Weird Science: The Ghost in the Machine

[J T]

What is consciousness?

This question has been the topic of philosophical and scientific debate for ages. Cartesian dualism, the basic philosophy that mind and body are separate entities, is still a widely held belief and serves as the basis for popular beliefs in a soul or spirit that can be separated from our bodies and perhaps carry on in an afterlife or some alternate plane of existence.

This idea hasn’t gone without its challengers though. This thread’s title of “The Ghost in the Machine” is taken from philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s criticism of Descartes’ mind-body dualism. The basic problem that Ryle identifies is that within Descartes’ basic worldview, the mind is only ever understood via the body, and the way the two interact is left a complete mystery. As an example, if a person’s eyes are blinded, has their mind been affected? Can the spirit see, but the body cannot? What about a person born blind? We know these people don’t even dream visuals and don’t think with visual imagery. Is this a limitation of their bodies or their minds? The whole notion of the mind existing separate from the body kind of falls apart because the mind can’t be experienced independent of its body. People with brain damage clearly see wild changes to their personalities. Neuroelectrical stimulation can lead people to do or experience things simply by administering a little electrical jolt. It’s harder to believe in a soul (as traditionally described) when you know about these things.

And yet, it’s hard to not believe in a soul. Clearly something happens when we die that is different from life and different from sleep. Everything about a dead person looks pretty much the same physically, but the lights have gone out, movement has stopped, and decay is soon to follow. Why did matter have life one minute, and not the next? What is life, and conversely what is death? It seems likely that the concept of a soul or spirit was something humans created, along with other accompanying religious beliefs, to explain the transition from life and death, and to explain the private nature of our thoughts unspoken and perceptions unshared.

Private experience is essential for understanding consciousness, and so it is a confounding idea that eludes science, since science, at its core, depends upon logical positivism and inter-observer reliability. Consider the Turing Test. If you could make a robot that looked and acted like a human, would you have to treat it as if it were a human with a consciousness? But how would you ever know it is conscious? There is a popular thought experiment called the Chinese Room where you are to imagine yourself locked in a room. You only speak English. Cards with Chinese characters are handed to you. You have English instruction for providing appropriate Chinese character responses to the questions on the cards. You do not understand Chinese, but you are able to follow a set of procedures that gives you the appearance of understanding Chinese. Likewise, it is possible for a computer program to look like it has consciousness, but it actually has no experience or understanding of consciousness.

The Chinese Room thought experiment makes assumptions about how computers must work, however. What if there was a dense network of interacting parts that could give rise to consciousness as an emergent property of the system? What if this is how our own consciousness comes into existence? Maybe consciousness is not one specific thing, but a pattern arising out of the interaction of other parts, like fish swimming to create a school, or bees flying to create a swarm. It’s something like how two triangles can be laid on top of each other in such a way that their relationship leads to the emergence of the Star of David, which contains patterns not present in the triangles alone, such as a star, a hexagon, and six smaller triangles. I mean, every “thing” that we think of as a “thing” is actually not a “thing”, rather it is the network of relationships of smaller “things” such as cells, molecules, atoms, etc. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and maybe the soul is greater than the sum of its parts as well.

But how does one test for conscious experience, since conscious experience is always a privately observed experience that only conscious entities perceive? Really, you could be the only conscious person on the planet and the rest of us (including me) are all just robots without awareness who are tricking you into thinking that we are conscious entities, right? Some have suggested that consciousness may be an unsolvable problem for the scientific method.

If you’re going to find consciousness, though, the brain seems like the obvious place to look, since we are conscious of thoughts, emotions, sensations, sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, and all of the sense organs for those things get networked together in the brain. But consciousness is the experience of those things, not necessarily those things. Your video camera doesn’t necessarily “see” you, but it does encode visual information. Likewise, it is not necessarily the case that the eyes and the visual cortex of the occipital lobe “see” information, but rather they play important roles in the encoding of visual information that is then seen by whatever the hell consciousness is.

There was a really interesting case study recently though. Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University was studying a woman for her problems with severe epilepsy. He was not studying consciousness, but as we all know, serendipity plays an important role in science. As part of their treatment attempts for her epilepsy, they electrically stimulated an area of the brain called the claustrum. The claustrum is a thin sheet of neurons in the neocortex with connections to the various sensory modalities of the brain. Francis Crick and Christof Koch have proposed that the claustrum serves an important integrative function for the senses, and acts like the brains orchestra conductor, and may be the home of consciousness (yes, that’s the same Crick who was integral in identifying the structure of DNA). When Koubeissi stimulated the claustrum of this epileptic woman, she remained awake, but she stopped reading and simply stared off into space. She didn’t respond to any visual or auditory commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the neural stimulation stopped, she regained consciousness and had no memory of anything that happened during the time that her claustrum was being zapped. Now people are beginning to wonder if the claustrum could be used as an on/off switch for consciousness. Any good scientist knows that you can’t generalize from one case study, especially since this woman didn’t have a normal brain to begin with since a portion of her hippocampus had already been removed in an attempt to treat her epilepsy; however, this case study is highly notable because she remained awake. Whenever consciousness is typically lost, the person is no longer in a wakeful state because they are in a coma, under anesthesia, or somehow knocked out. This woman was awake with all sensory systems firing, but nobody was home: no consciousness. That’s certainly interesting and means that the claustrum is worth further study. Perhaps the question of consciousness will not be an unsolvable problem after all.

[MrPopo]

I think this proves that JT writes these posts offline before posting them.

[J T]

I think this proves that JT writes these posts offline before posting them.

Well when sentient A.I.'s deliberately crash the racketboy site to delete my work in an attempt to cover up their existence, I have to take precautions in the form of backups.

[Luke]

Quick answer to a long question:

It is the perception of what we perceive to be reality.

End thread/

[J T]

But then what is doing the perceiving? And is that perceiving entity inextricably linked to free will? Is there even such a thing as free will? Why do we perceive ourselves as having free will, but carrying out our scientific ideas about determinism would lead us to believe that there is no such thing?

[MrPopo]

But then what is doing the perceiving? And is that perceiving entity inextricably linked to free will? Is there even such a thing as free will? Why do we perceive ourselves as having free will, but carrying out our scientific ideas about determinism would lead us to believe that there is no such thing?

Maybe what we think of as free will is simply the wave function collapsing.

[Ack]

But then what is doing the perceiving? And is that perceiving entity inextricably linked to free will? Is there even such a thing as free will? Why do we perceive ourselves as having free will, but carrying out our scientific ideas about determinism would lead us to believe that there is no such thing?

Maybe what we think of as free will is simply the wave function collapsing.

If existence is a closed system, then everyone acts and reacts solely based upon the only way they could act or react as part of a continuous chain of events.

[Luke]

But then what is doing the perceiving? And is that perceiving entity inextricably linked to free will? Is there even such a thing as free will? Why do we perceive ourselves as having free will, but carrying out our scientific ideas about determinism would lead us to believe that there is no such thing?

Okay. Like where this is going.

Our collective intelligence (from learning or passed intelligence) does the perceiving.

Perception is not ultimately linked to free will, if free will exists...which you ask about, and it does exist.

Although it seems shallow to some, I make a choice to make my own pizza rather than order a crappy one from Papa John's. I choose my own toppings. Why? Not because I'm programmed to, rather through experience I know what combinations work for me, and one's that do not.

We're not programs. We do not choose to bleed.

[J T]

But then what is doing the perceiving? And is that perceiving entity inextricably linked to free will? Is there even such a thing as free will? Why do we perceive ourselves as having free will, but carrying out our scientific ideas about determinism would lead us to believe that there is no such thing?

Maybe what we think of as free will is simply the wave function collapsing.

If existence is a closed system, then everyone acts and reacts solely based upon the only way they could act or react as part of a continuous chain of events.

Then maybe existence is an open system?

If I use Newtonian physics I can accurately predict what will happen when I kick a ball. I can know the trajectory, velocity, the landing point, when it will roll to a stop, etc. However, when I kick a human, things become much more unpredictable. Will they cry? Will they laugh? Will they turn around and kick my ass? It becomes much more probabilistic than deterministic. Maybe there is a degree of determinism, but its boundaries are more fuzzy.

If we lived in a closed system, then everything would dissolve into the entropy of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, but then why, as one professor used to ask me, are there no Toyota mines? These incredibly complex machines didn't exist in the past, and don't seem to be getting simpler, in fact increasing complexity seems to be readily observable in human society. How are we not just fading away in entropy? Maybe the entropy of closed systems doesn't apply to us because we actually live in an open system.

[Luke]

If I use Newtonian physics I can accurately predict what will happen when I kick a ball.

No you can not.

Go ask Scott Norwood.