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

>I believe Koch is conflating two distinct concepts.

I believe Koch is conflating many distinct concepts - as most of the consciousness research field seems to.

How can you say anything useful until you define your terms?

It seems to me humans have many different layers of experience:

Visceral pain/pleasure Instinctive drives Emotional/limbic experiences Locational (physical mapping) Memory-based/learned Abstract/intellectual/symbolic

Consciousness is another kind of experience which adds a symbol that works a bit like JavaScript's 'this', and seems to create a level of experiential indirection - so instead of sensing something directly, you experience how it affects the 'this' symbol. It seems to do this by abstracting the experience and simultaneously comparing it with an associative database of previous experiences, using all of the circuits in the list. (And probably others too - I won't pretend this is a complete model.)

You need some basic ability to abstract to have a 'this.' The better you are at it, the more bandwidth passes through the experience/memory/abstraction/future prediction/new memories system.

Simpler animals have basic input circuitry, and they learn instinctively without abstraction.

But... I'd guess surprisingly many animals of all kinds have a 'this' network. The human advantages are a 'this' network with more bandwidth, a much improved ability to learn from experiential invariants, an ability to make useful predictions, and an ability to store and communicate 'this' experiences using external technologies.

If this sketch is accurate, consciousness doesn't have to be mysterious. But it also doesn't depend on a simple connection count.

The Internet won't be conscious because it has no 'this' network. It has no pain/pleasure circuits, no emotional circuits, and no instinctive drives. But most of all it has no ability to compare memories with current experiences and to abstract learning from that. There are systems - like Google search - which have incredibly basic precursors to abstraction/learning/prediction. But they still mostly run on a batch basis with input->processing->output, and no explicit self-concept state memory.

My guess is that if you built a system from these elements and included the current state of the art - or better - machine learning, machine vision, and natural language elements, with useful analogs of instinctive drives and the other animal fundamentals, you'd potentially have something that at least acted and sounded conscious, and would likely do some unexpected things. (Which is one of the practical ways we think we recognise consciousness. Conscious entities are hard to model. In fact we're probably easier to model than we think we are, but face to face, consciousness in other people usually implies surprises.)

Whether or not it would be truly self-aware or just pretending is a question that's impossible to answer without resorting to metaphysics.

>Now replace "apple" with "the fact that I am experiencing my own existence"

I find it interesting to replace "apple" with "UFO", and you get a scenario that is no longer theoretical.

> I'm experiencing existence

Right, but I don't think this is as unrecognized as you think. Entire systems of ethics are built on the assumption that since I'm experiencing existence, and you are roughly the same as me, you're probably experiencing existence too.

Some systems expand on this and stretch or restrict the definition of "same" from "skin color" to "has a central nervous system" and other notions.

The longer I'm around, the more I start to think that this experience can be really different. Quite a bit of research is going into some fragments of this topic, we call it "intelligence". And we come back surprised whenever we find out that something which we didn't think of as "the same as us", like an octopus, can have it's own "experience of existing".

More recently there's a growing body of work that's starting to show that things even less similar to us might have an experience in their own way. We're finding out plants, for example, have all kinds of interesting and subtle ways of responding to the universe. People are afraid to call this "intelligence", but there's definitely something there.

It may be more that "life", of any kind, can be considered under this notion of experience, and not just self-similar things.

A different spin, "you are the universe experiencing itself"

For me questions on the nature of consciousness have always been deeply connected to the question of identity. Specifically the following thought experiment: What if there was a machine that would read every atom of your body and recreate your body at a different location at a different time whilst destroying the original. Would the arising consciousness still be your own original consciousness or would it be a copy? What if we keep both, the original and the copy? Are there now two separate instances of your consciousness running?

I guess the only answer in line with Koch is yes. Consciousness emerges out of a complex system. And I might add that consciousness is not a continuously working "state of mind". It fades in and out during our daily lives. The consciousness we had yesterday is lost today and replaced by a new one, which runs on a different chemical setting in your brain (albeit shares most of the memories of the previous one).

I think that while I can "experience my own existence", this "existence" doesn't always refer to the same consciousness - one moment to the next the underlying system might have changed marginally or even substantially (in the case of being based on an entirely new set of atoms, which just happens to be in the same configuration as before).

A storm doesn't have feedback loops in brain-like interconnections. But in a quantic level there is thermodynamic activity re-adapting and re-shaping the system all the time. In any case, as Giulio Tononi would say, "it has zero integration." And it doesn't have consciousness, only energetic physico-chemical activity.

I agree with that view.

The important part is (a) that it does not have computation and (b) regardless of complexity, computation is not consciousness. Saying it and expecting it to "magically emerge from it" does not make that hypothesis any truer.

They are throwing darts in the dart and making it sound cool.

But, okay, I'll be nice and not troll the effort of making this subject cool and let's not put theory against theory because is not productive.

What about seeing something testable?

Take a Paramecium.

It does not have many neurons, so it doesn't have synapses but it still learns where the food is and reacts to anestesics as we do.

What about that?

That radical theory published there is not predicting the Paramecium, much less anything about the one in the Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Bring me news on how quantum-biology is behaving down there and we might actually get somewhere.