Nicholas Humphrey drops new ideas on origin of consciousness

Per an Aeon interview about a new book of his, the British philosopher has ideas that I would very largely agree with.

His analogy with "Moby-Dick" is very good, as an introduction to the idea that sensation, vs mere perception, is about brain narratives.

And, the kicker? (Aside from him ignoring or not knowing, or omitting them because extinct, that dinosaurs were also warm-blooded.) Interesting. Warm-bloodedness, and not only greater control of one's self vis a vis one's environment, but more rapid, and more active, response to it? Makes sense. And, especially since I have noted the amount of hype about the octopus in recent years, which is overblown, I agree with his take on them not demonstrating sentience.

And, I'll keep an eye open for his book!

Update, March 19, 2023: The New Yorker interviews him in Athens, including a trip to the cave that may have inspired Plato's famous analogy in The Republic.

Does "implicit bias" exist? If so, how measurable is it?

The idea that people might have implicit, unconscious racist, sexist, or ageist biases is one that’s gotten a lot of traction in the last decade or so. With the rise of movements like Black Lives Matter, the racial portion of possible implicit bias — setting aside, of course, explicit bias, has gotten even more traction.

Project Implicit, grounded at Harvard but which also has itsown website, is the biggest, and original, tester for such attitudes, looking at not only the three above, but possible implicit bias against sexual orientation and more.

That said, the question is, how well can we test for this?

Massimo Pigliucci has raised this issue, per one of the links on a Friday roundup. Two different meta-analyses within that piece both look at the racial bias test. (And yes, both of them focus on that, the first citing only race-based testing as explicit examples and the second specifically saying it was only about racial bias testing. The idea that the first is also about race only is reinforced by a pieceI posted on Massimo’s site last week, meta-analyzers, while having bits of problems with the other tests, don’t see the same testing issues in the same degree with them.)

That all said, let’s dig into this issue, both of implicit bias in general, and why racial implicit bias (presuming it exists, as I shall shortly show we have good reason to believe) may be hard to test accurately, and again, that problem being most difficult with racial bias.

First, my idea of consciousness, as should be known to long-term visitors to Massimo’s sites, is broadly similar to that of Dan Dennett — subselves poking up from the subconsciousness, multiple drafts of consciousness, etc. I have no problem with the idea of implicit biases. In fact, I’d be shocked if humans did NOT have such biases. Shocked. (For more on that, see the last two links at the bottom.)

Second, let’s look at the main such biases in modern America, as most commonly tested for by implicit association tests, whether crafted by Project Implicit or not — racism, sexism, ageism, sexual orientation. Sexism and ageism appear to be largely culturally driven. In pre-literate societies, the elders were valued for their wisdom, doubly so in pre-agricultural societies. In “neutral” societies, let alone matrilineal ones, women were valued for inheritance, clan/tribe structure and more, sociologically; and especially contra a myth of Ev Psychers, weren’t denigrated for doing non-hunting work, etc.

Racism, though, is different. Vis-à-vis human xenophobia and outgroups, it appears to be more biologically embedded. Please don’t reference Hume at this point; I know well that is ≠ ought. BUT … until a desirable “ought” of cultural evolution fully trumps an “is” of biological evolution, the “is” is still in play. That’s reality, folks; we’re still blobs of protoplasm, not Platonic Ideals.

OK, that’s our background.

(Sexual orientation bias is probably the second-hottest button issue. And, it may have a moderate degree of biological background, if connected to generalized feelings of disgust. But, in turn, it’s wrapped up with yet other issues, and that would be too distracting.)

Third, with the above said, can racism-based implicit bias be tested? I say yes. The critiquers of IAT don’t say no; they just say that IAT is overstating what it has found, as far as degree of bias and potential conscious-level effects of that. And, they do focus on race-based bias.

Fourth, why is such testing problematic? Well, racism is the hot-button issue in America, beyond the biological background, versus ageism or sexism. The United States is quite arguably the most racially diverse nation in history, with minorities becoming an ever-greater portion of that. And, America has nearly 250 years not just of slavery, but of race-based and race-justified slavery, behind that.

Ergo, it’s understandable that “social justice warriors” or “special snowflakes” in places like modern American academia might over-critique themselves to ferret out actual, would-be, or feared-to-be, bits of such bias. That’s doubly true with the conformist nature of academia in many cases.

That still doesn’t mean that such bias is nonexistent.

What it does mean is that we have:

1.     Low accuracy in testing for it;

2.     Low accuracy in determining any explicit results of it (this applying to the other IATs, not just race.

Or, as noted by Wikipedia at the third link above (additional pull quotes also from there):

A recent meta-analysis[30] has concluded that the IAT has predictive validity independent of the predictive validity of explicit measures. However, a follow-up meta-analysis[31] questioned some of these results, finding that implicit measures were only weakly predictive of behaviors and no better than explicit measures. Some research has found that the IAT tends to be a better predictor of behavior in socially sensitive contexts (e.g. discrimination and suicidal behaviour)[32] than traditional 'explicit' self-report methods,[33] whereas explicit measures tend to be better predictors of behavior in less socially sensitive contexts (e.g. political preferences).

That seems to sum up the main issues pretty well.

First sidebar:

The IAT has also demonstrated a reasonable amount of resistance to social-desirability bias. Individuals asked to fake their responses on the IAT have demonstrated difficulty in doing so in some studies. … Distinct from faking (the deliberate obscuring of a true association), some studies have shown that heightening awareness about the nature of the test can change the outcome, potentially by activating different fluencies and associations. 

In other words, whatever the IAT is measuring, regardless of the accuracy of measurement as correlated to an alleged specific implicit bias, it's measuring something "real."

At the same time, per the second half of that second pull quote, it does seem moderately susceptible to "priming," which itself an issue that still gets some degree of debate.

Fifth, that said, what’s the answer?

The answer is to replace so-so science (not “bad science,” in this case, I say, but “so-so science,” viewing it on a continuum rather than two polarities) with better science. This is not bad science, and it’s certainly not pseudoscience. (That said, if Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji keep digging in their heels, it's going to become semi-bad science soon enough, then bad science after that.)

So, IAT’s founders need to admit their shortcomings, as well as admitting what seems to be a primary reason for their shortcomings.

Then, social scientists in general need to work on better testing. They also need to ask the self-reflective question of: “How much better can we make this testing?”

I would guess “moderately better.” Science can’t know everything, nor can it get everything 100 percent right. (Sorry, British astronomers.)

Sixth, the same applies to asking how much we can improve our knowledge as to how much implicit biases have explicit results. “Moderately better” is likely the best we can do.

With that all said, we should support better science in this instance. The answer to not-good science that’s nonetheless science is always better science, not rejection of existing science.

And, given the existence of both implicit attitudes, implicit cognition, and (outside of the IAT and Project Implicit), implicit stereotypes, again, while their work is somewhat problematic, Greenwald and Banaji aren't all wet, either.

And, since this is my blog, per one commenter on Massimo’s site?

Maybe we could substitute “Israeli” and “Palestinian” for “black” and “white.”

And, yes, I went there. And, in that specific order, stating that specific version of the parallelism.

Speaking of, I also don't get how someone so in love with depth psychology can resist the idea of implicit biases, when, especially with Freud's theories, the idea of implicit bias fits like a T.

To pivot this to politics ...

We leftists and left-liberals must not let conservaDems, classical liberals, or whomever claim that the Democratic Party caved into identity politics at the expense of the working class.

Democratic Party local leaders stress that's a false dichotomy. And they're right.

And, we who vote outside the duopoly box must insist on this even more.

#SamHarris: Being dishonest about #Buddhism once again

I've already reviewed his new book, based on long excerpts he posted on his website, and found it wanting.

But, he doubles down on now-stereotypical Sam Harris traits in an interview with Gary Gutting, editor of "The Stone," an ongoing philosophy column at the New York Times.

Harris shows himself, IMO, to be his usual tendentious self, namely, where he claims to .... well, where he claims to know the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism much better than many other people who actually know a cardinal difference.

G.G.: But it seems to depend on who’s looking. Buddhist schools of philosophy say there is no self, and Buddhist meditators claim that their experiences confirm this. But Hindu schools of philosophy say there is a self, a subject of experience, disagreeing only about its exact nature; and Hindu meditators claim that their experiences confirm this. Why prefer the Buddhist experiences to the Hindu experiences? ... 

S.H.: Well, I would challenge your interpretation of the Indian literature. The difference between the claims of Hindu yogis and those of Buddhist meditators largely boil down to differences in terminology. Buddhists tend to emphasize what the mind isn’t — using words like selfless, unborn, unconditioned, empty, and so forth. Hindus tend to describe the experience of self-transcendence in positive terms — using terms such as bliss, wisdom, being, and even “capital-S” Self. However, in a tradition like Advaita Vedanta, they are definitely talking about cutting through the illusion of the self.

However ...

Wikipedia notes that Advaita has been strongly influenced by Buddhism.

And, beyond that, it's arguable that Harris is engaged in an overinterpretation of Advaita, and that, even to the degree he's right about it, it doesn't represent the majority of Hindu thought.

I think most Hindus and most Buddhists alike would agree on this differentiation on the issue of a personal self:

Now though Buddhism and Hinduism share the concept of rebirth, the Buddhist concept differs in details from the Hindu doctrine. The doctrine of rebirth as understood in Hinduism involves a permanent soul, a conscious entity which transmigrates from one body to another. The soul inhabits a given body and at death, the soul casts that body off and goes on to assume another body. The famous Hindu classic, the Bhagavad Gita, compares this to a man who might take off one suit of clothing and put on another. The man remains the same but the suits of clothing are different. In the same way the soul remains the same but the psycho-physical organism it takes up differs from life to life. 

The Buddhist term for rebirth in Pali is "punabbhava" which means "again existence". Buddhism sees rebirth not as the transmigration of a conscious entity but as the repeated occurrence of the process of existence. There is a continuity, a transmission of influence, a causal connection between one life and another. But there is no soul, no permanent entity which transmigrates from one life to another.

Well put.

Meanwhile, later on, Sammy admits that Buddhists hold metaphysical beliefs, and ones that can be wrong:

Buddhists also make claims about invisible entities, spiritual energies, other planes of existence and so forth. However, claims of this kind are generally suspect because they are based on experiences that are open to rival interpretations. 

Per my definition of "religion," these are metaphysical "matters of ultimate concern," about which practitioners engage in certain ritual and practice to align themselves better. Hence, once again, Buddhism is still a religion.

Meanwhile, per one of my overall philosophical heroes, David Hume, one can engage in speculations about the seeming intangibility of human nature without going down a "spiritual but not religious" road or any like it.

I want to add Hume’s famous comment from A Treatise on Human Nature here:

When I enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other….and never can observe anything but the perception.

A few issues relevant to this discussion come up.

1. Hume makes this statement without engaging in any metaphysics.

2. Per my comment elsewhere that “the only good Buddha is a dead Buddha,” note that we have “I” used three times and “myself” once. If one is an arhat, similarly, how does one talk about that without the use of first-person pronouns, thereby undercutting the idea of a no-self, and certainly, the idea that one is enlightened enough to have already achieved no-selfhood?

I’m now going to move to a different section of his comment:

If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time.

3. NOT directly related to this, but going back to classical Greece: On the word “when” in the first statement, and this …

How “thin” does one slice time for one sensation, perception or impression to succeed another? In other words, are we at an internalized, psychologized version of Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion?

This month in philosophy: Rejecting old ideas on free will

For new readers, this is actually a roundup of my philosophy-related postings for January.

At the start of the year, I talked about New Year's resolutions, and how ideas behind the making of resolutions relates to issues of free will and consciousness. 

Next, I took a look at the philosophy of fallacies and fallacious reasoning, especially the "informal" fallacies that most people think about when they talk about this issue.

Back in December, I did a second installment on what is becoming a bit of a series: saying "Mu" to the old polarities, old dichotomies and old inadequate definitions of the increasingly stale and sterile "free will vs. determinism" debate. Thoughts here are inspired in part by David Hume and his "fleeting self" ideas, which supplements theories of the likes of Dan Dennett about subselves and multiple drafts of consciousness.

I followed that at the end of January with Part 3, which focuses on problems I see with compatibilist ideas of free will. As often is the case when I write on these issues, there's usually an allusion to Dennett. That's especially here, since this is his modern baby. But, he's just as wrong on a lot of issues of free will as on a lot of issues of consciousness.

Mu to free will vs determinism, part 2

I've had a bit of running discussion with philosopher Massimo Pigliucci about this issue for some time, with much of my original thoughts on this issue to be found in this blog post. He asked me to give it my best shot, as to why I reject free will in the sense of being associated with a unitary self, and also why I say mu to the whole dualistic issue of free will versus determinism, going beyond my original thoughts, with which he indicates he has some degree of sympathy.

What follows is what I said on a recent post at his excellent blog, Rationally Speaking, and further developed and edited. 

My best shot? Probably nowhere near perfect, but...

First, I'm a country newspaper editor, Jim, not a professional philosopher! (Cue old Star Trek music.)

OK, that said, let's build on the thoughts in that original piece and go from there.

A couple of baseline notes, first.

1. Traditional free will does have metaphysical overtones, so I reject it in part on those grounds.
2. Ditto for determinism. (Stoicism's Logos is just as metaphysical as John Calvin's double-predestinarian God.)

I am also a non-dualist in general. That's true not just about dualism of ontological categories, like body-soul dualism. Using dualism more generally, as a term for polarities, I generally reject them, too. I am not a big black-and-white person. In philosophy, this is especially true. I look for nuance. I question theories and ideas that seem to lack it, and more.

That, in turn, relates to my "mu."

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it comes from Zen Buddhism. There's no precise translation in English, but a good, direct one is that using the word "unasks" a question or idea stated immediately in front of it. In other words, saying "mu" to "free will vs. determinism" rejects the dualism, that these are the only two ways of looking at decision-making in human consciousness. Related to that, to the degree that these are ever useful terms, it rejects the polarity behind them, that is the idea that a particular action is either 100 percent determined or 100 percent of free will.

And, since Zen is pretty non-dualistic, I use the particular word "mu" to deliberately underscore that I'm rejecting a way of thinking as much, if not more, than traditional uses of two concepts.

The reason I say "mu" gets back to the ideas of subselves, multiple drafts of consciousness, and even Hume's "fleeting impressions." In short, I take Dennett one step further, in the same direction Daniel Wegner does. (And I'm sure you're familiar with his writings on free will.)

Update: Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will" is reviewed by me here.

In other words, to use Dennett's language, if there is no "Cartesian meaner" in a "Cartesian theater," there's no "Cartesian free willer" there either. There's no unitary conscious self with a free will at the center of the controls.

Now, might our subselves, or whatever of the "multiple drafts" is in the driver's seat at any particular moment, be engaged in something that might be called quasi-free will, is another question. I think something like that does happen. But, it's as ephemeral as that particular subself, "draft," or whatever, is in the driver's seat.

So, in that sense, I'm not totally against all of the ideas that are lumped under the rubric "free will."

Reason No. 2 that I oppose the idea of "free will" linked to a single unitary conscious self is somewhat related. I do believe there's a fair amount of value to the Libet experiments and related, even if sometimes, some people have overstated them.

Here, I disagree with John Horgan, who in a new Scientific American column about free will and New Year's resolutions, says:

Libet’s clock experiment is a poor probe of free will, because the subject has made the decision in advance to push the button; he merely chooses when to push. I would be surprised if the EEG sensors or implanted electrodes did not find neural anticipation of that choice.

See, I don't understand Libet that way. I've always understood it, and his work to separate subjective feelings of, and belief in, personal volution, from a (theoretically) objective idea of something called "free will," as refuting the existence of any such objective idea.

And, per a reader, this take on Benjamin Libet's famous experiments is in general line with what I'm saying.

And hence, with Pigliucci, when he uses volition, I get the feeling that it is for something still akin to traditional versions of free will, and something he believes actually exists, not Libet's idea of a subjective belief.

That said, that veto power?

We may still have a "veto" over such actions, but even then, that veto may vary from subself to subself as to what a particular subself would veto or not, degree of veto power it has, etc. Beyond that, that veto itself may be at such a deep layer we wouldn't associate it with a quasi-formed subself, let alone a fully formed self. In short, Libet has some good ideas, but they need further developing.

In short, so far, part of what I am saying is that what's actually happening in the human mind is far too complex to reduce to "free will," too. It's another instance where the human brain's predilection for facile labeling of things draws us astray.

I think Libet's discussion of antedating and backdating, subconsciously, our understanding of temporal order of events, relates to that. His ideas here are certainly compatible with Dennett's multiple drafts theory of consciousness, for example, but Dennett chooses not to go down that direction, just as he chose not to go down Wegner's direction in rejecting a Cartesian free willer.

In short, ideas of consciousness in general, and volition in particular are far too complex, and our understanding today far too limited, to cram into a particular philosophical system.

(Sidebar: This is why I also talked about neo-Humean ethics. I'm in general an anti-system builder, and a neo-Humean ethics would be a variation on situational ethics based in some way on studying how different particular subselves constructed primarily for different predominant social relations, such as work life, family life, life with friends, etc., have different ethical values, and how said different ethical values are constructed.)

3. Without saying this is part of my answer for how the subselves that produce the appearance of a self act, there's also the question of how all this evolved. Is what appears to be free will an adaptation, or is it, shades of Dennett vs. Gould ... a spandrel? Or, at least, is our belief that we have a unitary self, with unitary free will, a spandrel? I side somewhat with Gould on this issue of spandrels in general, as it has some ties with issues of ev psych, and over-the-top claims in ev psych, etc.

====

Here's the biggie, now. I say "Mu" to the dualism that's part and parcel of the "free will VERSUS (emphasis needed) determinism" issue. Just because conscious, unitary-self free will doesn't exist, there's no need to believe any sort of determinism, whether Coyne's physical determinism, or somebody else's psychological determinism, exists.

A good way to further explicate this is per the post you just put up about the year in books, and namely, Susan Blackmore's new book. I'm sure that, were she to write in detail on this issue, she would have at least a few broadly similar ideas, above all, rejecting the whole **dualism/duality** present in traditional framing of this as a "free will vs. determinism" issue.

I feel the same. That's at the core of my "mu," and per Hofstadter first tipping me off on the word years ago, why I deliberately use that word in this situation. With your word "volition," or whatever, I think we have to see this whole issue of apparent intentionality in human actions in a non-dualistic way.

That said, per all of the above, I do see some degree of psychological determinism, on an action-by-action basis, somewhat related to more crude statements of this issue, based on MRIs, in legal defense in certain criminal cases.

That is, can something like, say, childhood sexual or physical abuse psychologically determine some of our actions?

I'd say yes, **to a degree.** Here, I'm rejecting not dualism, narrowly speaking, but something analogous, polarities.

In other words, Action X may be 23 percent psychologically determined and 77 percent volitional, or whatever word you prefer. Action B may be 42 percent psychologically determined and 58 percent volitional. Action C may be 8 percent psychologically determined, and 92 percent volitional.

If you don't like the word "determined," let's borrow a word from genetics and developmental psychology, and talk about "tendencies." That way, it sounds less like a classical version of psychological determinism. Just like we have a 90 degree heritable tendency to be tall, a 50 percent one to intelligence, etc., but this still has an element of environmental expression related to it, ditto on having Z degree of psychological tendency in Action X.

As for physical determinism, of the type that drives Coyne? It's not worth even bothering with. Among other things, how anybody in the modern quantum world can believe in a classical version of physical determinism is beyond me. (That said, I don't even come close to accepting Penrose's idea of consciousness arising through quantum effects in the brain!)

===

There's one more major reason I say "mu" to the whole issue.

Cognitive science, neuroscience, etc., are perhaps in the Early Bronze Age. Maybe the Neolithic. But, our knowledge curve here, if even from a low base, hints at exponential growth.

Within a decade or two, we will realize how little we have known about the mind, and to the degree that we have gained new knowledge, we will realize how anachronistic "free will" is, as well as seeing even more that "determinism" is not just anachronistic, it's out of the picture. 

I mean, ever since Hume's famous quote from "A Treatise on Human Nature," quoted above in the poster quote: 

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception…. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.

The two ideas have been at least somewhat anachronous philosophically, long before Dan Dennett dressed up ideas originally from Gilbert Ryle (who, in turn, ultimately traced back to Hume).

At times, to be honest, I become a bit frustrated with professional philosophers who are forgetting that ideas related to "subselves," "multiple drafts," or similar, are more than 250 years old. The fact that free will, determinism, and the paired polarity of insisting that the guiding of human actions is one or the other is shown to be anachronistic in the history of Western philosophy by the man who was, arguably, the world's first professional psychologist. 

And, per searching my own blog, there's another, similar reason to the above. In fact, here, I analogized between current postulations of free will and the old "god of the gaps" idea.

====

Massimo, and others, hope this provides food for further thought.

Again, I want to stress once again that the "mu" is about rejecting the duality of free will vs. determinism, and that, rejecting ideas of free will associated with a unitary conscious self doesn't mean that determinism is therefore the only answer left to choose.

====

Meanwhile, as of early 2015, it's become time for a third installment on this issue.

Is the Internet conscious?

Now, my philosophy has no problem with imputing consciousness to non-carbon beings or creatures. (We would, of course, call anything with consciousness a "being" or a "creature" and not just an "it.")

Well, Massimo Pigliucci has a good discussion of claims about the consciousness, or not, of the Internet, here.

I agree with him that today's Internet is not conscious, but that, at some unknown date, it may become so. I also agree with what I take as his tacit thought that the "unknown date" isn't happening in the next few years. Sit down, Ray Kurzweil.

That said, especially on issues like this, Massimo gets some ... "interesting" comments and commenters. Baron and Dave S, definitely, on issues like this.

Per Baron and some of his interests in other blogs and such, I riff on Hanns Johst (not Hermann Göring): "When I hear the word 'noetic,' I reach for my revolver!"

My thought? Without going down Kurzweil's road, or Michio Kaku's, but with taking Lynn Margulis' idea of "symbiosis" beyond just carbon-based life (sorry, Massimo, you're being too restrictive there), we might talk about a symbiosis for a new type of consciousness at some point.

But, even that, rather than just talk about conscious humans being helped by the Internet, is some point away. And, if that symbiosis does become conscious, it will surely eliminate for now and beyond, the idea of the Internet having a free-standing, non-symbiotic consciousness.

That said, like SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, our definition of "consciousness" may be too narrow. Or looking in the wrong corners.

But, the Internet is not currently conscious, or even close to it.

And, contra Baron and a few Jains, hammers sure as hell aren't conscious and never will be.

Consciousness is not the same as attentiveness

It's long been established that we have what could be called "subconscious attentiveness," which can cause things such as certain types of psychological priming through images being presented to people, but too quickly for them to be consciously aware of the images.

It now appears, in the latest in attempts to unravel human consciousness, that this cuts both ways.

But, the story doesn't go as far as it could, both on speculation and on Wittgenstein-like questions on our use of language on these issues.

Perhaps "consciousness," "attentiveness" and "awareness" need more precision in usage in such aspects. Or maybe they need to be redefined to some degree. Or replaced.

Whether language will be crafted to this end remains to be seen.

Does consciousness go down to individual neurons?

Antonio Damasio, one of the leaders in the investigation of what makes humans conscious, certainly thinks that's what will prove out.

And, because of the number of connections each individual neuron has, that could mean that consciousness for a computer or robot may be quite some ways off, still.

Back to futurist dreamland for Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku and others, in that case.

Even if Damasio isn't totally on the right trail, I think he's headed in the right direction. Now, what led to the precursor of consciousness to "emerge" at some level of animal life? How much brain complexity was needed? Is neuronal number per body weight, or neuronal connections per body weight, a power law situation?

The state of consciousness studies

Science News has two excellent articles on where we are at, part of a just-started ongoing series.

The first, by Tom Siegfried, follows in many of the footsteps of Douglas Hofstadter to talk about consciousness and self-referential systems. The title of "Self as Symbol" gives some hint of where he's headed. And, he says self-referentiality may actually deepen our eventual understanding of consciousness rather than acting as a barrier.


Laura Sanders looks at the neuroscience side of the coin, and what brain studies are telling us these days. Not too much of high specificity, but we're getting ideas on how to refine, and in some ways change, our searching.

Siegried, especially, complements the "mu" I have said to free will VERSUS determinism. In a self-referential loop, especially one as complex as consciousness, free will VERSUS determinism sounds way too linear.

Free will not so free? And not so human-specific

I've long been of the opinion that "free will" vs. "determinism" is, if not a false dilemma, at least something close — a pair of false polarities, rather than something on a continuum.

(I've also been of the opinion, taking Dan Dennett's stance on consciousnesss that there's no "Cartesian meaner" to its logical conclusion — as does Daniel Wegner and others, I'm not alone — that there's no conscious, central, controlled location for free will in humans, as well. That is, there's no "Cartesian free willer" either. But, I digress.)

There's a German-based neuroscientist who agrees with me on the "polarities" angle. But, that's not all.

Bjoern Brembs also says that this free will — free will within constraints — is exhibited by animals, too.

Brembs and others have used mathematical models to simulate brain activity on a computer, finding that what worked best was a combination of deterministic behaviour and what is known as stochastic behaviour - which may look random but actually, in time, follows a defined set of probabilities.

Personally, I actually don't see this as that big of a deal. Given that consciousness itself is understood as being on some sort of continuum, rather than "we conscious humans" vs. "you unconscious animals," how could a will, and a will that is partially free, also not exist, and again, on a continuum?

That then said, I do find it a bit more questionable to extend some degree of free will, as Brembs does, all the way down to the level of flies, just as I would find it questionable to attribute consciousness to an animal with so few neurons.

To talk about a dog, or the old laboratory vertebrate standby, the lab rat, as having some degree or type of free will? Yes. The laboratory insect standby, a fruit fly? Per Carl Sagan, that's an extraordinary claim. I expect more evidence.

I'll stand by for more research; this is surely going to be a hot topic not just for months but for years.

Consciousness doesn't need a mirror for proof

Some humans as well as theoretically intelligent animals fail the psychological classic mirror test of self consciousness. With humans, the "failure" appears sociologically related. There's thoughts in this for both human and animal psychology.

There are two things we should take away from this. First, self-awareness is not a hard and fast line. Instead, it is probably a continuum. That is an especially important lesson to keep in mind with animal research. A species might have the skill, even if some individuals do not. This is true for chimpanzees, who do not all pass the mark test, and can lose the ability as they age.

A takeaway?

"Self-awareness is like gravity," Johns Hopkins's Roma says. "We can't touch it directly, so if we want to measure it, scientists must develop valid techniques to directly observe its effects. Currently, mirror mark tests are the best-known and most accepted method, but the absence of an effect does not necessarily mean the absence of the thing we're trying to measure. Ultimately, evidence from multiple techniques should converge on the truth, whatever it may be. Such is the beauty of how scientific advances turn controversy into common knowledge."

At bottom line — if the mirror test is sociologically influenced, this is a powerful, if indirect, undercutting of the universality of IQ tests, no? Take THAT, hereditarians, racialists, et al.

Just how conscious are we?

New Scientist appears to transcend its slide into the crapper of the past few years with a serious of vignettes on different aspects of consciousness.

First, unconscious reactions that we later label as products of conscious free will appear to occur seconds before a "conscious determination," not just Benjamin Libet's well-known 300 millisecond delay.

Second, it appears that consciousness is not "vs." unconsciousness, but that the two are on a spectrum.

In light of all of this, in addition to it becoming clearer that the human mind does not operate like a computer, it's clearer that we are a long ways away from creating a conscious machine, something that would pass a Turing test when viewed by a true skeptic.

New indications of what drives consciousness

A theory known as "global workspace" seems to be getting some tentative empirical confirmation, including that "the researchers found a 300 ms delay between presenting the stimuli and witnessing this explosion of neural activity," which may be analogous to the famous half-second delay between starting what turns out to be a conscious action and actually consciously willing to do it.

That said, per David Chalmers, this study seems to answer an "easy question" about consciousness, or a couple, more than any "hard questions."

We have 1,000 types of nerve cells

This Scientific American story shows why we have only just emerged from the Stone Age into the Bronze Age on neuroscience:

(And), as our understanding of the brain grows, our desire to intervene, to help ameliorate the many pathologies to which the mind is prey, grows commensurately. Yet today’s tools (drugs and deep-brain stimulations) are comparatively crude, with undesirable side effects.

Christof Koch is a disciple of DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick and a leading neuroscientist. He's on the forefront of new research in the field; read the full story to see some of the latest avenues of research.

The human brain, simulated?

In Switzerland, a neuroscientist is hoping to use an IBM supercomputer much more powerful than Deep Blue to do just that.

That's interesting enough. The real thing is that Henry Markram says we (mainly, his professional colleagues being referenced) need to ditch many of their scientific preconceptions about how individual neurons, neuron groups and areas of the brain work.

The story describes how he is modeling the simulation on actual "slices" of mouse neocortex.

What's Markram's take on consciousness? Well, he's definitely an anti-mysterian, but believes it is an emergent property, so he's not a Dennett-style greedy reductionist. Sounds like he's right in the groove with his thoughts on that matter, which leads me to give him credence on looking at junking some current ideas about neuron operation.

Dead salmon, live MRI

A salmon showed human-type emotional responses to stimuli, when its brain was subject to functional magnetic resonance image scanning.

Just one problem: the salmon was dead.

THE TRUE ORIGINAL SIN

Eat, sleep, defecate.
If you’re lucky, have a little fornicate.
In times between, do a little work
For a little bit of money
To afford the food to eat,
And the place to sleep,
And a spot to defecate the food you eat,
And a room for a lucky little fornicate.
Maybe develop some hobbies, and interests,
Work harder, make some money for “fun.”
If you fornicate long enough and often enough,
And luckily, or unluckily, enough,
Have some kids.
Work harder to earn money for them.
Lather, rinse, and repeast.
As your hair gets gray, your face wrinkles, and your muscles sag,
While rich people with more and better shampoo try to hide this,
Life moves on.
Then, one day, go to a poetic “sleep eternal,”
Even though there’s no “you” to know it’s “eternal.”
Finally, the true original sin, the curse of consciousness,
Is removed.

Steve Snyder
May 17, 2009