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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Do you think that your newest acquisition, a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner that traces out its unpredictable paths on your living room floor, is conscious? What about that bee that hovers above your marmalade-covered breakfast toast? Or the newborn who finally fell asleep after being suckled? Nobody except a dyed-in-the-wool nerd would think of the first as being sentient; adherents of Jainism, India’s oldest religion, believe that bees—and indeed all living creatures, small and large—are aware; whereas most everyone would accord the magical gift of consciousness to the baby.
The truth is that we really do not know which of these organisms is or is not conscious. We have strong feelings about the matter, molded by tradition, religion and law. But we have no objective, rational method, no step-by-step procedure, to determine whether a given organism has subjective states, has feelings.
The reason is that we lack a coherent framework for consciousness. Although consciousness is the only way we know about the world within and around us—shades of the famous Cartesian deduction cogito, ergo sum—there is no agreement about what it is, how it relates to highly organized matter or what its role in life is. This situation is scandalous! We have a detailed and very successful framework for matter and for energy but not for the mind-body problem. This dismal state of affairs might be about to change, however.
The universal lingua franca of our age is information. We are used to the idea that stock and bond prices, books, photographs, movies, music and our genetic makeup can all be turned into data streams of zeros and ones. These bits are the elemental atoms of information that are transmitted over an Ethernet cable or via wireless, that are stored, replayed, copied and assembled into gigantic repositories of knowledge. Information does not depend on the substrate. The same information can be represented as lines on paper, as electrical charges inside a PC’s memory banks or as the strength of the synaptic connections among nerve cells.
Since the early days of computers, scholars have argued that the subjective, phenomenal states that make up the life of the mind are intimately linked to the information expressed at that time by the brain. Yet they have lacked the tools to turn this hunch into a concrete and predictive theory. Enter psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Tononi has developed and refined what he calls the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness.
An Integrated Theory
IIT is based on two axiomatic pillars.
First, conscious states are highly differentiated; they are informationally very rich. You can be conscious of an uncountable number of things: you can watch your son’s piano recital, for instance; you can see the flowers in the garden outside or the Gauguin painting on the wall. Think of all the frames from all the movies you have ever seen or that have ever been filmed or that will be filmed! Each frame, each view, is a specific conscious percept.
Second, this information is highly integrated. No matter how hard you try, you cannot force yourself to see the world in black-and-white, nor can you see only the left half of your field of view and not the right. When you’re looking at your friend’s face, you can’t fail to also notice if she is crying. Whatever information you are conscious of is wholly and completely presented to your mind; it cannot be subdivided. Underlying this unity of consciousness is a multitude of causal interactions among the relevant parts of your brain. If areas of the brain start to disconnect or become fragmented and balkanized, as occurs in deep sleep or in anesthesia, consciousness fades and might cease altogether. Consider split-brain patients, whose corpus callosum—the 200 million wires linking the two cortical hemispheres—has been cut to alleviate severe epileptic seizures. The surgery literally splits the person’s consciousness in two, with one conscious mind associated with the left hemisphere and seeing the right half of the visual field and the other mind arising from the right hemisphere and seeing the left half of the visual field.
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47 Comments
Add CommentWhat is most significant about IIT is that is clearly delineates exactly which observable parts of the universe it applies to. In particular, there are two distinguishable aspects of the approach (not really yet a theory): a primary aspect that addresses observable physical systems such as brains and neural networks and computers, and a secondary aspect that can potentially address people's subjective reports about their conscious states, as well as experiments that test how those subjective reports change in concert with physically measurable conditions, based on the assumption that those reported mental states are attributes of the primary (or physical) model. In contrast, discussions by philosophers such as John R. Searle to my mind never fully clarify exactly what phenomena they are addressing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne aspect of conciousness is awareness. Take, for example death. Humans that have seen others die can make other non-witnesses concious of death by explaining what they have seen. An animal can see predators kill their own kind and become afraid of death, but they can only transmit their own fear of death to others through their immediate body language in a dangerous situation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps evolution favors higher consciousness as it favored sexual reproduction as organisms grew larger....it works better at surviving when reproduction is limited. Insects, for example, produce huge numbers of offspring compared to cats and then to apes and humans. Consciousness is quite probably as much a part of the universe as physics and chemistry...it just is. In smaller organisms it is possible that proto-conscious exists..that is, given time and evolutionary pressures, life develops consciousness in all its many forms. There is much to be gained if a large organism can understand, say, germ theory and actually change its "destiny" whereas bees, for example, are dying in huge numbers that even with their prolific breeding style, are still threatened. Consciousness gives more "tools" for survival.....and possibly, its own destruction unless it evolves further.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe answers to this it is in the book I am writing, THE AWAKENER, which I am about to finish, edit and publish soon -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am the new traveller in this wide road of life which is full of mystries, one among them is consciousness. From philosopher to scientist, from poet to layman every one are just amaged by the question "What is consciousness".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSocrates was conscious but he was unaware of genes--and jeans. If he could magically be resurrected he could be taught the advances of science, and incredibly, he would be able to understand it! The potential of higher and wider consciousness is possible so long as one has pioneered the way to it and can teach it to others. It seems that unit of consciousness is the word. The magic of words and the way they are strung together can alter consciousness and subsequently the world and the reality it reflects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAny organism that has to make a decision to act based on sensory input is conscious of the input that requires the decision. As to humans in particular, even when we are asleep we receive input, and are conscious of our responses to it. We also have a high degree of consciousness that is specific to the level of abstraction required for processing language, either when communicating or examining those communications. We tend to think the latter is a separate form of consciousness, but where is that line of separation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere likely is no such line, even though the great degree of differences in the experiences that arise under different circumstances would make it appear so.
"Any organism that has to make a decision to act based on sensory input is conscious of the input that requires the decision. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisan organism is an information processing system...so why not "any information processing system....". so then is any artificial intelligence that takes auditory, visual, tactile information from the environment and reacts to this conscious?
My take on this is that a quantitative measure of consciousness may help us to make better decisions in many areas such as the ethical issues around the treatment of animals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut I’m unsure how it would work in practice.
1. I agree with Koch’s suggestion that behaviour cannot be the sole guide to animal consciousness (he states that consciousness requires ‘neither sensory input nor behavioural output’).
2. If Koch is correct about the limited validity of behavioural evidence this would, on my view, invalidate the subjective judgements we make currently. Though we do, of course, give benefit of doubt.
3. However, even if we were to have a measure of consciousness, Phi(), this would not give us the complete answer to our ethical dilemmas. We would still not know where to set the threshold at which the performance of a given procedure should be deemed unethical.
So the question is, how useful would a measurable Phi() be in this context?
I don't think the phenomenon of consciousness is simply, "Any organism that has to make a decision to act based on sensory input is conscious of the input that requires the decision. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThink about it, humans can be in states where they are not conscious to their actions, such as sleep walking. The brain is receiving sensory stimuli and making decisions based on that, and yet there is no consciousness involved.
Another example is unconscious processes of the brain, such as visual and audible processing. The brain can completely filter out certain information from our visual and audible experience, descriminating what we are to be conscious to.
So you can't simply say any organism that has sensory information fed to it is conscious to it. I think consciousness is a heightened state of awareness, and it is achieved by specific mechanisms in the brain. How the mechanisms achieve the phenomenon of consciousness is a big question, and the extent to which it can be explained by physical and biological processes will determine our understanding of it.
Consciousness may be better expressed as the ability for self directed response to stimuli input. Consciousness could not be attributed to a system (organic or inorganic) which is unable to respond to perceived input.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn this example, a computer responding to a simple "if/then" command is not exhibiting consciousness since it is not a self directed response, but rather one preprogramed by another consciousness. If, however, the computer must evaluate a complex series of "ifs" and based on that evaluation select one of many "thens", it would be displaying a form of consciousness.
In this context it would seem that a state of "consciousness" is based on the complexity of input and the ability to select a response. The question, then, is where is the "bright line" where the level of complexity reaches the point of consciousness?
Associating consciousness with the entropy of a system is indeed intriguing, but IIT also seems to assume that a high-entropy system, which possesses no memory, attention, has no interaction with an environment or any of the traits that we might otherwise associate with consciousness would inherently still be as conscious as it phi-factor denotes; if so, such consciousness would surely be very different from our usual definition and experience of the phenomenon?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is another example of the explanation of consciousness as an epiphenomenon of very complex brain activity. That when activity reaches a certain level somehow consciousness appears like a cloud rising from the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem cannot be solved from a study of the objective world because it is part of the subjective world. Two entities which are connected but not the same. Read Thomas Nagel.
Survival of the species will trigger any necessary actions to take place. This may be attributed to consciousness, or it may just be "survival instinct." If the latter is correct than how is this different than consciousness? Where is that line drawn? If a species shows the ability to understand death, does that not make it aware of its own existence?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould ITT not just be a new way of defining what it means to be conscious or aware? Daresay a more accurate way? If we prohibit the forward thinking or new thinking we prohibit our growth as a species. Right or wrong I feel it is a step in the right direction for science and further understanding of&
Survival of the species will trigger any necessary actions to take place. This may be attributed to consciousness, or it may just be "survival instinct." If the latter is correct than how is this different than consciousness? Where is that line drawn? If a species shows the ability to understand death, does that not make it aware of its own existence?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould ITT not just be a new way of defining what it means to be conscious or aware? Daresay a more accurate way? If we prohibit the forward thinking or “new” thinking we prohibit our growth as a species. Right or wrong I feel it is a step in the right direction for science and further understanding of…
Of interest, this article seems to imply that consciousness comes in a fluid range, and that drawing a line in the sand over which we classify something as "conscious", and something else as "unconscious" is fallacious. Even if this method does not pan out exactly, this fluidity makes intuitive sense. Like most things about life, black and white is not often really encountered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also have a suspicion that for each of us, the only conciousness we can be sure about is our own (even that ability may be debated by some). If we could build a machine with an equivalent Phi(), would that imply it feels and knows itself in the same way you and I do? We might ascribe to it the term "conscious" due to Phi(), but I suspect we would only really believe this if we could behaviourly discern this.
Good article!
Enough conjecturing who is right or wrong, any approach must be measured to determine validity, why not start here? Let time decide if Koch is right.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsciousness as a concept is a handy, but self-serving and very likely imaginary theory, that helps us rationalize killing other life forms, originally out of necessity for food, and more recently, out of convenience and our lust for self-worship.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNothing in nature has indicated that humans alone are conscious, nor that 100% of all humans are functioning on a "higher level" (?) than any other animal. Since no one can even agree on a root what constitutes consciousness even is, the whole thing reeks of a failed pseudoscience.
Raise a human baby from birth in a colorless, spherical, seamless sterile room for a couple decades. Then take it out. Then you will start to learn.
I agree that consciousness is a universal research topic HOWEVER most disciplines which categorize stimuli as conscious or unconscious never address whether there are any other levels of awareness inbetween. We are all being dualists and somewhat closeminded ones at that. What the question really should be is whether or not there are different levels of awareness that can be QUANTIFIED. Some of the Implicit Memory work (i.e. John Bargh, Dijksterhuis et al) where they distract consciousness of their participants (through anagrams, the n-back task, or word search puzzles) has found astonishing results in the form of better decision making after unconscious deliberation. NONE of these studies assesssed in any qualitifiable way the levels of awareness of their participants after they had made their decisions. I think that we need to work on a measure of levels of awareness since we may be somewhat conscious of something does not make it fully one or the other. I think that this would be the most useful use of our time. Additionally, some of the work being done in implicit learning is showing that though we are not completely conscious that we are extracting statistical properties from the stimuli in our enviornment, we can still talk about them to some extent. So here even learning implicitly (without awareness ) it is not so cut and dry that there is no conscious awareness of what has been learned at all...Only some aspects of it. As for the perceptual statement (unconscious audition, vision, perception) it would actually somewhat relate to lack of attention instead of lack of consciousness...See attentional spotlight....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI htink it was Marvin Minsky who gave many years ago what has always seemed an intuitively satifactory definitiion of the level of consciousnees of an entity: The extent & accuracy of its model(s) of itself in relation to the rest of the Universe. This should suffice until we can tease out the exact neural circuitry & mechanisms ot these models.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am learning more with the comments! Thanks to you all!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe focus on differentiating abnd integrating is supported by my own research into the foundations of meaning and language - called IDM (Integration, Differentiation, and Meaning). What is noticable is the brain's use of recursion to derive meaning and the sudden jump from a mechanistic dynamic to an oraganic dynamic that occurs with increased neural mass and especially connectivity. Thus a WELL differentiated nature is required for full blown consciousness to present itself. This focus on differentiation means distinction-making and environmental demands for mediation, out of which comes language. This indicates consciouseness as an agent of mediation; when the mediation is no longer required we fall back on autopilot - i.e. our instincts/habits/memories.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recently read about a similar, but far more thorough, theory of consciousness in the Psychological Channel (http://www.thepsychologicalchannel.com/blogs/blog4.php/2008/09/28/3-towards-a-materialistic-resolution-of#more39)...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisis consciousness a rational state? Is consciousness self-awareness, the result, not of will but the consequence of subconscious neural associations, emotional ties, memories, spacial identity,and learned responses create an 'aura' of consciousness?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI still prefer the approach that relative intelligence can be computed as the ratio of synapses to input (sensory neurons) and output (muscle) neurons. A high ratio implies a greater ability to abstract an experience to determine an appropriate response. I realise intelligence is not consciousness but it is certainly possible that consciousness is nothing more than a side effect of a highly abstracted mind. It certainly seems apparent that our conscious experience is not a "window on reality" but of a highly integrated and abstracted summation of our body's experience with the real world. This gives us the illusion that consciousness is the source of our thoughts, rather than just a documentary showing an event that has already happened. The synaptic ratio approach also has the benefit of being easier to compute than IIT, yet would likely give substantively similar results. It may not be as precise but we still land satellites on distant planets using Newtonian Physics. I’m not saying we shouldn’t pursue IIT, I'd just like to know what evidence we have that this is a "better" way to characterise consciousness than the above. I guess I'm trying to apply Occam's razor here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems that conciousness is not attribute that is associated with only living things, but an inherent property of the substrate of matter itself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut, some living beings (like humans) are just so highly evolved that their system (using Brain & consequently the intellect, memory, emotion and ego etc.) is able to percieve this inherent property of the substrate.
This is why probably, though insects might be conscious, yet they are not aware of it (as we are) because their physical and chemical machinery (physiological & mental design limitations) do not allow them to percieve that they are sentient (though they actually are...just they are not aware of it).
For example:
If a person is in a state of coma, he is conscious but yet not using all his mental faculties (reasonong, intellect, ego, memory etc.) to the full extent of their complexity to be AWARE of his being conscious or anything else.
So being AWARE and being CONSCIOUS seems to be two different aspect. They may be emerging from of the same physical substrate, but the later is something fundamental (independent of living or non-living objects) and the former is an emergent property that depends on the design complexity if the physiology and is therefore found only in complex living organisms.
Let me give another example:
Assume a wall in room which is RED and there is a mirror in your hand. Now, if the mirror is held against the wall, you can see the REDness reflected in the mirror. Now that does not mean the REDness is of the mirror. The mirror is just a tool or instrument that is reflecting the property of the wall. But the REDness is fundamental and cannot be reflected by the itself. Similarly, complex animal designs are just tools that might be allowing those animals to percieve that they are consciousness. But the latter in itself might be a fundamental property of matter or its substrate. This allows bees and even computers to be conscious but not necessarily be aware of it.
But who know how it is....
The whole premise of this article collapses miserably in the face of the elephant in the room:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe documented medical cases of fully functioning, intelligent humans with no significant brain tissue. The most recent one I'm aware of is this fellow: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290610,00.html
"an intuitively satifactory definitiion of the level of consciousnees of an entity: The extent & accuracy of its model(s) of itself in relation to the rest of the Universe. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell by this definition, the majority of the worlds religious people who place themselves as the center/most important thing in the universe (and of course those who cling to creationism, flat earth theories, and a 5000 year old universe) are all basically unconscious, just because they have a narrow & inaccurate view of themselves in relation to the rest of the universe.
As far as I've ever seen, the only definition of consciousness that stuck was: crouch down under something hard and immovable. Stand up fast. Conscious was what you were before you stood up.
I would love to see someone show that living things with functioning brains are not conscious. Varying levels of intelligence and experience, sure.
frgough, the comment above is highly misleading, as was a particular quote from the Foxnews article. To copy from the article:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The condition is called Dandy Walker complex and is a genetically sporadic disorder that occurs in one out of every 25,000 live births, mostly in females. Although many with Dandy Walker develop dramatic symptoms from the condition, such as an enlarged skull, jerky muscle movements and problems with the nerves that control the face, the condition also can develop unnoticed."
This seems to be a variation of hydrocephalus or "water on the brain" which this guy did have. Basically, the spinal fluid in the middle of his head pushed the brain tissues to the extremities of the skull. His neurons are NOT absent, it just appears that way because they have pushed (thru fluid pressure) towards the skull. The guy tested with an IQ of 75, which is functional. He does have billions of neurons, they just don't function very well in such a disease.
It is extremely misleading to say that he has no significant brain tissue. He has plenty of it; it just is squished, so the central fluid makes it APPEAR that most of his brain is missing. Again, his brain isn't missing; it just kind of looks a bit that way when you see the scanned image.
Rather than contribute intelligence to the subject of consciousness, you're using sensationalist language to confuse appearance and reality. Grow up. Robert Schmidt should focus his laser on you.
The human brain is unsurpassed in pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is essential to survival, so this is no surprise. But pattern recognition is a 'tough' problem. Even our best computers are hopelessly outclassed by the pattern recognition capabilities of a two-year-old.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is reasonable to expect that, once an organism becomes adept at pattern recognition it will begin to PERCEIVE ITS OWN PATTERNS! I contend that, when this recursion occurs, the organism achieves consciousness.
I predict that once we crack the problem of efficient pattern recognition in computers, we will inevitably create self-aware computers, and artificial consciousness.
@bostonprof LOL. Where’s the challenge? Besides, when frgough says that a scientific paper “collapses miserably” because of something he saw on Fox News then obviously my explaining to him why he’s an idiot will do no good. I simply don’t have the integrity, credibility or damn it, the common sense that the giants of scientific reporting, such as Fox News, the National Inquirer and National Examiner have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Tononis IIT postulates that the amount of integrated information that an entity possesses corresponds to its level of consciousness." I think he means 'awareness', e.g., a barometer can register changes in atmospheric pressure and be programmed to activate all kinds of related parameters like meteorology monitors. Is the barometer conscious? Can it respond to novel contingencies not programmed for? Can it be aware of itself monitoring and responding? Dr. Koch wisely raises important questions that remain un-answered with Tononi's model. Awareness is a species survival strategy at the biological, psychic and sociological (BPS) where unconscious genetic and subconscious memetic domains get integrated for robotic control of a desired pre-programmed environmental setting. The robot is not programmed to think outside the box. With language comes the ability to represent percepts and concepts for parsing processing and analysis as self, introspective consciousness is generated that incorporates the specifically human ability to control of his destiny by the exercise of free will control of available probabilities in cortical attractors. The cortico-thalamic axis of Crick and Koch is too narrow an explanation of complexity to warrant investing on it. More on this @ http://delaSierra-Sheffer.net , look at BPS model on Brain Dynamics. Dr.d
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfocused human attention measureably compresses electric charge (bill tiller's latest book)- focused human attention measureably reduces radioactivity (uri geller et al research):
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit's simple - human attention is a charge compressing phase conjugate dielectric field- here is how you measure that in eeg :
www.goldenmean.info/clinicalintro
(phase conjugation)
here is how you measure that field bioactivity
www.goldenmean.info/phaseconjugatewaterconfidential
..and language (alphabet letters) are the symmetry index to adding charge compression to that field:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.goldenmean.info/dnaring
Consciousness is more than information processing or interconnections! Computers can mimic very basic human tasks but are utterly unaware. There are things about human consciousness that can not be explained such as the collective unconscious. The Universe is obviously "wired" in many ways that we are not aware of and is the ultimate interconnected system. I believe the human brain is a conduit of consciousness not its source. Some day we will possess the technology to completely duplicate the neuronal structure of the human brain in circuitry and it will be no more conscious than today's computers. If anyone thinks the brain is just a really powerful bio-computer how do you explain learning, which happens in real time? Does the brain grow new neural connections every time we learn something? How fast do these neural structures grow and has this activity been observed? Or maybe Neurons are like Field Programmable Gate Arrays and are spontaneously rewired by electrical activity through the synapses. If this is true, what determines how this electrical activity is coordinated. Since I can "decide" to do something, I must have control over my brain's electrical activity at some level. But if the electrical activity is what gives rise to "me", where is the "I" in this. You see, any discussion about consciousness quickly dissolves into psychobabble. The observer is the observed, etc, etc. The real question is, how is information encoded in the brain (if it even is at all)? No one knows the answer to this question. With all it has been studied, you may wonder how this can be the case. You can argue that the complexity of the brain is such that it defies our analysis. I would say that consciousness is equally undecipherable if not more so. As interesting as this article is, it is nothing more than pseudo science. We don't know what consciousness is. We can formulate axioms about information and interconnection, but in the end these are nothing more than idle speculation. As a Computer Scientist who has studied AI, I talk about with my colleagues a lot. For most the consensus is: "How can we model something if we don't know what it is?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA computer will be aware when they will be able to start when he want, or not, if not want, and say: I am not your slave.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA computer will be aware when, from its machine language as a mother tongue, begins to create its own language, as a poet or philosopher, to express what he found himself and can not express in words learned from his programmers.
Instinct of preservation has any animal, but this is not the consciousness (as computer Hall, of Stanley Kubrick, in "2001: A Space Odyssey").
A computer will be aware when they will be endowed with moral instincts and spirit of sacrifice. Machine (tool) does not know how to lose (quit). Anny tool is a recipe for success by its very nature.
The whole discussion here is far from the essence of consciousness, because it is still influenced by the materialistic paradigm (deterministic), source of Aristotle.
As useful as mathematical symbols can be, a casual reader such as myself prefers the structures of literary, rather than numerical literacy to predominate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTherefore I resolved that each time I saw the annoyingly prevalent symbol '�', I would internally substitute the word 'Poo'.
This ensured a smooth flow of language and ideas, and moreover by replacing the equally irrelevant 'fi' revealed a hidden subtext:
"Think of P�o as the synergy of the system."
..indeed.
"The size of P�o could even end up being a yardstick for the intelligence of a machine."
..as it ever has - and last but not least:
"Provided that the causal relations among the transistors and memory elements are complex enough, computers or the billions of personal computers on the Internet will have nonzero P�o"
..this is surely a major health concern given how much goes to landfill.
"consciousness" to me is just an elevated level of intelligence. I have a little more of what my loving, communicating, aware of her existence, self examining, dog has.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChristopher Koch is confused about consciousness. He asks if we think a Roomba vacuum cleaner is conscious, and he answers nobody except a dyed-in-the-wool nerd would think so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYet explaining Tononis theory, he writes, In the limit, a single hydrogen ion, a proton made up of three quarks, will have a tiny amount of synergy, of �. In this sense, IIT is a scientific version of panpsychism, the ancient and widespread belief that all matter, all things, animate or not, are conscious to some extent.
By that standard a Roomba is conscious. So which is it?
The answer is that Tononis theory doesnt describe consciousness as a unitary thingpresent or not. Consciousness isnt a step function. Rather, IIT ascribes to consciousness varying degrees.
Despite his own words, Koch persists in seeing consciousness as either present or absent. For example, he writes of patients undergoing surgery that their consciousness is transiently turned off and on again with the help of various anesthetic agents. Although Koch appears to accept the notion of levels of consciousness, he reverts repeatedly to an all-or-nothing concept of it.
In my view, consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, present in everything. I believe I am with Tononi in this. We both understand consciousness as something that exists in degrees, depending on the complexity of the system. Tononi uses a quantitative statistic �the degree of integrationto precisely characterize the level of consciousness of a system.
Tononi is correct, but I view it qualitatively and more simply. Level of consciousness depends on the amount of communication in a system. Indeed, in my view, communication is consciousness, and the most fundamental carrier of communication, the photon (the vector of light), carries the property of consciousness.
Koch writes:
Consider split-brain patients, whose corpus callosumthe 200 million wires linking the two cortical hemisphereshas been cut to alleviate severe epileptic seizures. The surgery literally splits the persons consciousness in two, with one conscious mind associated with the left hemisphere and seeing the right half of the visual field and the other mind arising from the right hemisphere and seeing the left half of the visual field.
The conclusion I draw from this is that when communication is cut, consciousness doesnt cease but becomes more limited. On the other hand, those of us with intact callosa have consciousness not split but whole and integrated. Communication, therefore, expands and unifies consciousness.
IIT looks ok:) half serious suggestions to the 'future challenges': ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) direction can barely exist without a context. being aware of the context or recognising similar contexts encountered in the past helps in choosing the best direction (of (in)action). had not the butterfly burnt the first time it got into the flame it would tell you. same applies to the snail I just accidently stumped on a few days ago. apparently snails are not very social animals and don't have legends about two footed giants, as I am sure this was not the first time it happened.
2) just use appropriate measuring units, say like 1 Roundworm is equal to the amount of synergy Phi found in Caenorhabditis elegans. then human's Phi would be equal to approximately billion Roundworms, and consciousness of atoms to somewhat nanoRoundworms etc (rough estimation;))
3) everyone would be more conscious would that not raise the temperature in the head to the extent when the neural connections would just melt or wouldn't they? have not yet tried meditation but suspect that's what making oneself free of unnecessary thoughts means - a brain can allow to be more conscious without overheating.
On a lighter note about pattern recognition : is anyone concious of the fact that a disembodied brain and nervous system very closely ressembles the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster'?. (Look it up on your search engine.).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGetting back to hard science, perhaps we should be careful to differentiate between awareness and conciousness implying concience, itself possibly existing in animal behaviour.
This website contains a theory uniting human consciousness, human evolution, complex information, language, reincarnation, population growth, mental illness, awareness, judgment and much more. The key is an information virus.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.atotalawareness.com
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to the experts surveyed so far, now including Lehar, Smythies, Hameroff, Chalmers, and a growing number of others, the clear consensus "Representational Qualia Theory" (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/6 ) indicates that no theory can ever be complete, no matter how 'complex' it is, if it does not simply include references to qualia, like red, green, what they are like for each of us, and how to eff these ineffable things that are merged together into our unified world of awareness by the corpus callosum.
Brent Allsop
"Why should natural selection evolve creatures with high Φ?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne step towards this answer is provided by the work of Robert Wright, in "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny" 2000, where he argues that biological and cultural evolution are driven by "non-zero-sumness", or to put another way, interactions that are not zero-sum. I would also link this to the work on life as a system far from equilibrium, which also results in the emergence of higher complexity. In fact, it has been suggested that it is a property of energy passing through and being trapped temporarily to some extent within a system (Sun to earth) that it in turn 'organises' that system. Fascinating stuff. The emergence of a new paradigm that in many ways connects with the old. Now that makes a pleasant change!
Where does the information come from?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this/ Quantum Theory as Quantum Information /
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Does information begin on the quarks level?
No. Quark cannot leave an atom.
Maybe does proton have quant of information?
No. Single proton has no quant of information.
Why?
Because information can be transfered only by
electromagnetic fields. And we don’t have a theory
about protono-magnetic fields.
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In our earthly world there is only one fundamental
particle - electron who can transfer information.
Can an electron be quant of information?
Maybe at first glance this seems to be a rather senseless questions.
But . . . . .
Energy is electromagnetic waves (em).
In 1904 Lorentz proved: there isn’t em waves without Electron
It means the source of these em waves must be an Electron
The electron and the em waves they are physical reality
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1900, 1905
Planck and Einstein found the energy of electron: E=h*f.
1916
Sommerfeld found the formula of electron : e^2=ah*c,
it means: e = +ah*c and e = -ah*c.
1928
Dirac found two more formulas of electron’s energy:
+E=Mc^2 and -E=Mc^2.
According to QED in interaction with vacuum electron’s
energy is infinite: E= ∞
Questions.
Why does the simplest particle - electron have six ( 6 ) formulas ?
Why does electron obey five ( 5) Laws ?
a) Law of conservation and transformation energy/ mass
b) Maxwell’s equations
c) Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle / Law
d) Pauli Exclusion Principle/ Law
e) Fermi-Dirac statistics
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What is an electron ?
Now nobody knows
In the internet we can read hundreds theories about electron
All of them are problematical
We can read hundreds books about philosophy of physics.
But how can we trust them if we don’t know what is electron ?
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Quote by Heinrich Hertz on Maxwell's equations:
"One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae
have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own,
that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers,
that we get more out of them than was originally put into them."
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Ladies and Gentlemen !
Friends !
Electron is not as simple as we think and, maybe, he is wiser than we are.
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We know, there is no information transfer
without energy transfer. More correct: there is no quant
information transfer without quant energy transfer.
And the electron has the least electric charge.
It means it has some quant of the least information.
What can electron do with this information?
Let us look the Mendeleev / Moseley periodic table.
We can see that electron interacts with proton
and creates atom of hydrogen.
This is simplest design, which was created by electron.
And we can see how this information grows and reaches
high informational level. And the most complex design,
which was created by electron is the Man.
The Man is alive essence. Animals, birds, fish are alive essences.
And an atom? And atom is also alive design.
The free atom of hydrogen can live about 1000 seconds.
And someone a long time ago has already said, that if to give
suffices time to atom of hydrogen, he would turn into Man.
Maybe it is better not to search about "dark, virtual particles "
but to understand what the electron is,
because even now nobody knows what electron is.
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In my opinion the Electron is quant of information.
Was I mistaken? No !
Because according to Pauli Exclusion Principle
only one single electron can be in the atom.
This electron reanimates the atom.
This electron manages the atom.
If the atom contains more than one electron
(for example - two), this atom represents " Siamese twins".
Save us, the Great God, of having such atoms, such children!
Each of us has an Electron, but we do not know it.
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Many years ago man has accustomed some wild
animals (wolf, horse, cat, bull , etc.)
and has made them domestic ones.
But the man understands badly the four-footed friends.
In 1897 J. J. Thomson discovered new particle - electron.
Gradually man has accustomed electron to work for him.
But the man does not understand what an electron is.
By my peasant logic at first it is better to understand
the closest and simplest particle photon /electron and
then to study the far away space and another particles.
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Best wishes.
Israel Sadovnik. Socratus.
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P.S.
Robert Milliken, who measured a charge of electron,
in his Nobel speech ( 1923 ) told, that he knew nothing
about the “last essence of electron”.
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The verse: The world of electron.
But maybe these electrons are World,
where there are five continents:
the art,
knowledge,
wars,
thrones
and the memory of forty centuries.
/ Valery Brusov./
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Consciousness is an after-effect of all perceptive senses elaborated by the brain. Seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking makes the consciousness. It is not located in only 1 spot in the brain. Think of isolating our brain from all our perceptive senses. Like we are in deep unconscious status. We don't feel, don't hear. and don't see. Is our consciousness alive in that moment? No, we can't think, we can't hear our voice inside. Just our biological body is alive. That brings me thinking that Consciousness is an after-effect of all perceptive senses elaborated by the brain. Consciousness exist when electric impulses from perceptive senses come to our brain, or when these impulses are selfgenerated by the brain, like when dreaming.Im my brain, and my brain its me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe there are two points lacking or unclear in this theory.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst information integration can give a quantitative measure of consciousness, but I think a qualitative specification is also necessary if you want to differentiate the poppy red, the apple odorous and the skylark sing related states of consciousness. And these are not just computational.
Second it seems not able to distinguish semantic, conceptual or verbal consciousness from pre-verbal. If you try to select-highlight a phrase in Tonoli's Phi Kindle book with right hand your conscious-verbal manager can engage itself (its working memory) on the better lenght-word meaning to select or highlight. But, if your right hand is busy and you are doing that with your left hand, you are compelled to retrieve to consciousness some concepts as the function of side keys and central button of Kindle's keyboard. You are both more consciously aware (higher phi?) of the meaning of each separate function, but relevant knowledge is really more fragmented and disaggregated, less synergistic if compared to right hand automatism. So it seems to me that automated-process synergy and analytical awareness in verbal knowledge-consciousness states can not be easily tackled by IIT.