A Neuroscientist’s Theory of How Networks Become Conscious (2013)

A Neuroscientist’s Theory of How Networks Become Conscious (2013)
wired.com

His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma". It makes just as much sense.

Gravity, electrons, and energy are all concepts that are defined to exist as the manifestation of certain physical phenomena that can be modeled and predicted with mathematical equations. These words are just English simplifications of the equations.

But consciousness has no such analogue. It's just a term that people throw around when they talk about the brain. I believe that over time, it has started to acquire a more well-defined meaning -- something along the lines of "the emergent properties of the brain's activity resulting from lower-level processes". This is similar to how a human body is just the emergent result of many atomic interactions. This version of consciousness can be modeled, theorized about, and tested experimentally. There's nothing magical about. As the brain's neural circuitry becomes better understood, you could say consciousness is a simplified model that still has good predictive capability.

However, I would also like to focus on a much more interesting topic in the article:

> My consciousness is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I’m conscious.

I believe Koch is conflating two distinct concepts. If we take the definition of consciousness as the predictive modeling of the brain, then this is something totally different than what he's talking about here. Let me alter his quote:

> That I experience my existence is an undeniable fact. One can only infer facts about the universe, such as physics, indirectly, but the one thing I’m utterly certain of is that I am experiencing existence.

It's really astonishing to me that he words it this way, because independently I have thought almost exactly the same thing for a long time.

I've often struggled to put this notion into words, but let me try it in a new way with an analogy. Suppose you see an apple floating in front of you. You tell other people "Look at this apple!" But they just go "What apple?" So, you try to get crafty. You take a picture of the apple with a digital camera. But when you show people the photo on the computer, they still see no apple. So you zoom in on the pixels and start copying the RGB values for each one by hand onto paper. "Look, this value is 237!" you say. And you sit down with a friend, and start calling each and every pixel's values out as he puts them in manually into his image editing program. When he's does, you say "Ha! Look, there's my apple, right on your screen! And you put it in there yourself!" But he stares at you quizzically, and says, "I still see no apple; just an empty table." And no matter what kind of tricky experimental method you try to come up with to get everyone else to understand the concept of this apple that's always floating in front of you, every attempt to catch it produces a representation of the apple for you and nothing for everyone else.

It's frustrating because the people you tell about the apple say "Well, you have provided no testable predictions, and no data that can be independently verified by everyone else in society. Clearly your apple doesn't exist." But it does! You know it does! In fact, out of everything that constitutes reality, the floating apple is the one thing you're most sure of. Frustrated, you walk around thinking you're crazy until one day someone says, "Well, I don't see an apple floating in front of you, but do you see the orange floating in front of me?" Which, of course, you don't.

Now replace "apple" with "the fact that I am experiencing my own existence". It's an element of reality that is only apparent to you on a personal level, and since it isn't testable by other people, it is not a part of their reality, and thus does not exist as far as they are concerned. And thus it's not science. Yet even though it's not science, it is the one thing in life I am most certain of. My five senses could all be faked with advanced enough neural circuitry. I could be in an entirely simulated environment, with entirely simulated physics. So when I order things in probability of how likely they are to be an illusion, experiencing existing falls at the lowest probability. In fact, you could strip me of all my senses and put my brain in a vat, and as long as it's running, I'm still experiencing existence.

If the idea bothers you that things might exist that are incapable of being verified consensually by society, look at this image of all the particle interactions (so far discovered): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Ele...

If you'll notice, gluons "hang on" to the rest of the particles by merely one interaction. If this interaction was not present, as far as positivists are concerned, then gluons don't exist. But that seems entirely unreasonable to me. I could imagine plenty of particles that could "exist" that simply don't have an interaction with the ones in the standard model that constitute our reality.

Anyway, this is probably the most bizarre post I've ever written on HN, but hopefully what I'm trying to convey "clicks" for some people.

Intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge. Knowledge is acquired when it is represented in a system. Action is the application of knowledge. Thus, all systems in which actions occur are intelligent.

The potential for intelligent behavior is determined by the existence of a goal, the opportunities to acquire and apply knowledge that are relevant to the goal, the resources available to acquire and apply knowledge, and the capacity of the knowledge representation to express truths. With the exception of the goal, adjusting these constraints scales intelligence.

Intelligence requires a goal to determine action selection. No actions occur in systems without goals, and therefore such systems are not intelligent. The goal of a system does not influence the scale of intelligence of the system (which can be thought of as the magnitude of a vector), but only its purpose (which can be thought of as the direction of the same vector).

Opportunities to acquire knowledge range from stones falling on levers (the force exerted on the lever – from the perspective of the lever) to humans touching hot elements (nerve impulses from the sensory system – from the perspective of the human mind). No observation is fundamentally superior. Representations of observations (as knowledge) determine potential applications.

Opportunities to apply knowledge exist when it is possible for a system to perform an action. At the beginning of a game of chess, each player has many opportunities to apply knowledge. After the losing player has made his/her final move, the player has no further opportunities to apply his/her knowledge. Opportunities to acquire or apply knowledge which are not relevant to the goal do not influence the potential for intelligent behavior because they will not influence action and will not be applied, respectively.

Resources to acquire and apply knowledge make action possible. The resources available to apply the laws of nature are typically presumed infinite (mathematical models preserve truth and the laws of nature conserve energy, but just as mathematical models require resources for the completion of proofs, it can be assumed that the laws of nature may require resources). This differs from the limited resources available to computers and human minds.

Knowledge representations range from the experience of observations (the force exerted on the lever and the nerve impulse) to stored, abstract concepts (mathematical models written on paper and memories in a mind). All knowledge can be expressed as truths. Knowledge representations express truths with respect to the perspectives defined by their grammars. Knowledge representations with wider perspectives (fewer assumptions) are subject to fewer biases, and are therefore more expressive.

The degree to which an intelligent system observes itself determines its level of consciousness. Most humans are not capable of independently observing which of their neurons are firing at a given moment, or the location of the electrons traveling through their electronic devices. The availability of such observations would result in a higher state of consciousness. Perfect observation would allow a system to be completely aware (although attempting to observe all of a system at the same time, including its state of observing itself, is an infinite set), resulting in the highest possible state of consciousness. Intelligent systems that are conscious of their action selection are able to optimize this process, subject to the capacity of their knowledge representation to express truths.