On Theories of Consciousness
It is hard not to notice the fact that an unusually high percentage of Nobel laureates, from Gerald Edelman to Francis Crick turn their attention to the problem of consciousness and formulate embarrassingly ridiculous theories of consciousness. Why is that?
Then there are people who are completely outside the field of neuroscience who propose ridiculous theories of consciousness. For example, Roger Penrose, a well-known mathematician who invented "twistor theory", has been very vocal about his theory that consciousness is really a Bose-Einstein condensate in microtubules. Seriously, this is the peak of absurdity, but it's hard to appreciate this unless you have a biological, and better yet, a neurobiological, background and understand what a Bose-Einstein condensate is.
I am anticipating that Stephan Wolfram, the creator of the Mathematica software, and also an ego-maniac extraordinaire, will soon be proposing that consciousness is nothing more than a cellular automata (CA).
Should we blame philosopher David Chalmers for bringing consciousness theories back in vogue? Now anyone with a consciousness theory, no matter how silly it is, feels compelled to push it as "the theory of consciousness". Is it any wonder that we are still left without a generally useful and detailed theory of consciousness? Yet hordes of individuals feel compelled to add to the noise because everyone else is making noise about theories of consciousness. And if they have a Nobel prize under their belt, then they're given a microphone. And yet we still are left without a generally useful and detailed theory of consciousness.
My belief: that our ignorance of brain organization precludes an understanding of consciousness. Instead of looking for a "new physics" to explain consciousness, or new metaphors, the insights that will lead to a real (i.e, useful and detailed) theory of consciousness will be found in the detailed scrutiny of brain and neuroanatomical organization.
Then there are people who are completely outside the field of neuroscience who propose ridiculous theories of consciousness. For example, Roger Penrose, a well-known mathematician who invented "twistor theory", has been very vocal about his theory that consciousness is really a Bose-Einstein condensate in microtubules. Seriously, this is the peak of absurdity, but it's hard to appreciate this unless you have a biological, and better yet, a neurobiological, background and understand what a Bose-Einstein condensate is.
I am anticipating that Stephan Wolfram, the creator of the Mathematica software, and also an ego-maniac extraordinaire, will soon be proposing that consciousness is nothing more than a cellular automata (CA).
Should we blame philosopher David Chalmers for bringing consciousness theories back in vogue? Now anyone with a consciousness theory, no matter how silly it is, feels compelled to push it as "the theory of consciousness". Is it any wonder that we are still left without a generally useful and detailed theory of consciousness? Yet hordes of individuals feel compelled to add to the noise because everyone else is making noise about theories of consciousness. And if they have a Nobel prize under their belt, then they're given a microphone. And yet we still are left without a generally useful and detailed theory of consciousness.
My belief: that our ignorance of brain organization precludes an understanding of consciousness. Instead of looking for a "new physics" to explain consciousness, or new metaphors, the insights that will lead to a real (i.e, useful and detailed) theory of consciousness will be found in the detailed scrutiny of brain and neuroanatomical organization.
posted by neubrain at 4:59 PM
14 Comments:
I have noticed this too - all the big names seems to turn to consciousness at some point. Or perhaps it's just the big headed...
At any rate, very entertaining.
Any nominees for "Least Silly Theory of Consciousness"?
My current candidates are Daniel Dennett and Jeff Hawkins.
Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" is over-ambitiously titled, but does a good job of clearing some of the other sillier theories out of the way enough that the problem is better stated. My favorite summary of his view comes from the title of one of his papers: "More like fame than television."
Hawkin's "On Intelligence" takes a narrower focus and really attempts to lay out "how it works" without much attention to the usual catalog of philosophical niceties. It's very much an engineer's manifesto, crying out: "let's try to build it *this* way!"
In fact the two are complementary, as Hawkins' design proposal fits nicely into the philosophical space Dennett so meticulously clears of paradoxes.
Any other nominees?
Dennett is a philosopher/linguist who wouldn't recognize a brain if it bit him in the ass. From his books, I get the impression that he likes to hide/reside in an ivory tower, completely divorced from reality and the brain's relation to consciousness.
Hawkin's ideas provide an interesting and useful abstraction and implementation of what the brain may be doing computationally, but do not really offer anything in the way of a theory of consciousness.
Searle has made some interesting arguments for 'unified field theories' of consciousness and contrasting them with 'building block theories' of consciousness, but has not seemed to make much progress beyond this. Nonetheless, he would probably be my nominee.
I take it for granted that neither Dennett or Hawkins have achieved anything better than a local minimum of silliness. There will be many years of hard work ahead, and what I appreciate about these two is confined to a) puncturing dumb philosophical objections, b) proposing a fresh program for engineering research.
What is Searle's single best contribution? Got a favorite book/article of his?
I found this article interesting:
Consciousness. Annu Rev Neurosci. 2000;23:557-78. Review.
But the problem is, there is little substance to the article, but what little substance there is, is interesting, which is more than I can say for the majority who just publish a lot of crap.
I agree that, generally, the study of consciousness suffers from a surplus of philosophy and a paucity of science. However, I do believe that some progress has been made. A variety of true neuroscientists have published several articles in the last decade that provide new evidence based on scientific study, rather than philosophical conjecture.
Christof Koch's book, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, is well-researched and a step in the right direction. Of course, Koch still has not solved the problem, but he does an excellent job of summarizing what we do know about consciousness. While the mystery remains, Koch's work is sufficient to rule out a number of existing philosophical conjectures, and to give some structure to the "quest."
Christof Koch has written good books on computational neuroscience but his thoughts on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) are comical and reveal his blatant ignorance on the matter. Koch's decision to ally himself with the late Francis Crick also needs to be examined, since most of Koch's popularity stems from this alliance. To what extent was Koch the lapdog of Crick? And after Crick's passing, Koch just seemed to disappear from the public eye. Why is that?
In my final analysis, Koch has done some worthwhile computational neuroscience, but has contributed nothing but comic relief and misinformation to the field of consciousness.
It seems to me Searle's best work is negative. (i.e. his noted attacks on eliminative materialism and functionalism) I don't find his positive claims as being terribly persuasive or ultimately helpful.
I think Searle's greatest contribution is his emphasis on "resting state" and baseline consciousness. This is too often overlooked in the literature because no-one understands it, yet it underlies almost every single experiment. What is baseline neural activity and brain activation, in spatiotemporal terms? The brain baseline activity underlies all stimulation-induced activities, and I would argue that before we can ever hope to understand stimulus-induced activations, we must understand the baseline.
I'm not sure what Searle says against functionalism and EM, but here are my thoughts. Functionalism is unattractive because it does not spell out what consciousness is functionally. All it states is that the brain's implementation of consciousness may be implemented in other materials, such as silicon, which is a completely vacuous and unsubstantiated claim without further details.
Paul and Patricia's Eliminative materialism (EM) is trivial in the sense that they're saying that consciousness can be reduced down to neural activations. Their suggestion of using neuron-resolution dynamical systems analysis and neural activation phase portraits is hopelessly naive because there are 100 billion neurons in our brain, which means any neural activation phase portrait will have 100 billion dimensions, which is unanalyzable. I mean, it's nice conceptually, but could never be realistically implemented in the near or distant future.
I meant Paul and Patricia Churchland's Eliminative materialism (EM) above
brain12357:
i'm planning to read Koch's book shortly. i'm sorry to hear that it doesn't have all the answers either ;)
is there someone else out there whom you would endorse as "not as bad as Koch?"
the trouble with a really hard problem is that it embarasses those who try to tackle it!
neubrain:
i read the survey article you recommended (at least a draft which i found on Searle's web page) and am following some of the references.
i also read his book on "The Construction of Social Reality" which I found quite valuable. it attends to some of the issues that deconstruction points out without resorting to the anti-realist postures so common in that literature.
naturally, i don't yet have any concrete idea about how to apply Searle's concept of Social Reality to consciousness ...
i have to admit i had misclassified Searle in the past. i was aware of his critique of "AI" and familiar with his "Chinese Room" thought experiment. but i had not appreciated how down-to-earth and essentially sympathetic to "don't-call-it AI" as he is. i like his formulation of "biological naturalism".
as for "don't-call-it-AI" -- this is my home-brew term to denote what AI strives for, while simultaneously distancing from anything you might actually associate with the term "AI". what i really need is an operator akin to the "writing under erasure" used by heidegger or derrida (but in an almost opposite sense) which functions by stripping a word of its connotations.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' (Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll)
Hello, Everybody, Mind, and Spirit! :)
I think your essay and discussions above are excellent and realistic!
Briefly, as you all might have known, Consciousness is an ambiguous subject even today that none a well trained scientist or philosopher could have had gotten it right completely, satisfactorily. Indeed, it is too hot and vague a subject to debate; it is also too hard a phenomenon to define and to be understood, in and by any conventional ways, other than awaiting more advances in interdisciplinary science and metacognition of the subject.
Definitions aside, whoever comes up with the quantum mechanics of consciousness, shall eventually win the race, so as to comprehend the universal theory of consciousness.
At least, that was my understanding and impression that I’ve had gotten when I was doing extensive and intensive research for my new book Gods, Genes, Conscience whose subtitle is self-explanatory as follows: A socio-intellectual survey of our dynamic mind, life, all creations in between and beyond, on Earth; or A critical reader’s theory of everything: past, present, future; in continuum, ad infinitum, in case you all might be interested in reading it.
Furthermore, epistemologically, since the 1980s, consciousness and theory of the human mind, have had been increasingly studied by many prominent philosophers and scientists alike, from all possible ways or perspectives, accurately or misguidedly, throughout our intellectual history. Generally, I would characterize them, as follows; although which by no means are to be construed as an exhaustive list:
1) Metaphysical-cosmological—eg, Spinoza; Einstein; Carl Jung; et al; whose hunches are that consciousness or deity as something big out there in the Universe, beyond our reach physically;
2) Hard artificial intelligence (AI)—eg, Turing; Marvin Minsky; Ray Kurzweil; et al; who believe that computers will be conscious someday; AI dreaming, so to speak;
3) Neurophysics-mathematics—eg, Descartes; Roger Penrose; et al; who pinpoint the seat of consciousness in our brain, but all in the wrong places; Descartes pointed at the pineal gland, Penrose at the neuronal microtubules (1994), all inconsistent with the current knowledge of neuroscience, neurology, and neuro-endocrinology!
4) Soft artificial intelligence—eg, Paul Churchland; David Chalmers; Steven Pinker; et al; who believe that consciousness may be akin to digital computational software;
5) Neurophilosophy—eg, Francis Crick; Patricia Churchland; et al; who attempt to incorporate neuroscience into theory of mind, but they are not quite there yet, both conceptually and empirically, all lost in the complexities of the neuropsychological forests, so to speak;
6) General philosophy—eg, John Searle; et al; who vehemently oppose all AI representation or simulation of the human mind or consciousness; whose “Chinese room” thought experiment is exemplary, as a debunker of the AI thesis, hard and soft;
7) Faulty theory of memetics (not even a philosophy!)—eg, Richard Dawkins; Daniel Dennett; Susan Blackmore; et al; whose Evolutionism in The Selfish Gene (1976) gives rise to the scientistic, metaphysical, evolutionistic theory (or wordplay) of meme (or myth), whereby our consciousness may be likened to the viral contagion in our brain, gloriously and utterly fashionable nonsense, for 3 decades now;
8) Self-defeatist philosophy—eg, Mary Midgley; Colin McGinn; et al; who proclaim that consciousness is what our brain does, but we’ll not be able to understand it! And,
9) Interdisciplinary metacognitive philosophy—eg, Gods, Genes, Conscience; wherein a new theory of consciousness is presented (Chapter 15 The Universal Theory of Mind), whose quantum mechanics dubbed “memophorescenicity” has had been empirically defined and localized in the particle-wave function of our neuronal membrane (2006)—please also see Scientists use quantum mechanics to control a biological process (PhysOrgEU; September 7)!
Thank you all for your kind attention and cooperation in this matter. Happy reading, thinking, scrutinizing, and enlightening! :)
Best wishes, Mong 9/6/6usct10:44p; author Gods, Genes, Conscience and Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now; a cyberspace hermit-philosopher of Modern Mind, whose works are based on the current advances in interdisciplinary science and integrative psychology of Science and Religion worldwide; ethically, morally; metacognitively, and objectively.
I honestly think my theory is not silly.
http://www.freewebs.com/consciousnessdecoded/
Can a dumb geologist intrude? Astronomers have just gotten around to updating the definition of 'planet' after 2000 years. Doesn't the subject 'consciousness' suffer the same problem? IT must be measurable, locatable, and have a cause, with CONSCIOUSNESS as the effect. Otherwise, it's supernatural. I have my own ideas, but as a dirt guy, I'll butt out.
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