>The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom–up influence and partly under top–down control. We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience.
Kind of makes sense to me - that the mechanism that forms a model of your body or a place map or whatever also forms a model of your mental setup of senses, memories and the like.
The same theory was also mentioned in Dawkins' Selfish Gene. The evolution favored individuals that could simulate its surrounding and consequences of its actions better. At certain point, that simulation had to include the individual itself in order to be complete, and that gave way to consciousness. Dawkins called this "simulation", while the article calls it "internal model".
Top down control presupposes consciousness, or something really close to it.
Sleep / dream memory formation seems like a much more reasonable argument. Sleep without activity can simply tone down brain activity. But, if activity happens during REM sleep you need a brain / body abstraction to avoid sleepwalking via sleep paralysis. At that point you have lot's of brain structures for simulating things that can be run while your awake.
Sleep as a means to conserve energy > Sleep as a means to aid learning (replay events for different types of memory formation) > Sleep as a means to simulate options > Simulating options while awake.
The higher "awareness" of the environment and the effects of the body's actions to it can obviously be of evolutionary advantage. And the individuals whose awareness better matches the reality will obviously have advantage too.
This article was a little confusing for me. When I read "consciousness," I think of private, subjective experience—qualia. This meaning of consciousness is a very hard problem indeed, and any new theory is bound to be interesting. (See Chalmers for a great summary: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html) But the article seems to be talking about meta-cognition, not conscious experience. Meta-cognition is interesting in its own right I suppose, but far less so than what I normally think of as consciousness.
I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked.
It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia.
Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings.
The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.
So his attention schema theory is actually about consciousness as a whole, not just metacognition. Here's a quote from his book Consciousness and the Social Brain:
>The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality?
His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.
I agree - it seems to be another variety of "nothing buttery." I don't see how locating the production of experience in attention schemas (which seem, inasmuch as they're scientifically respectable, to be indistinguishable from advanced signal processing) gets us any further with the hard problem of understanding how any subjective experience at all is necessitated or implied by what the brain does functionally.
It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice?
On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.
I find that lately the term "consciousness" is being overloaded to mean something that I don't think it originally meant. Because of that, I like to distinguish between neurobiological consciousness (which can be studied, probed, and predicted) and experiential consciousness (subjective experience).
Chalmers from your link: There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.
There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true.
Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is.
Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.
What you refer to as qualia are not "private", even though they're subjective. When we say a person is enlightened it means they realize what kind of effect a certain kind of thing has on the "eyesight" of a person's consciousness, and they also can see what kinds of causes people carry within their own consciousnesses. The reason why you may have heard they're private is that a true enlightened being only comes to world extremely rarely – once in every few thousand years.
> Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes compare covert attention to a spotlight. (The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.) Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another.
very much put me in mind of an unusual book: A Life of One's Own (Marion Milner, 1934) - in particular, this:
At any moment there exist in the fringes of my thought
faint patternings which can be brought to distinction
when I look at them. Like a policeman with a flash-light
I can throw the bright circle of my awareness where I
choose; if any shadow or movement in the dim outer circle
of its rays arouses my suspicion, I can make it come into
the circle of brightness and show itself for what it is.
But the beam of my attention is not of fixed width, I can
widen or narrow it as I choose.[1]
I'm stuck with a related philosophical problem, perhaps somebody here can help me out.
The problem is that consciousness happens "now", but "now" has only a meaning in an inertial frame of reference, and simultaneity in physics depends on the chosen frame of reference.
To phrase it differently, you generally don't feel what you felt yesterday, or what you feel tomorrow. You only feel (or experience) what you are feeling at this very moment. But if one (mathematical) point in the brain is conscious, by the time it has communicated to another point in the brain, that "feeling" has been lost to time.
So either consciousness happens only at distinct (mathematical) points in the brain, or, somehow, consciousness can span a short non-zero time interval. You experience not just "now", but also briefly in the past and perhaps into the future.
This seems contradictory, so a better way of looking at it is needed.
The article takes "consciousness" to mean the contents of awareness, and not awareness (subjectivity) itself, so from my point of view it doesn't even begin to touch on the "hard problem".
One interesting clue is that, as you point out, subjectively "it" is always now and you are always here. Whatever "you" are, you're the origin-point in spacetime for the contents of your awareness.
This is true even when you are dreaming, which seems significant.
We know that phenomenon that are too fast or too slow cannot be perceived, and I think you're right that that indicates something important about how subjectivity functions.
Mmm, I think your brain smears consciousness over a short rolling period of time. It has the machinery in there already because it has to coordinate signals from your extremities which can take a hundred or more ms to propagate to the brain.
You might find this experiment interesting [0] where a scanner can see that you've made a decision slightly before you're conscious of the fact that you've decided. Also Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang) has an interesting, if not especially scientific, post [1] looking at the brain and consciousness from something of a distributed systems (Erlang bread & butter) perspective you might find interesting. (That said, since I sometimes wake up 1-5 minutes before the alarm, I don't completely buy his explanation, but it's still an interesting read.)
I'm not sure why you assume consciousness happens "now". I would argue consciousness intuitively includes more time than that, perhaps even your entire conscious lifetime, as when you are conscious that includes your identity which would include your memories and hopes.
My narrow physicists' answer is that conciousness doesn't just happen "now", it happens _here and now_ -- and that isperfectly well defined in all relativistic frames of reference.
A broader -- and much more speculative answer -- is that concious experience "is happening" (English tenses are not approriate for this discussion) all over the time-space. But at each point along the trajectory (history) of an intelligent being, there exists an unsually coherent, understandable description of a part of that experinece.
Our catch-all description for such descriptions is "what Mr X is experiencing now".
I think it was a similar thought that inspired Heidegger to write his Being and Time[1]. But I have to admit while I tried to get the basic ideas I finally gave up on all philosophy.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
To me it seems like the battle that Wittgenstein postulates was lost in the first place. Most philosophy is nitpicking about linguistic idiosyncracies without any real physical or metaphysical value.
Well, if it doesn't? Rather, you have a statechange between two times and you don't know when the change happened any more exact than that.
The notion of the now is just a placeholder of a state, for future reference. It's an abstract idea anyhow. But thought arises from statechanges, seeing how nothing would happen if everything stayed the same.
The article (haven't read the paper yet) resonates with things Dennett has said, as many commenters have pointed out. It goes further though, as it details a few different structures and goes beyond speculation, as most of the theses are empirically testable, at least in theory.
Two questions:
* Are there any objections to the theory, apart from: but consciousness is magic?
* What are good resources to learn the history of the idea that complex brain activity emerges from neurons competing with each other?
The papers and work on this theory go on for years already and its due time it gains more/wider public attention, imo.
I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" just like heliocentric theories caused when they un-throned the earth-centric theories... we humans love magic, especially when we are told/we think to be magic, right?
I love the seemingly improbable, not "magic" - it just so happens that they overlap.
Children are still fascinated by flying machines. Adults generally aren't as fascinated, just by having grown up with them, regardless of how well they understand them.
But both groups know the machines are grounded in reality, as opposed to being "magic".
So no, I disagree. And I think it's irrelevant. The people who want to believe in science will be happy to expand their understanding (this is still theory). The people who don't will keep on believing whatever it is they believe. There are still people out there who think there's a god that raises the sun each morning and sets the moon at dawn, despite what science tells us.
> I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment"
Just look how some religion-influenced philosophers fight to obscure the simple fact that everything humans do and even "feel" (yes, also that "feeling" of the "existence of qualia" they have) can be explained with biology and evolution.
Humanists, however, already assuming all religious ideas are created only by humans, should not even be surprised.
For those who are interested in hearing Graziano discuss consciousness further, alongside Chalmers and Tegmark, I recommend this NYAS video from last month:
It's impossible to be sure, but since it seems consciousness follows a spectrum when it comes to living beings, with more complex beings having "more" consciousness and less complex beings having less, my guess is that all living things have some form of consciousness, including plants and insects.
As soon as anything "prefers" any stimulus over another, I think consciousness becomes an emergent property.
[+] [-] tim333|9 years ago|reply
>The theory begins with attention, the process by which signals compete for the brain’s limited computing resources. This internal signal competition is partly under a bottom–up influence and partly under top–down control. We propose that the top–down control of attention is improved when the brain has access to a simplified model of attention itself. The brain therefore constructs a schematic model of the process of attention, the ‘attention schema,’ in much the same way that it constructs a schematic model of the body, the ‘body schema.’ The content of this internal model leads a brain to conclude that it has a subjective experience.
Kind of makes sense to me - that the mechanism that forms a model of your body or a place map or whatever also forms a model of your mental setup of senses, memories and the like.
[+] [-] veli_joza|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
Sleep / dream memory formation seems like a much more reasonable argument. Sleep without activity can simply tone down brain activity. But, if activity happens during REM sleep you need a brain / body abstraction to avoid sleepwalking via sleep paralysis. At that point you have lot's of brain structures for simulating things that can be run while your awake.
Sleep as a means to conserve energy > Sleep as a means to aid learning (replay events for different types of memory formation) > Sleep as a means to simulate options > Simulating options while awake.
[+] [-] acqq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwah1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
Sight aside, who said the mind "constructs a schematic model of the body"?
[+] [-] niccaluim|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkloop|9 years ago|reply
It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia.
Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings.
The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.
[+] [-] dovin|9 years ago|reply
>The attention schema theory could be said to lie half-way between two common views. In his groundbreaking book in 1991, Dennett explored a cognitive approach to consciousness, suggesting that the concept of qualia, of the inner, private experiences, is incoherent and thus we cannot truly have them. Others, such as Searle, suggested that the inner, subjective state exists by definition and is immune to attempts to explain it away. The present view lies somewhere in between; or perhaps, in the present view, the distinction between Dennett and Searle becomes moot. In the attention schema theory, the brain contains a representation, a rich informational description. The thing depicted in such nuance is experienceness. Is it real? Is it not? Does it matter? If it is depicted then doesn’t it have a type of simulated reality?
His stance is basically that theories of consciousness rely on way too much magical thinking, and that this is the most scientifically responsible position to take. That consciousness is entirely information, rather than some sort of spontaneous emergence from the processing of information.
[+] [-] ttctciyf|9 years ago|reply
It's often occurred to me that the very difficulty we have discussing the nature of subjective experience (inverse spectrum, etc.) points to some superfluity there - giving you a precise description of retinal state, a color code, the frequencies of light, etc., isn't enough for you to tell whether my experience of red is like yours - but what description would suffice?
On this line, I occasionally indulge in the thought that "qualia" are a necessary but irrelevant tokenisation of our experience, a bit like variable names: you need a bucket to put that data in, but the particular name you give to the bucket doesn't matter.
[+] [-] Xcelerate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|9 years ago|reply
There's nothing harder than explaining a delusional idea - while still accepting that it's true.
Most individuals in this society take "consciousness" as some, often unique, mix of subjectivity, meta-cognition and other stuffs. It's also commonly taken as a quality characterizing humanness despite no agreement on what it is.
Thus I'd say "the hard problem of consciousness" is exactly the sort of problem science has learned to discard. It's hard like the problem of explaining astronomy in terms of astrology, the hard problem of reworking astronomy in terms of earth-centered coordinates and any science that attempts to carry-on without clarifying terms.
[+] [-] saint-loup|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueprint|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|9 years ago|reply
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...
[+] [-] kanzure|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttctciyf|9 years ago|reply
> Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it. Scientists sometimes compare covert attention to a spotlight. (The analogy was first suggested by Francis Crick, the geneticist.) Your cortex can shift covert attention from the text in front of you to a nearby person, to the sounds in your backyard, to a thought or a memory. Covert attention is the virtual movement of deep processing from one item to another.
very much put me in mind of an unusual book: A Life of One's Own (Marion Milner, 1934) - in particular, this:
1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ntg6OE7haSgC&pg=PA77[+] [-] robg|9 years ago|reply
http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that consciousness happens "now", but "now" has only a meaning in an inertial frame of reference, and simultaneity in physics depends on the chosen frame of reference.
To phrase it differently, you generally don't feel what you felt yesterday, or what you feel tomorrow. You only feel (or experience) what you are feeling at this very moment. But if one (mathematical) point in the brain is conscious, by the time it has communicated to another point in the brain, that "feeling" has been lost to time.
So either consciousness happens only at distinct (mathematical) points in the brain, or, somehow, consciousness can span a short non-zero time interval. You experience not just "now", but also briefly in the past and perhaps into the future.
This seems contradictory, so a better way of looking at it is needed.
[+] [-] carapace|9 years ago|reply
The article takes "consciousness" to mean the contents of awareness, and not awareness (subjectivity) itself, so from my point of view it doesn't even begin to touch on the "hard problem".
One interesting clue is that, as you point out, subjectively "it" is always now and you are always here. Whatever "you" are, you're the origin-point in spacetime for the contents of your awareness.
This is true even when you are dreaming, which seems significant.
We know that phenomenon that are too fast or too slow cannot be perceived, and I think you're right that that indicates something important about how subjectivity functions.
[+] [-] losvedir|9 years ago|reply
You might find this experiment interesting [0] where a scanner can see that you've made a decision slightly before you're conscious of the fact that you've decided. Also Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang) has an interesting, if not especially scientific, post [1] looking at the brain and consciousness from something of a distributed systems (Erlang bread & butter) perspective you might find interesting. (That said, since I sometimes wake up 1-5 minutes before the alarm, I don't completely buy his explanation, but it's still an interesting read.)
[0] http://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ [1] http://joearms.github.io/2015/03/02/Waking-Up.html
[+] [-] greatingale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianratnapala|9 years ago|reply
A broader -- and much more speculative answer -- is that concious experience "is happening" (English tenses are not approriate for this discussion) all over the time-space. But at each point along the trajectory (history) of an intelligent being, there exists an unsually coherent, understandable description of a part of that experinece.
Our catch-all description for such descriptions is "what Mr X is experiencing now".
[+] [-] mh-cx|9 years ago|reply
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
To me it seems like the battle that Wittgenstein postulates was lost in the first place. Most philosophy is nitpicking about linguistic idiosyncracies without any real physical or metaphysical value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Time
[+] [-] choosername|9 years ago|reply
Well, if it doesn't? Rather, you have a statechange between two times and you don't know when the change happened any more exact than that.
The notion of the now is just a placeholder of a state, for future reference. It's an abstract idea anyhow. But thought arises from statechanges, seeing how nothing would happen if everything stayed the same.
[+] [-] corecoder|9 years ago|reply
Two questions:
* Are there any objections to the theory, apart from: but consciousness is magic?
* What are good resources to learn the history of the idea that complex brain activity emerges from neurons competing with each other?
[+] [-] pointernil|9 years ago|reply
The papers and work on this theory go on for years already and its due time it gains more/wider public attention, imo.
I wonder if it will cause/is causing already a kind of antropo-"disappointment" just like heliocentric theories caused when they un-throned the earth-centric theories... we humans love magic, especially when we are told/we think to be magic, right?
[+] [-] wallacoloo|9 years ago|reply
Children are still fascinated by flying machines. Adults generally aren't as fascinated, just by having grown up with them, regardless of how well they understand them. But both groups know the machines are grounded in reality, as opposed to being "magic".
So no, I disagree. And I think it's irrelevant. The people who want to believe in science will be happy to expand their understanding (this is still theory). The people who don't will keep on believing whatever it is they believe. There are still people out there who think there's a god that raises the sun each morning and sets the moon at dawn, despite what science tells us.
[+] [-] acqq|9 years ago|reply
Just look how some religion-influenced philosophers fight to obscure the simple fact that everything humans do and even "feel" (yes, also that "feeling" of the "existence of qualia" they have) can be explained with biology and evolution.
Humanists, however, already assuming all religious ideas are created only by humans, should not even be surprised.
[+] [-] dr_|9 years ago|reply
http://www.nyas.org/events/Detail.aspx?cid=43d077ca-947f-4f4...
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkloop|9 years ago|reply
As soon as anything "prefers" any stimulus over another, I think consciousness becomes an emergent property.
[+] [-] hasbroslasher|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]