Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#2This seems consistent with my experience that when I'm attending hard to a task I have no idea what it is like.
>For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth.
This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#3The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo-location.
On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a "conscious action" or an "unconscious motivation". This is a very Freudian concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind. The philosophical consciousness is much more holistic, but also very vague. You wouldn't think a tree has an Ego, but it might have some sort of existential awareness.
It's cool to see the philosophy of consciousness intersect with neuroscience, since outsiders like me tend to think of these fields as at-odds.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#4Killer observations. I've been wondering if conscienceness is circular activity in the brain, such that while we are conscience there is a constant circle of activity, and upon sleep this circle stops. I suppose this article is saying that this is metacognigtion, but still circle all the way down.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#5This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender.
This is especially troubling when you consider that meta-consciousness sells easily to the general public as "the hard problem" (our thorough use of it seemingly being a large part of what makes humans different, after all), while it's likely that it's more of an engineering problem after you've figured out base consciousness.
If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. Implementing recursive phenomenal access seems like an undergraduate research project after that. Yet it's most often the very thing we spend all our time focusing on. Frustrating. We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#6The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo-location. On the other hand, conciseness in our everyda…
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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#7I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms.
The article asks this question:
> Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?
Implicitly saying that "experience" and "consciousness" should be defined such that I experienced and was conscious of those sensations even though I was not aware of them. Thus, using the terminology of the article, I am currently conscious of a ton of things all at once:
The feeling of my feet on the floor, my butt in the seat, my tongue in my mouth, the sound of my typing, and of the rattling behind me, and of the rumbling of the train, the vibrations of the train, the propioceptive feeling of the positions of my limbs, the slight but distinctive smell of mass transit.
Is this right? Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#8This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…
No new words are needed. What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again, using and re-using words under different meanings without ever bothering to either listen or read their predecessors properly, which only leads to feelings of ineffectualness and a strange sensation of déjà vu.
When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers for the sake of attaching their names to a publication, then it will see some progress.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#9I've been involved in meta cognition research, but I am confused by the distinction being raised between consciousness and meta consciousness, as 'conciousness' seems to reduce to 'interact', as in particle A hits particle B, and so reduced seems to have no meaning.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#10This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…
> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem.
I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings being inaccessible to introspection.)
But our consciousness goes beyond simple self-awareness: having a theory of mind is a step beyond (and is realizing that others have a theory of mind a step beyond that?) Our own experience of our own consciousness is several steps removed from what a worm might experience.
> We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.
Yes; I think the words we use are definitely an issue, perhaps because we don't remember what it was like to be an aware, but not self-aware, infant. To some people, anything that responds to external stimuli is conscious, while to others on the other extreme, consciousness entails being able to verbalize it. This might be the only case where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is actually correct - that our ability to think about the issue is constrained by our language.
In short, I think the author of the article made heavy weather of the issue by conflating consciousness with simple awareness, and not recognizing that meta-consciousness, and perhaps even an awareness of meta-consciousness, is an essential part of what distinguishes what is commonly meant by consciousness from mere awareness.
In case I haven't made myself clear, I don't think the hard problem of consciousness has been solved by invoking meta-consciousness; on the contrary, I think that is where the difficulty is most apparent.