other tools (and with each other) directly, but because it relies on the brain’s plasticity to create the links, the hard work of communication and understanding is being done by the brain itself.

To really understand consciousness we’d need to tap into, and model, a much larger fraction of the central nervous system; something that is quite a bit more difficult than making a few peripheral links.

313

Fair enough; I’m hip.

Anyway, the immediate real benefits are cool enough, the research will almost certainly be funded, so it’s win/win/win!

314

For what it’s worth, here’s a site I just came across that may or may not shed some light on the subject of consciousness.

315

Alas, pretty empty stuff. Lots of language about fields and energy and planes and density…but none of the terms are defined. It’s all a priori declarations, with no citing of evidence for how this is known.

Lots of talk about “soul” and no talk about how the energy interacts with matter.

Maybe I’m wrong here, but it feels like it belongs in the woopile.

316

Well thanks, Trinopus. Saves me the trouble if actually reading it . though I admit I do find the idea of energy fields and souls pretty interesting. Maybe we are all part of the same energy field that inhabits these bodies in this particular region of space. The mind boggles.

317

Poul Anderson wrote a troublingly clever sf story about souls – he made it sound reasonably scientific. A soul was essentially a standing wave with a wavelength the size of the entire cosmos. The frequency was so low, it might just as well be eternal.

Arsen Darnay wrote an even more troublingly clever sf story about souls: “Plutonium.” In this vision, the soul added exactly the needed increment of energy to permit a sperm and egg to unite. Some evil bloke figured out how to build a detector – and then a collector – for that energy, and so he ended up with a really big containment vessel full of souls.

Someone else wrote a story about a “soul flashlight” that could be used to see ghosts at night. But when you amped up the output, you got a “soul laser” that flash-fried ghosts – or could burn the soul right out of a living person. A kind of “damnation gun.”

The ideas can be made sensible, at least in the science fictional sense. All of these ideas would be amenable to actual physical testing. The hypotheses would not be “nonsense” in the scientific sense. Of course, in real life, none of these ideas actually has one fiber of real evidence…

318

But isn’t that what makes science fiction so much fun? Take an idea and run with it. I’m not so sure about the concept of a soul as something someone can take, as in a bargain with the devil or an exorcism. But I am fairly certain of the concept of consciousness as the “ghost in the machine.” As Rudy Rucker once said in the tagline for his novel Software: preserve your software at any cost. The rest is meat.

319

Meh. I’ve written a few bits of SF nonsense about souls, some of it based on discussions on this mb.

Do I believe any of it? Not in the slightest, but I’m fairly sure that technology will be concerning itself with this sort of thing within the next century or two. My own vague idea is that we are information entities living in meat, the ‘ghost in the machine’ mentioned by** Biffster**; this ‘ghost’ can’t exist without the machine, but it might be transferrable to another machine, perhaps a better one.

320

That’s how Rudy Rucker’s novel worked. Your consciousness could continue to exist as long as you had another host to transfer all of your software to. At one point the guy became an ice cream truck.