Emergence of Consciousness Page

I created this page to share and discuss our models for the emergence of consciousness from matter. Please share your models and add discussion so we can all see and think about it. We will use this page in the end to write up a summary and hopefully compare and contrast the models and discuss what properties of consciousness can be explained by what model.

Thanks, Alireza

Working Ideas

(1) Consciousness as Hyper Attractors of Brain (Alireza)

In this schema states of our mind/consciousness as attractors of the dynamics that arise from our brain. We receive sensory information that act as perturbations pushing the trajectory out of a basin of attractor and into a new basin.

= (2) Reference! Tegmark - The fourth state of matter

This can be an interesting starting point... at least one perspective on the topic http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v2.pdf Sarah

Perspective Summaries

Sean Hayes

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

This paper makes the important distinction between the 'easy' and 'hard' problems of consciousness in relative terms. I think it would be useful to use this framework to focus the precise problems we're investigating around consciousness.

My definition for consciousness at it's simplest form is just having subjective experience. While some of the discussion this afternoon touched on integrative brain problems (which falls under 'easy' problems of consciousness in the above, as a way to describe issues of cognition), my question is whether this property of consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. While this is difficult to address objectively, I think it can be approached from our perspectives by comparing consciousness with other emergent phenomena.

The big question that I've been trying to resolve myself along this line of thinking is related to the 'binding problem' (1,2). I'm probably bastardizing the definition a bit, but essentially the issue is conscious experience is not a distributed phenomenon but rather that experience is inherently singular - to me this is entirely distinct from emergence, which is inherently a distributed feature of a complex system. Moreover, our conscious experience not only receives input from the complex, distributed network of our brain, but itself can cause changes in brain behavior and function. Is this actually an emergent phenomenon, or the concentration of information into a centralized control (our subjective experience)? Are there characteristics of subjective experience which do act the way we expect emergent phenomena to behave?

Cole Mathis

I think that consciousness is an Emergent property of the electro-chemical interactions occurring in my brain. The difficulty in understanding the dynamics and/or the origin of consciousness is (in my opinion) the hard problem in emergence: how can macroscopic features of the system have causal control of the microscopic degrees of freedom? One of the canonical examples of emergent phenomena is the emergence of thermodynamics from statistical mechanics. Here the behavior of a system with many degrees of freedom (an ideal gas) can be effectively represented using bulk (emergent) variables (temperature, pressure, volume, etc.) This example is great but it says nothing about the flow of information in the system or the casual direction. For example consider a box of an ideal gas, if I hold the volume constant and heat this box, the pressure will go up. An increase in pressure on the macro scale corresponds to an increase in the average speed of the particles on the microscopic scale, however we do not say that the increased pressure caused the increase in the average speed (although we might say that the increase of the average translational kinetic energy caused the increase in pressure). In this system the causal arrow points only from the micro-scale to the macro-scale. With consciousness we have exactly the opposite situation. If the state of my neurons are the microscopic state variables and my conscious thoughts are the macroscopic variables, then when I think about typing, the macroscopic variables configure the microscopic variables in just the right way to send signals down to fingers, my fingers didn’t start typing and then cause my brain to think about typing (I hope.) So here the causal direction is reversed. How did this reversal/ asymmetry arise and how can we generalize this notion? Quantifying Casual Emergence shows macro can beat micro

Claire Lagesse

Here are some ideas about my personal experiment of what consciousness could be... There is no reference but just some thinking from what I learned. I don't deal with consciousness in my every day work but as a conscious human being I experiment it every day ! :) I'm really sorry for my french-english !

What is consciousness ? Where does it starts ? Where does it ends ? Are we conscious of the sun on our skin, of the wind, of our breathe, of our position, of the temperature, of all the elements surrounding us ? Does the consciousness start with a 'me' ? A dissociation of the external world from our body ? Then, what are the limits of our body ? Is the hair just fallen a part of 'me' ? What about my legs ? They are a part of my body, but if one is cut of it won't be 'me' any more. So maybe we could define our 'me' as the living part of our body. So, for people with a Locked Inside Syndrome their 'me' can be the minimal part of their body alive : their brain. That's maybe why the analogy is often made between the brain and consciousness : it is considered as the minimal part of our body which has to be alive for a 'me' still existing. Even our heart can be replace by a machine.

If we define consciousness with a 'me' apart from the surrounding world, it could be problematic for some persons with mental disease. What about autism ? In some cases, persons with a major autistic trouble cannot make the difference between their own body and the world surrounding them. Can we say they are not conscious ? That sounds a little extreme.

Could we extend consciousness to each living organism ? Is a plant conscious ? Plants are moving all day long, but at a different time scale than ours. They are moving with the sun, with the wind... Does it means they are conscious of them or could we just see it as a action / reaction mechanism ? It goes the same way for some animals. Is the jellyfish conscious of its moves with waves ? Is the shell conscious ? Is the frog conscious ? Each animal is responding to its physiological needs : feed, security and reproduction. Feed goes with a body, security goes with a surrounding (potentially dangerous) and reproduction goes with finding and interacting with another animal of my own specie.

Could we consider those behaviors as conscious ? What are the limits of this hypothesis ? It is possible to program a robot to find food, make itself secure and make sure to reproduce the sooner it can. But it won't be conscious those behaviors are for its own survival and its specie one. But can we say that animals are conscious of it ?

Thinking about artificial intelligence, one could say that consciousness begin with feelings, and a computer is not able to feel anything. Happiness, sadness, love, hate, if we look closely they all have a chemical reaction as an origin. The mystery could be what produce this chemical reaction.

Ants or bees have great collective behavior. They form a fascinating system with some extremely complex emerging properties. But it is not sure that each ant, each bee, is conscious it is taking part in a complex system. It is more about a robust collective intelligence than about consciousness. However, in an anthill 20% of ants are not doing anything. What is this 'useless' time for ? Are the ants conscious of this free time ? Is this demonstrating something about a system we are judging as hyper efficient ?

A third idea could be the knowledge that our consciousness is limited in the time. As human beings, we are conscious that we will die some day. So we develop some cults and funeral rite. Could it be a 'proof' of consciousness ? This way of thinking may exclude a lot of animals of consciousness.

One could ask the difference between consciousness and intelligence. Can an artificial intelligence be conscious ? Is consciousness recognizable by feelings, non efficient time or the simple fact to name it ? Could we say that consciousness is the amount of things linked to our body that we are not able to scientifically explain ? Does the consciousness define the 'me' out of my body limits ? And so what about all the unconscious things I do every day ? Breathe, blink, dream... Is it about the will of doing something more than in the fact of doing it ? Are we defined by our body, our will or our acts ? Is the consciousness the fact to ask ourselves about consciousness ?

John Balwit

Definitions matter. Definitions create boundaries around elements of a system that we attempt to model and understand. Definitions also create a background of implicit assumptions that are necessarily less well examined. Definitions of consciousness are perhaps inherent circular, the definitions “import” themselves into their own definition. For example, let’s start to build a definition of consciousness It makes sense to reflect for a moment on the ever present phenomena of consciousness and begin with “I feel the warm sun on my cheek. … etc. “ Already we have made assumptions which may prove to be missteps. There is clearly some connection between consciousness and the personal pronouns that we use to label our identity—the locus of our perception. This may be one of the key things that we hope to understand as we attempt to understand consciousness. In this respect, It appears that even Descartes choose a starting point that was well down the road—got ahead of himself. “I think therefore I am” is no philosophical atom. * A second problem in the “reflective” exercise above is the implicit assumption that “pausing to reflect” give clearer access to the phenomena of consciousness. It might be the case (and I happen to believe that it is the case) that this particular kind of introspection obscures a more general apprehension of the phenomena that we are interested in understanding.

Disciplines matter too. Our understandings are necessarily informed by our experience. Our disciplines provide us with tools and models of various systems that build our intuitions in different ways. I study evolutionary biology, systems, models and have affinities for the philosophical position in cognitive science called Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The ECC theoretical position is critical of the classical cognitivist approach which relies on a mechanistic “internal representation”.

My definition of consciousness is something like this:

Some (perhaps all) evolved systems perceive and respond to an environment. This is a property of matter, energy, and the properties of the systems as they are arranged in space. Slowly driven systems far from equilibrium (biological systems, perhaps others) have an opportunity to create “perceptual, modeling subsystems” that generate models of the world that may “run faster” than the physical system in which they are embedded and therefore serve adaptive, predictive functions. The chemical systems of plants have these property, language systems used by humans also have this property. My discipline suggests that the models that these subsystems generate are instances of consciousness.

Now consider the parts of these models? These models are not strictly localized within the modeling subsystem, rather they involve relationships between the environment and the modeling subsystem and can be thought to “hover” immaterially between the subsystem. Practitioners of various meditation practices frequently observe this “untethered” property of consciousness. In the philosophical literature there are colorful “brain in a vat” and “philosophical zombie” thought experiments which make a compelling case that consciousness is property of not just the matter in our modeling subsystems but of all matter that participates in those relationships. This “embedded” aspect of consciousness holds that the interplay between the world and the modeling system introduce important constraints that influence the content or character of consciousness-i.e. there is no general consciousness.

The “embodied” aspect of consciousness refers to the observation that modeling subsystems have an “internal milieu” which deeply “colors” the behavior or characteristics of consciousness

My discipline (and my temperament) value precision and rigor. There are established ways to bring rigor to various domains of study. However, it is not immediately clear to me how to make falsifiable claims; to generate testable hypotheses in the area of consciousness. I would like to be able to do this. Using AI and a generative science is an interesting but not, I would say, promising approach. As we create ever more sensitive, and responsive technology we will almost certainly encounter more cases that we are likely to consider as “marginal cases” of consciousness In the event that we do create the “paradigm case” of consciousness – an AI like to one in the movie “Her”-- it is still not clear that we will gain understanding into the nature of consciousness from this system. Our success will ironically be revealed in the inaccessibility of the states that the AI will claim to have.

Finally, a few words on mystery and the ineffable: Part of the motivation for research in the area of consciousness lies in the surprising observation that electro-chemical systems like ourselves give rise to the beautiful, vivid, textured, emotionally-tinged, riddled-with-longing, plagued-with-ambition, haunted-by-death and, oh yes, “is that sunshine on my cheek” kind of experiences that characterize one’s own experience. There is a striking incongruity between the processes that we imagine are taking place at the “lowest levels”. My intuitive reaction to this is that we just don’t understand physics and chemical reactions very well. Our theories and our mathematics are cartoon sketches. We are justifiably impressed with ourselves for the progress made but the notion that “all is known” stands now, as always, as the principle barrier to greater understanding. For most of human history animism has been taken for granted. The Greeks, the Judeo-Christian tradition and the western scientific world view that these modes of thought gave rise to (and in which we happily participate) changed all that by creating zero order approximations that made certain things evident but obscured others. I am persuaded by some of Stuart Kaufmann’s work in this area and feel that as our understanding of the properties that are inherent in matter, energy and the long histories that are encoded in their arrangement in time and space –as our understanding of these things grow we will increasing come to feel “at home in the universe.”

• Cogito ergo sum seems to work for many folks, but, personally, I rarely think. I spend most of my time reacting and as much time as possible mountain biking. Furthermore, I also participate in many relationships with family, with my colleagues and with my larger community that make it unclear were my “locus of self” or “locus of control” resides. Maybe it is just “me”. I don’t think so.