@NicoleCRust @Neurograce

Do any of you remember when Francis Crick did his book tour, and he ended his talk with an enthusiastic slide that read something like

!!! CONSCIOUSNESS NOW !!!

His talk included the claim that it was a moment, much like the time of DNA, when understanding consciousness was at hand. Around 1994. Crick and Koch were the chatGPT of that era.

You might both be too young to have seen any of this.

@Neurograce @wandell
I like how @anilkseth breaks down this space: Consciousness level (what I was referring to above); Consciousness content (awareness; the NCC); Consciousness Self (the Cartesian theater; Free Will).

I think folks are still searching for the NCC? https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.22

And there's the fun story that Christoph Koch has until next June to find it or he loses a case of Bordeaux to Chalmers:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831830-300-consciousness-how-were-solving-a-mystery-bigger-than-our-minds/

@NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth

It's indeed a frustrating topic to work on, especially given that people who have their own theories of consciousness are too fixated on them.

My point has been: instead of trying to study these old theories, we should follow new findings in neurobiology and try come up with novel ideas.

My own crappy way to use advances in neuroscience to develop a new view of consciousness was written up in this tics paper https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(20)30175-3

@jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth

Thanks! I've been working on this annoying topic for 18 years so there are quite some, but fortunately enough I haven't tried to write up all the stupid ideas I have had!

However, if people keep on pushing the idea that LLMs are conscious then I might need to get back into business. Anyone else feel this way?

Anyway, I am in the bed with a high fever so I should really put the phone down. Stay safe and healthy, everyone!

@jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @PessoaBrain @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay

Nicole, you started out asking about complexity measures of consciousness. Anyone interested in this has to absorb Scott Aaronson's critique of IIT: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
He shows that the IIT measure does not even come close to isolating what we think we mean when we separate the conscious from the unconscious. The punch line is:

"More generally, we can achieve pretty good information integration by hooking together logic gates according to any bipartite expander graph: that is, any graph with n vertices on each side, such that every k vertices on the left side are connected to at least min{(1+ε)k,n} vertices on the right side, for some constant ε>0. And it’s well-known how to create expander graphs whose degree (i.e., the number of edges incident to each vertex, or the number of wires coming out of each logic gate) is a constant, such as 3. One can do so either by plunking down edges at random, or (less trivially) by explicit constructions from algebra or combinatorics. And as indicated in the title of this post, I feel 100% confident in saying that the so-constructed expander graphs are not conscious! The brain might be an expander, but not every expander is a brain."

Tononi, to his credit or blame, is so committed to IIT that his response is yes, such an arrangement of logic gates is conscious. But I think that pretty much destroys any connection of what he calls consciousness to what the rest of us are referring to when we use that term.

I don't doubt that there is some sense in which conscious brains are functionally in more complex states than unconscious brains. And that it might be possible to characterize this difference in ways that are, say, clinically meaningful in identifying awareness in locked-in patients. I have no idea how effective any of the existing measures are at this, or how unique they are in being effective (if they are), or whether, if they do the job, they are about as simple as any criterion that could do the job can be. I don't even know if these questions have been asked. At any rate, these are practical issues.

But the idea that one proclaims a theory, writes down an expression for complexity and proclaims that is the alchemical formula for consciousness -- well, that's just silly. I think that completely misunderstands what a theory is.

I'll also add that I agree with several people above (@neurograce, @DrYohanJohn, probably others) that the "hard problem of consciousness" -- why do objective arrangements of matter create subjective experience -- is not a question science can answer. Science is a process of distilling out the objective, measurable, reproducible. It can tell us all about the structures of neural activity that enter consciousness and create its contents, the NCCs. Maybe when we understand this and get used to it the hard problem won't seem so interesting or bothersome. Maybe it will seem natural that *that* kind of neural activity enters conscious awareness. Maybe the mystery will seem to disappear. But all science can tell us about are the objective structures and their correlations with subjective experience. Not why cold dead matter organized intro energy-consuming, reproducing (living) entities can, in some cases, produce subjective awareness.

#neuroscience @cogneurophys

@kendmiller
@jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn @ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay

Question for the group: is there a sense in which the "hard problem of consciousness" is similar to the problem of "life"? This one has clearly receded into the background, no elan vital needed.

To me it seems that the hard problem is a holdover from dualism. Biology in general seems to me about the "general problem of organization" and we seem to be constantly getting stuck at find "the exact level" (eg section in evolution is only possible at the individual level).

The problem of consciousness is of course interesting, much like the problem of life.

#neuroscience

@PessoaBrain @kendmiller @jaanaru @jiahongbo @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @wandell @anilkseth @DrYohanJohn
@ShahabBakht @jerlich @LeslieKay

It seems to me that every biological theory of consciousness has a common element. A critical amount of cortical activity has to synchronize. That won't solve the "hard" problem but are we that far away from the "easy" problem? Do we need to solve the hard problem? Isn't worrying about subjective experience a little narcissistic?

@ekmiller @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht
with all due respect, synchronization is not a common element of theories of consciousness.

I did my PhD on these issues with Wolf Singer and Lucia Melloni. The evidence for synchrony is overrated.

It's ok if we disagree here, I simply wanted to add this note so that younger people would know that there is actually no such consensus.

For a ref, see the section "gamma synchrony" here https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.22

@jaanaru @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht

I didn't say "gamma synchrony" or even rhythmic synchrony per se.

But whether it is the High-Order Theory, the Global Workspace Theory, Recurrent/Predictive Models, or IIT, they all say the same thing: Consciousness depends on "metarepresentations" that stretch across cortex. You need to get enough of cortex "on the same page".

@ekmiller @PessoaBrain @kendmiller @NicoleCRust @Neurograce @anilkseth @ShahabBakht

Thanks! I guess it is always good to clarify the terms (surely you'd agree that synchronization in your initial post could have been seen as referring to rhythmic synchrony).

And while we're at it, there is also no need to assume that cortex must be the key to consciousness. :)

Thanks for the discussion!