Consciousness
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the consciousness page
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The no-mind thesis doesn’t mean that people are ‘merely bodies’. Instead, it means that, when faced with a whole person, we shouldn’t think that they can be divided into a ‘mind’ and a ‘body’, or that their properties can be neatly carved up between the ‘mental’ and the ‘non-mental’. Sometimes, when speaking of ‘the mind’, people really mean agency; other times, cognition; still others, consciousness; some uses of ‘mental’ really mean psychiatric; others psychological; others still immaterial; and yet others, something else.
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Core ideas
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Precursors to consciousness
We know of
- non-living things - atoms, rocks, etc.,
- living creatures - fungui, plants, etc.,
- creatures with a neurological system,
- animals with a brain,
- animals with a brain and self-awareness (mind),
- creatures with a brain and self-awareness and consciousness.
They all depict different states (not levels) of freedom.
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What is consciousness for?
Consciousness is not just one thing. Conscious selfhood is best understood as a complex construction generated by the brain. It is informative because every experience differs from every other experience you have or could have.
- The bodily self is the experience of being a body and having a particular body.
- The perspectival self is the experience of perceiving the world from a particular first-person point of view.
- The volitional self involves experiences of intention and agency: urges to do this or that and of being the causes of things that happen.
- At higher levels, we encounter narrative and social selves:
- The narrative self is where the ‘I’ comes in. It is the experience of being a continuous and distinctive person over time, built from a rich set of autobiographical memories.
- The social self is that aspect of self-experience that is refracted through the perceived minds of others,
- shaped by our unique social milieu.
- At higher levels, we encounter narrative and social selves:
How can we account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms? Biologists have gotten on with explaining the different properties of living systems in terms of underlying mechanisms: metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction, etc. An important lesson here is that life is not 'one thing'. Moreover, it cannot be cut up into isolated items.
Our bodily senses include:
- interoception involves a raft of inputs that convey information from inside the body, such as blood pressure, gastric tension, heartbeat and so on.
- and proprioception, which signals the body’s configuration in space,
The experience of embodied selfhood depends on predictions about body-related causes of sensory signals across interoceptive and proprioceptive channels across the classic senses. Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a distinctive kind.
Starting from the former, we experience agency over events when incoming sensory data match the predicted consequences of actions. A good starting point is to distinguish between:
- Conscious level,
- this has to do with being conscious at all – the difference between being in a dreamless sleep (or under general anaesthesia) and being vividly awake and aware.
- Conscious content,
- conscious contents are what populate your conscious experiences when you are conscious – the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that make up your inner universe.
- Conscious self,
- among these conscious contents is the specific experience of being you. This is conscious self and probably the aspect of consciousness we cling to most tightly.
| Content source |
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| Work and concepts of Anil Seth |
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What is the consciousness 'process'?
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Complex adaptive systems
All living systems are complex systems, from organisms to societies, ecosystems, ..., and brains. Most importantly, they are self-organising systems. That means their structure, shape, and organisation arise from the interaction of many components that change each other over time. Those changes evoke some fascinating principles, but for this subject, the most crucial feature of these systems is that they organise themselves. Their structure is self-perpetuating due to recurring interactions between their elements through small feedback loops.
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Process
Consciousness must be understood as a process, not as a thing. Simply put, the argument is that consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than a natural process like evolution or the weather.
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Fighting entropy
The universe becomes more random, scattered, and chaotic as time goes on. That's the second law of thermodynamics: everything tends to chaos, and entropy generally increases. But on the other hand, we exhibit repetitive, self-organising behaviour that runs counter to how the universe usually behaves.
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Model
If action depends on inferences, then systems must be able to infer the consequences of their actions. You can't choose what to do unless you can estimate the likely outcome. However, there is an important twist here. We cannot infer the consequences of our actions unless we possess a model of our future. We must know what to expect when it does this instead of that. For example, I need to know (or unconsciously model) how my sensations will change if I look left, right, or even close my eyes. However, the sensory evidence for the consequences of an action is not available until it is performed, thanks to the relentless forward movement of time.
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Future actions
Due to the arrow of time, we must necessarily have a 'temporal thickness' to understand the impact of our future actions. Therefore, we need to have internal models of ourselves and the world that allow us to predict things that haven't happened and may not happen. Such models can be thicker and thinner, deeper or shallower, depending on how far ahead they predict and how far back they 'post-dict', that is, whether they can record how things would have turned out if they had acted differently. Systems with deeper temporal structures will better infer the counterfactual consequences of their actions. Neuroscientist Anil Seth calls this counterfactual depth.
Almost all of our behaviour can be understood in terms of uncertainty-minimising drivers. Our system's actions in the world seem to have a purpose: to minimise as yet unreal but possible surprises.
Embodying a deep understanding of our past and having a long-run view of our future enables us to minimise that has n't-yet-happened surprise.
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Selection
Non-conscious processes realise selection in the here and now. The kind of selection we have associated with consciousness works in parallel but within the system. This system can simulate multiple futures under different circumstances and select the action with the least surprising outcome. The conscious self is simply a way of capturing this counterfactual future in a way that allows active inference.
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Deep dive
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- Consciousness is a process
- Consciousness is about body & brain and emotions & intelligence
- Consciousness, I’d contend, is nothing grander than inference about my future (The mathematics of mind-time - Karl Friston - Aeon - 2017)
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Comming soon
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Do you want to know more?
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Slow Human Mind
It may feel like you have a million thoughts at once, but it turns out that human beings think at a fixed, excruciatingly slow speed. Researchers pooled data from studies across different fields (like neuroscience and psychology) that all looked at a range of elements, from the processing speed of single neurons to the cognitive abilities of memory champions. They ran their own calculations and determined that human thought occurs at a rate of about 10 bits per second—each thought happening one-at-a-time.
Why this is interesting: In contrast to their tortoise-paced thinking, human sensory systems gather data at about one billion (!) bits per second. Why such a discrepancy between sensing and thinking? The authors say the answer might have something to do with the brain’s need to frequently switch tasks and integrate information across different neural circuits. All in all, they estimate that the total amount of information a person can learn across their lifetime could comfortably fit on a small thumb drive.
What the experts say: “Nature, it seems, has built a speed limit into our conscious thoughts, and no amount of neural engineering may be able to bypass it,” says Tony Zador, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “Why? We really don’t know, but it’s likely the result of our evolutionary history.”
| Content source |
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| Scientific American - 2024 |
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