Consciousness: another approach (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 30, 2021, 18:52 (938 days ago) @ David Turell

It also fails:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/anil-seth-finds-consciousness-in-lifes-push-against-entr...

"Anil Seth wants to understand how minds work. As a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in England, Seth has seen firsthand how neurons do what they do — but he knows that the puzzle of consciousness spills over from neuroscience into other branches of science, and even into philosophy.

"As he puts it near the start of his new book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (available October 19): “Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person?”

***

"When we think about consciousness or experience, it just doesn’t seem to us to be the sort of thing that admits an explanation in terms of physics and chemistry and biology. There’s a suspicion that scientific explanation — by which I mean broadly materialist, reductive explanations, which have been so successful in other branches of physics and chemistry — just might not be up to the job, because consciousness is intrinsically private.

***

"How is consciousness related to our nature as living machines, in a way that’s continuous between humans and other animals? In my work — and in the book — I eventually get to the point that consciousness is not there in spite of our nature as flesh-and-blood machines, as Descartes might have said; rather, it’s because of this nature. It is because we are flesh-and-blood living machines that our experiences of the world and of “self” arise.

***

"The promising bit comes from what Gerald Edelman and Tononi together observed, in the late ’90s, which is that conscious experiences are highly “informative” and always “integrated.”

"They meant information in a technical, formal sense — not the informal sense in which reading a newspaper is informative. Rather, conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other experience you ever have had, ever could have, or ever will have. Each one rules out the occurrence of a very, very large repertoire of alternative possible conscious experiences. When I look out of the window right now, I have never experienced this precise visual scene. It’s an experience even more distinctive when combined with all my thoughts, background emotions and so on. And this is what information, in information theory, measures: It’s the reduction of uncertainty among a repertoire of alternative possibilities.

"As well as being informative, every conscious experience is also integrated. It’s experienced “all of a piece”: Every conscious scene appears as a unified whole. We don’t experience the colors of objects separately from their shapes, nor do we experience objects independently of whatever else is going on. The many different elements of my conscious experience right now all seem tied together in a fundamental and inescapable way.

"So at the level of experience, at the level of phenomenology, consciousness has these two properties that coexist. Well, if that’s the case, then what Tononi and Edelman argued was that the mechanisms that underlie conscious experiences in the brain or in the body should also co-express these properties of information and integration.

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"One thing that immediately follows from this is that you have a nice post hoc explanation for certain things we know about consciousness. For instance, that the cerebellum — the “little brain” in the back of our head — doesn’t seem to have much to do with consciousness. That’s just a matter of empirical fact; the cerebellum doesn’t seem much involved. Yet it has three-quarters of all the neurons in the brain. Why isn’t the cerebellum involved? You can make up many reasons. But the IIT reason is a very convincing one: The cerebellum’s wiring is not the right sort of wiring to generate co-expressed information and integration, whereas the cortex is, and the cortex is intimately related to consciousness.

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"The key to unlocking life was to recognize that it is not just one thing. Life is a constellation concept — a cluster of related properties that come together in different ways in different organisms. There’s homeostasis, there’s reproduction, there’s metabolism, and so on. With life there are also gray areas, things that from some perspectives we would describe as being alive, and from others not — like viruses and oil droplets, and now synthetic organisms. But by accounting for its diverse properties, the suspicion that we still needed an élan vital, a spark of life — some sort of vitalistic resonance — to explain it went away. The problem of life wasn’t solved; it was “dissolved.”

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"I don’t go all the way to what in philosophy you might call some version of idealism — that everything is a property of the mental. Some people do. This is where I diverge a little bit from people like [the cognitive scientist] Donald Hoffman....But he goes further, ending up in a kind of panpsychist idealism that some degree of consciousness inheres in everything. I just don’t buy it, frankly, and I don’t think you need to go there."

Comment: he has no answer, but interesting concepts., especially explaining cerebellar and cerebral wiring differences.