• petrichor
    321
    Should we only believe in what is verifiable? If so, we should be skeptical of claims that anything lacks consciousness.

    I should be clear about what I mean by consciousness, since people tend to talk past one another on this topic. I am not talking about reasoning, self-modeling, or any particular kind of mental activity or mental content, but rather just bare experientiality. If there is any sort of subjectivity, any experience at all, there is consciousness. This does not require self-awareness or a constructed self-model.

    Most consider general anesthesia a clear case of unconsciousness. But maybe instead of making us incapable of experiencing pain, it just paralyzes us and prevents the retention of any memory of the experience. Failure to remember or report an experience is certainly not evidence of a lack of experience. How would we know if this is the case? Is there any way to tell?

    Consider split-brain patients. The severing of the corpus callosum seems to split the mind into two distinct parts. Each hemisphere fails to report what is exclusively observed by the other. The ability to integrate information between hemispheres is lost. Unlike the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere can't speak. So if you talk to the patient and get a verbal answer, you generally only hear from the left hemisphere. But there are other ways of asking the right hemisphere questions and getting answers, such as by having it point to objects with the left hand.

    ...when an object is shown in the right visual field, the visual information travels to the left hemisphere and the patient is effortlessly able to name it. When shown to the left visual field, however, the information travels to the right hemisphere, and when asked, the patient will typically answer that no object was seen. This phenomenon is easily explained by the fact that most people’s speech centre is located in their left hemisphere. When the hemispheres are separated, the left will be capable of naming an object, while the right hemisphere stays mute. Moreover, the left hemisphere will also eagerly answer the question intended for the right hemisphere. When it hears the question directed to the right hemisphere asking what the object was, the left hemisphere correctly and honestly reports that it did not see anything at all.

    Now picture yourself listening to the completely normal looking person sitting in front of you saying that he did not see the object. He sounds absolutely sure about this. One might jump to the conclusion that the right hemisphere did not perceive the stimulus. Yet this interpretation drastically changes when the right hemisphere is asked to communicate non-verbally. For example, when instructed to point out the object from a group of objects with the left hand, patients reliably identify the object that had been presented to the right hemisphere. Not just better than chance. Every time.
    Lukas J. Volz, Michael S. Gazzaniga

    It could be that there are regions of the nervous system that have experiences that never get reported because they aren't connected to language processing and motor areas in the right way. Suppose, for example, that there is something like a separate brain in your liver, and that there is some subjective experience associated with this, perhaps of a sort very different from what we are familiar with. This liver-brain may not be connected to the left hemisphere in the skull in such a way that the left hemisphere is aware of what is happening there. This experience never gets reported and so remains unknown to science.

    There might actually be many functions in our nervous system that involve experiences that never get reported because those areas are not highly integrated with areas that can express themselves through behavior. We aren't conscious of regulating our heart rate and generally lack voluntary control of it. But some part of the nervous system controls it. That part may simply not be well-connected to the executive regions. The failure to report such experiences is not evidence that no consciousness of this exists anywhere.

    Imagine a room, buried deep underground, with a person inside who has no way of communicating with the outside world. We never hear reports of their experience and we never see behavior. We can stand on the ground and ask toward that room underground if there are any experiences there. Should we interpret the silence as evidence for lack of any experience in that room?

    Even in deep sleep, anaesthesia, and so on, it may not be that experientiality switches off entirely. Rather, it could be that the brain simply begins operating in a manner that is less integrated, dissociating into many smaller regions. Or maybe it switches to a very different mode of integrated functioning. Information about what happens during this time might not be available to the waking brain, or might not have a form that would be intelligible to the waking brain. In such a state, a story like those we normally tell ourselves might not be constructed and so none may be available to report. Even with normal dreaming, remembering is often difficult, if not impossible. So people often say, incorrectly, that they didn't have any dreams that night.

    When we (the waking brain with ability to report through speech) try to remember what happened during "dreamless" sleep, we come up empty. So we assume that there is no experience whatsoever. We might be making a mistake. Our coming up empty is experienced as finding nothing. We think this means there is nothing there, as if we are directly knowing the nothingness of that unconscious state. But notice that if you mentally try to remember the experiences of another human, you similarly find nothing. Is this evidence that other people lack consciousness? Of course not! All we have here is a failure to access memories of an experience. It is a failure of integration, not a lack of experience.

    Usually, when we can't directly access experiences, such as those of other people, we make a judgment about whether they have experiences or not by observing their behavior and making an inference. If they behave like we do during times in our lives that we can remember being conscious, we assume that they too are conscious. Some of this attribution of mind to others like us might also be part of our social instincts.

    With animals, we tend to think it more likely that they have experiences when they behave in a way most similar to how we behave during times when we remember being conscious. If they scream when injured, we tend to think they must experience pain. Even a simple retraction from a damaging stimulus is often suggestive to us. But notice that our gradient of consciousness-attribution tracks fairly tightly with similarity to ourselves. This seems a bit suspicious! The more mammal-like the behavior, the more consciousness there must be. Anyone see a problem here?

    My dad loved to go fishing. Even as he would use a pair of pliers to pull a hook out of the throat of a fish, even as that fish would struggle in his hands with all its might, attempting to get away, he would tell me with confidence that none of this hurts the fish. As a kid, I believed him. But how could he know this? It seems to me that if the fish would have screamed or cried, he would have thought differently. He never hunted rabbits again after being shocked upon hearing a rabbit scream when struck with an arrow. But of course fish can't scream! They evolved for a very different environment and lack lungs and vocal cords! Is their lack of report of pain evidence that there is no pain? Hardly!

    Notice the pattern here. We only attribute consciousness where we have access to reports of experience that have a form we recognize, a form that is very similar to mammal behavior. If there are no reports of experiences, there must be none! This is obviously problematic.

    Notice that in the past, this attribution of consciousness tended to be even more restricted to those who looked and behaved exactly like the person making the attribution. Humans doubted experience in animals altogether. White men denied souls, which they thought responsible for consciousness, to animals, and in some cases even to other human races and to women, even despite the fact that these report their experiences.



    If we are to be scientific, we should be careful about believing in claims that cannot be verified. Nobody has ever verified the reality of unconsciousness of any kind in any sort of entity ever. We have no evidence whatsoever that such a condition is possible. Where we find no recognizable report of experience, that's all we have, simply a lack of a report, not evidence of unconsciousness.

    What does evidence of consciousness look like? It always amounts for us to human-like behavior, and is often only seen as definitive when it involves verbal reports. This is obviously flawed. For one thing, we can create robots that move like humans and speak, making noises that sound like a person claiming they are conscious. Is this evidence? There are also situations like locked-in syndrome where even waking human experiences cannot be reported verbally.

    It could be that mycelial networks are conscious. How would we know?

    You probably see where this is going. We have no solid reason to believe that there is anything happening in nature at all with no consciousness associated with it. People who consider themselves to be scientific and to only believe based on evidence commonly believe in non-conscious, dead matter, saying that consciousness is "produced by the brain" under very special circumstances. Are they justified in their belief in non-conscious matter? Is this scientific? Should we believe in entities that have never been observed and cannot, even in principle, be observed by us? Is the existence of non-conscious matter falsifiable?

    I am not suggesting that a rock might be conscious of being a rock, that rocks have thoughts, animal-like senses or any such thing. Rocks surely lack the right kind of integration for anything like that. But there could be very simple, poorly integrated experientiality in the matter that makes up rocks. This same matter, when arranged in the right way, might even become capable of reporting experience.

    It might be that rather than producing consciousness, brains simply amount to a kind of organization that makes recognizable reports of experience possible.

    Thoughts?
  • David Mo
    960
    I should be clear about what I mean by consciousness, since people tend to talk past one another on this topic.petrichor

    Your concept of consciousness is too strange and not very useful. Psychology usually only includes thoughts and experiences that are explicit to the subject in the consciousness. It is synonymous with awareness. For example: Some people are playing with a ball on a screen. An individual disguised as a gorilla passes by in the background for a few seconds. Many observers do not refer to the gorilla when asked to describe the scene. They did not notice it.

    The classic distinction between conscious and unconscious is useful to analyze some relevant questions about perception and memory. It is a key concept in the debate about psychoanalysis and dreams. I see no advantage in blurring this distinction. Rather I see confusion.
    For example, forgetting is very different from unconsciousness. In oblivion you cannot remember something that you were aware of a few days before. In the unconsciousness you are not aware of a process present in your mind.

    It is not necessary to think about strange things when talking about the unconsciousness. Your abilities to drive a car are largely unconscious. It is not a mystery.
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    Should we only believe in what is verifiable?petrichor

    Obviously not. Most of the things that we hold as true are not verifiable in practice or even in theory.

    How would we know?petrichor

    If you were consistent in your skepticism, you would eventually arrive at solipsism, thus undermining all your empirical reasoning up to that point. This is a dead end.
  • Pop
    1.5k
    We have no solid reason to believe that there is anything happening in nature at all with no consciousness associated with it.petrichor

    Yep, this is how I understand it:

    Zero point energy is the divide. Living matter resists zero point energy with consciousness, whilst non living matter falls to zero point energy to unconsciousness. Consciousness is a system of self organization with a bias to resist zero point energy ( death ) at its core . Every moment of life is a moment of self organization, for all of life - always!
  • debd
    42
    Most consider general anaesthesia a clear case of unconsciousness. But maybe instead of making us incapable of experiencing pain, it just paralyzes us and prevents the retention of any memory of the experience. Failure to remember or report an experience is certainly not evidence of a lack of experience. How would we know if this is the case? Is there any way to tell?petrichor

    Yes, this has been demonstrated and the effect of paralyzing agents has been isolated from that of anaesthetic agents. Its called the Tunstall isolated forearm test in which before administering any drugs, a tourniquet/pressure cuff is tied to the arm/inflated such that blood flow in the arm seizes but nerve conduction remains intact. Now the patient asked to flex his fingers and the drugs are injected. When only paralyzing agents are instilled the patient is able to move his fingers as the drug does not reach beyond the tourniquet and also his central nervous system remains functional. However when anaesthetic agents are administered, even though it does not reach the forearm, the patient is unable to follow the command to move fingers because his consciousness gets impaired by anaesthetics agents in a dose dependent manner until he finally loses consciousness.
    This is a old test, nowadays more sophisticated EEG parameters are used to monitor consciousness during anesthesia.
  • petrichor
    321
    Yes, this has been demonstrated and the effect of paralyzing agents has been isolated from that of anaesthetic agents. Its called the Tunstall isolated forearm testdebd

    Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for pointing it out!

    However when anaesthetic agents are administered, even though it does not reach the forearm, the patient is unable to follow the command to move fingers because his consciousness gets impaired by anaesthetics agents in a dose dependent manner until he finally loses consciousness.debd

    That's a clever test, and it is suggestive of a loss of consciousness, but I can imagine many ways in which there could still be an experience of some sort happening even when there is a failure to report awareness with finger movements. Even if I am only dreaming, I cannot obey a request to move my fingers. Experience under anesthesia could be very distorted or dissociated, and this could explain the inability to act. Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? It is pretty disturbing! When this happens to me (rarely), I become quite "awake", but I cannot move a muscle, no matter how hard I try. I can't even open my eyes. After maybe ten minutes of this, something unlocks and I become able to move. I don't know for sure what the mechanism of paralysis during sleep is, but I am guessing the place where motor impulses are blocked isn't in all the peripheral nerves. It is likely in the CNS.

    Regardless, the details here are beside my point. We're getting lost in the weeds. For what I was trying to convey, it doesn't really matter whether we really feel pain under anesthesia or not. It was just a way to illustrate a more general idea, that a lack of report of experience doesn't necessarily mean there is no experience. And for my purposes here, memories of experiences are a sort of report.

    I find it very interesting that there are situations like the split brain where the mute right hemisphere can't answer for itself, can't report its experience, unlike the left. I am led to wonder what might be going on in the brain that we think is unconscious, but is rather just unable to report its experience. Certain brain regions could be basically just segregated from the parts of the brain that can speak.

    We could think of different regions of the brain network as like different people in certain positions in a company. Suppose you have an executive who makes big decisions and talks to the public and who receives various reports from assistants who gather data and so on. Suppose there is an assistant who provides visual information. The executive might think she knows about everything going on there, but maybe not. Maybe that assistant only presents the finished product to the executive, while privately experiencing the whole process of assembling those presentations. The executive might only experience what is handed off to her by the graph-maker. There may be other people who do other jobs that support the overall operation of the company, but who remain largely unknown to the executive. But they might still experience what they do. And they might communicate with people other than the executive. All of this might involve conscious experiences. But the only things ever reported to the public are what the executive has access to and decides to report.

    Do you see what I mean? You might be such an executive. And you might share the same skull with other conscious entities who have internal processes that you are unaware of, but who experience their own operation.

    This sort of thing could extend out to the wider world in general. We, as the executive parts of a brain, are only aware of what is happening in that part of a brain and of what neighboring parts report to us. But there is likely much more in the world that involves its own experience. We are perhaps stuck in yet another kind of Copernican delusion, thinking that we occupy a privileged position, that we are the only places in the universe where experiences happen.
  • debd
    42
    Yes, I agree with you but also think its a bit more complicated. The split brain example is interesting but needs to be examined a bit more. Not all patients with corpus callosotomy or corpus callosum agenesis develop disconnection syndrome. I will read up more on this and get back to you. But I do agree that not everything that is processed is reported to our consciousness and even those that are reported initially, cease to report after some time, an example being the sense of smell.
  • Malcolm Lett
    76
    Should we only believe in what is verifiable? If so, we should be skeptical of claims that anything lacks consciousness.petrichor

    I think the overarching principle that you're describing, or perhaps better phrased as the logical extension of your argument, is Panpsychism.

    It's a valid possible explanation, but it suffers problems. It presupposes that everything has some level of consciousness, from rocks to trees to humans, and by implication: from rocks down to molecules to atoms and smaller. On the face of it, this seems hard to fathom without inducing some form of mysticism.

    One of its biggest problems is that of the Combination Problem: what mechanism explains how all those billions of tiny proto-consciousnesses combine together to form a high level consciousness?

    Personally I don't buy panpsychism, so I'd say that there is a line somewhere that demarcates conscious from non-conscious, and our difficulty lies in understanding where that line exists.

    Consider split-brain patients. The severing of the corpus callosum seems to split the mind into two distinct parts. Each hemisphere fails to report what is exclusively observed by the other. The ability to integrate information between hemispheres is lost. Unlike the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere can't speak. So if you talk to the patient and get a verbal answer, you generally only hear from the left hemisphere. But there are other ways of asking the right hemisphere questions and getting answers, such as by having it point to objects with the left hand.petrichor

    I'm also very interested in split-brain phenomena. I'm still searching for a good account that gets to the heart of conscious experience in the non-verbal half. The problem with all the accounts I've read so far is that they don't directly attempt to ask the patient questions about their own conscious experience. It's possible that the problem lies in the fact that the non-verbal half cannot comprehend questions of consciousness without the verbal faculties; but I suspect it's more subtle than that.
  • bcccampello
    39
    Yes. And with regard to guilt, the problem is not guilty conscience. It is the guilty UNCONSCIOUSNESS. The fiercest accusers of others are the great bearers of unrecognized guilt. Commit a crime, forget it, and the next day you will be a tremendous apostle of social justice.

    Also, there is nothing more difficult than making someone aware of his progressive unconsciousness.
  • Possibility
    2.8k
    If we are to be scientific, we should be careful about believing in claims that cannot be verified. Nobody has ever verified the reality of unconsciousness of any kind in any sort of entity ever. We have no evidence whatsoever that such a condition is possible. Where we find no recognizable report of experience, that's all we have, simply a lack of a report, not evidence of unconsciousness.

    What does evidence of consciousness look like? It always amounts for us to human-like behavior, and is often only seen as definitive when it involves verbal reports. This is obviously flawed. For one thing, we can create robots that move like humans and speak, making noises that sound like a person claiming they are conscious. Is this evidence? There are also situations like locked-in syndrome where even waking human experiences cannot be reported verbally.

    It could be that mycelial networks are conscious. How would we know?

    You probably see where this is going. We have no solid reason to believe that there is anything happening in nature at all with no consciousness associated with it. People who consider themselves to be scientific and to only believe based on evidence commonly believe in non-conscious, dead matter, saying that consciousness is "produced by the brain" under very special circumstances. Are they justified in their belief in non-conscious matter? Is this scientific? Should we believe in entities that have never been observed and cannot, even in principle, be observed by us? Is the existence of non-conscious matter falsifiable?

    I am not suggesting that a rock might be conscious of being a rock, that rocks have thoughts, animal-like senses or any such thing. Rocks surely lack the right kind of integration for anything like that. But there could be very simple, poorly integrated experientiality in the matter that makes up rocks. This same matter, when arranged in the right way, might even become capable of reporting experience.

    It might be that rather than producing consciousness, brains simply amount to a kind of organization that makes recognizable reports of experience possible.

    Thoughts?
    petrichor

    Regardless whether or not we refer to it as ‘consciousness’, matter is, to some limited extent, interacting with its surroundings, and susceptible to change. A rock may not be aware of being a rock - may not recognise when it is split in half - but molecules of that rock suddenly exposed to the air will begin to oxidise. And picking up a rock from a cold creek bed and holding it in your palm will gradually alter the temperature of each rock molecule across the structure.

    If we consider a verbal report to be ‘information’ that a system has about another system, one with which it interacts, then the capacity of ‘inanimate’ matter to ‘report’ experience at a basic level is not so far-fetched, so long as we don’t presume integration where it isn’t evident. The molecules of a rock are not integrated in the way that the molecules of a living cell are. But the molecules of a chemical reaction are integrated for the duration of the reaction, making the reaction itself (as an entity) susceptible to experiences such as temperature change.
  • Caldwell
    1.3k
    I am not suggesting that a rock might be conscious of being a rock, that rocks have thoughts, animal-like senses or any such thing. Rocks surely lack the right kind of integration for anything like that. But there could be very simple, poorly integrated experientiality in the matter that makes up rocks. This same matter, when arranged in the right way, might even become capable of reporting experience.petrichor
    When arranged in the "right way", it is no longer a rock. I think we have to be fair when trying to argue for something as commonly understood as consciousness. If we are going to inject new rules to the definition of consciousness, let's clearly say so. Please explain why the current definition of consciousness no longer suffice.

    It might be that rather than producing consciousness, brains simply amount to a kind of organization that makes recognizable reports of experience possible.petrichor
    Then the Excel spreadsheet might actually be conscious -- it tells you when your input is invalid, asks you if you want to save it before closing, and provides protection for if you don't want your data to be deleted or changed.
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