Consciousness as a brain function

[Alan V]

I typed up this summary of points specifically for this forum, though I had created a longer version earlier.

According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology, scientists studying conscious access to information, by comparing brain scans with subjective reports from experiments playing with threshold conditions, came to the following conclusions.

* Certain "patterns of neural activity are exclusively associated with conscious processing."  Others are unconscious stimuli processing.
* The signatures of consciousness include:
1) "a sudden ignition of parietal and prefrontal circuits" which is similar to a phase transition between unconscious and conscious processing, 
2) a P3 wave, a late slow wave, 1/3 to 1/2 second after a stimulus,
3) "a late sudden burst of high-frequency [gamma band] oscillations,"
4) "a synchronization of information exchanges across distant brain regions."
* To compensate for the lag-time of consciousness per the second signature, much of our behavior works on autopilot and many of our perceptions work in anticipation of what we will perceive.
* A huge amount of unconscious processing of information occurs in our brains without becoming conscious.
* Information can register and stay in an unconscious buffer temporarily, but can be erased by distractions.
* Humans make terrible witnesses.  We suffer from inattentional blindness and change blindness to what we haven't attended to properly.
* Information can be readily available in the brain without becoming conscious, due to the rivalry for conscious access.
* Paying attention therefore plays a big role in what information becomes conscious.
* "Conscious perception relies predominantly on the higher-level association cortex."
* Most all the brain's regions can participate in both conscious and unconscious thought. 
* Emotional appraisals are made quickly and unconsciously by the amygdala.
* Unconscious priming speeds up processing.  "Repetition leads to facilitation even when it goes totally undetected."
* "What we experience as a conscious visual scene is a highly processed image, quite different from the raw input that we receive from the eyes."
* Consciousness requires attention, but attention can operate independently of consciousness.  Unconscious attention is constantly monitoring.
* Assigning values can be unconscious and can guide behaviors, so we constantly overestimate the role that consciousness plays in our lives.  
* Still, unconscious hunches require conscious verification.
* Subliminal perceptions exist and mental processes can be launched without consciousness.  In most cases, they do not run to completion.  
* Just about any brain process can operate unconsciously.
* "Unconscious information remains confined to a narrow brain circuit, while consciously perceived information is globally distributed to the vast majority of the cortex for an extended time."  Or as Daniel Dennett said, consciousness is "fame in the brain."  It is brain-wide information sharing.  This additional functionality enables certain unique information-processing abilities.  It allows us to keep information in mind, imprint it on our memories, and process it in various ways by routing it to different specialized brain functions.  This is the global neuronal workspace hypothesis.

"Equally fundamental to the global neuronal workspace is its autonomy.  Recent studies have revealed that the brain is the seat of intense spontaneous activity.  It is constantly traversed by global patterns of internal activity that originate not from the external world but from within, from the neurons' peculiar capacity to self-activate in a partly random fashion."  "The outcome, I argue, is a  'free-willing' machine that resolves Descartes's challenge and begins to look like a good model for consciousness."  "Stimulus-evoked activity accounts for only a very small amount of the total energy consumed by the brain, probably less than 5 percent.  The nervous system primarily acts as an autonomous device that generates its own thought patterns."

"Our belief in free will expresses the idea that, under the right circumstances, we have the ability to guide our decisions by our higher-level thoughts, beliefs, values, and past experiences, and to exert control over our undesired lower-level impulses."  About such decisions, the author considers "their fundamental indeterminacy (a dubious idea) and their autonomy (a respectable notion)."  "Autonomy is the primary property of the nervous system."  Through "purposeful exploratory behavior ... during brain development, the relevant patterns are preserved while the inappropriate ones are weeded out" in a Darwinian selection process.  Variations are followed by selection.

Consciousness performs an executive role, like the spokesman for a large organization.  Unconscious processes are fast and parallel.  Conscious processes are slow and serial.  "Consciousness gives us the power of a sophisticated serial computer."  "Complex strategies, formed by stringing together several elementary steps what computer scientists call  algorithms' are another of consciousness's uniquely evolved functions." "The capacity to synthesize information over time, space, and modalities of knowledge, and to rethink it at any time in the future, is a fundamental component of the conscious mind, one that seems likely to have been positively selected for during evolution."  Effectively, we possess "a hybrid serial-parallel machine" to process information.

My additional comments: So consciousness is an evolved brain function, and not, in fact, our self -- though it is an important part of our self.  This important research demonstrates that the separable-soul theory of consciousness is nonsense.  Consciousness seems like something other than physical only because it works by information processing, but that processing is entirely dependent on the brain as the research above demonstrated.  In fact, our bodies are our selves and are much older evolutionarily than the more recent development of human-level consciousness as an additional brain function.

[Paleophyte]

Brain trauma, or more subtle forms of anaesthesia, produces an absence of consciousness. It's hard to figure it as anything other than physical when chemical and physical agents remove it so thoroughly.

[Alan V]

Even our common experiences with sleep and dreaming demonstrate how consciousness is dependent on brain chemistry and activation. So yes, it does seem rather obvious unless we are committed to religious interpretations.

[Thumpalumpacus]

* A huge amount of unconscious processing of information occurs in our brains without becoming conscious.
* Information can register and stay in an unconscious buffer temporarily, but can be erased by distractions.

Both true and not true. Much problem-solving happens while consciousness is focused on something entirely different. Unconscious processing occurs, and once the conscious mind turns back to the issue, the answer is sitting inside your stack-pointer.

Erased? I'm not sure. I've had a few songs where I wrote two parts, knew it needed another, couldn't come up with a third part, and then one day several years later the solution popped up. Perhaps I was more open-minded that day? Perhaps I imported another little sniglet? Or perhaps, as in a couple of cases, my brain said "fuck it, go for broke" and I surprised myself.

I think human neural processing is largely unconscious, until our forebrains, you know, get around to sweeping up the shop and emptying the dustbins. Suddenly there's this understanding that pops to light, but we just haven't bothered to get back to it until now.

[Belacqua]

According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

I find Dehaene's reasons for dismissing the hard problem of consciousness to be too simple. 

First, he says that consciousness can be explained by the fact that "molecular machinery inside our cells forms a self-reproducing automaton." 

But how does an automaton give an individual subject conscious experience? The whole point is to avoid some kind of miniature homunculus which exists inside the brain, doing our experiencing for us. 

Then he says, "the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes." Which would be big if true. But the example he gives of how this is supposed to happen explains nothing: "current models of visual perception already explain not only why the human brain suffers from a variety of visual illusions but also why such illusions would appear in any rational machine confronted with the same computational problem." [p.314]

That the brain suffers from illusions in no way addresses the jump from sensory input through the nerves to experience.

So it may be a good book on the correlation between brain activity and consciousness -- in other words, "When we are conscious, this and this happen." But it doesn't address how electrochemical events in the brain are experienced by subjects. 

If he does a better job of this later on, maybe you can find it. I didn't.

[Alan V]

* A huge amount of unconscious processing of information occurs in our brains without becoming conscious.
* Information can register and stay in an unconscious buffer temporarily, but can be erased by distractions.

Both true and not true. Much problem-solving happens while consciousness is focused on something entirely different. Unconscious processing occurs, and once the conscious mind turns back to the issue, the answer is sitting inside your stack-pointer.

Erased? I'm not sure. I've had a few songs where I wrote two parts, knew it needed another, couldn't come up with a third part, and then one day several years later the solution popped up. Perhaps I was more open-minded that day? Perhaps I imported another little sniglet? Or perhaps, as in a couple of cases, my brain said "fuck it, go for broke" and I surprised myself.

I think human neural processing is largely unconscious, until our forebrains, you know, get around to sweeping up the shop and emptying the dustbins. Suddenly there's this understanding that pops to light, but we just haven't bothered to get back to it until now.

I think a large part of the reason why the unconscious processing of certain information continues for so long, and can come up with answers that suddenly pop into our brains, is that consciousness remains preoccupied with that information over time.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

* A huge amount of unconscious processing of information occurs in our brains without becoming conscious.
* Information can register and stay in an unconscious buffer temporarily, but can be erased by distractions.

Both true and not true. Much problem-solving happens while consciousness is focused on something entirely different. Unconscious processing occurs, and once the conscious mind turns back to the issue, the answer is sitting inside your stack-pointer.

Erased? I'm not sure. I've had a few songs where I wrote two parts, knew it needed another, couldn't come up with a third part, and then one day several years later the solution popped up. Perhaps I was more open-minded that day? Perhaps I imported another little sniglet? Or perhaps, as in a couple of cases, my brain said "fuck it, go for broke" and I surprised myself.

I think human neural processing is largely unconscious, until our forebrains, you know, get around to sweeping up the shop and emptying the dustbins. Suddenly there's this understanding that pops to light, but we just haven't bothered to get back to it until now.

This happens with me on the reg. If I find myself stuck over a problem with a build and getting frustrated, I'll lay it aside before I reach the tool-throwing stage and work on something else. After a few hours (sometimes days), my brain will send me a message like, 'Rotate that part thirty degrees' or 'Try a longer bolt' and all is sweetness and light.

Boru

[Deesse23]

My 2c:
The sub-conscius is part of consciousness. The fact that you aren't 100% aware all the time of what your brain processes, does not mean that your brain is not processing those parts.

Think of hypnosis, where you can bring stuff to the surface that you weren't able you processed at all, or stuff your brain removed from memory on purpose ( to mitigate/ avoid too much psychological stress)

[Alan V]

According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

I find Dehaene's reasons for dismissing the hard problem of consciousness to be too simple.

First, he says that consciousness can be explained by the fact that "molecular machinery inside our cells forms a self-reproducing automaton."

But how does an automaton give an individual subject conscious experience? The whole point is to avoid some kind of miniature homunculus which exists inside the brain, doing our experiencing for us.

Then he says, "the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes." Which would be big if true. But the example he gives of how this is supposed to happen explains nothing: "current models of visual perception already explain not only why the human brain suffers from a variety of visual illusions but also why such illusions would appear in any rational machine confronted with the same computational problem." [p.314]

That the brain suffers from illusions in no way addresses the jump from sensory input through the nerves to experience.

So it may be a good book on the correlation between brain activity and consciousness -- in other words, "When we are conscious, this and this happen." But it doesn't address how electrochemical events in the brain are experienced by subjects.

If he does a better job of this later on, maybe you can find it. I didn't.

Giving Dehaene the benefit of the doubt, unconscious processing has a lot to do with why we experience the subjective states we do, and understanding how the brain creates our visual, auditory, and tactile pictures of reality will go a long way in "eating away at the hard problem," as you quoted.

But in my own opinion, too many consciousness researchers still take our consciousness to be our self, when our self is much older evolutionarily.  Dr. Allan Hobson was one such researcher in my experience, and we disagreed on this point in our discussions.

So the real short answer to the hard problem may be that we experience subjective states because they literally happen to us, our bodies.  There is no need for a homunculus when a single body with a working brain, a self, is required.

The fact that all of our sensory experiences are centered on our bodies is evidence that our bodies are our selves. Also, the fact that we experience internals states which no one else has access to is evidence that we are our bodies. And of course we have access to the full range of the evolutionary history of our nervous systems internally: reflexes, instincts, emotions, attention, consciousness, and self-consciousness. The self-concept of our self-consciousness is just one aspect of this larger self, and it was obviously a later development evolutionarily, though we confuse the picture of our selves in our minds with the realities existing in the objective world.

[The Grand Nudger]

The hard problems existence is more poorly demonstrated than any of the things hard problem accepters say can't explain consciousness.