Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

mixed signals

 The other day I walked into the kitchen to see the following mundane happenings:

1) Daughter sitting at the kitchen counter eating a snack out of a bowl.

2) Wife sitting on a kids chair with son in lap, clipping his toenails.

These were about 8 feet apart. I casually looked at one, then the other, then back again, and got a flash of revulsion at having just seen my daughter casually clipping and eating toenails!

This incorrect impression instantly resolved. The higher level aspects of these two distinct happenings were briefly entangled. There are many ways to explain this, two come to my mind:

1) On foveating an event, the higher-level contents (recognizing-what-is-happening) are present in my experience, but on looking away, they are reduced and only a vague 'pointer' is retained (so that I can look back at the interesting event to re-experience the full thing). In this case, the reduction was delayed or incomplete, so that when I looked at one event, the previously foveated one was still in-mind, and so they briefly overlapped. Since the higher-level contents are strongly enforced by the lower-level contents, which are completely forced by the retinal input, the intermingling was brief and the 'correct' contents survived.

2) Different events can simultaneously be in experience, but they are normally cordoned off from one another. In this case, the cordon was briefly broken and the two sets of high-level contents were mixed - maybe from one leaking into the other.

I think that 1) is the more likely alternative. I doubt that multiple sets of high-level contents can be simultaneously experienced, since they inevitably will sometimes involve common contents (in this case, both would have involved 'person/child/fingers/kitchen/etcetc'), and so would naturally be inextricable. Instead, my impression that I can simultaneously entertain different sets of high-level contents must instead be due to keeping one set in detail, the object of attention, while the other is reduced to something more like a pointer which can be quickly grabbed by attention to reconstitute the whole set.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Book Review: Fall (or, Dodge in Hell) by Neal Stephenson

 Not really a book review. More like, some thoughts on this book. It was long and not so straightforward as most books I read, so there was something to think about rather than just be awed (like with the Three Body books I finished last year - awesome books, huge ideas, but it was all there on the page - nothing to figure out, or reflect on, as far as I could tell).

I read this because of a review I read when it came out in 2019. There's an early section that I think got most of the attention of reviewers, where the characters go on a road trip through a post-truth America, which sounded most interesting to me. In the world of the book (or at least of this section - the story seems to span a century, and this is the only discussion of the world outside the immediate experiences of the main characters) the American hinterlands have devolved into a confused tribal culture where all belief systems are focused on the noise-filled descendant of the social-media internet we have today, and every belief is a false conspiracy theory of one sort or another. The city-classes rely on special tools, namely human editors, to keep their information accurate. That's a neat idea, and it barely has anything to do with the rest of the book!

I wasn't disappointed, though. Because while the whole back half of the book seems unrelated to this road trip, I realized after finishing the story that there was a serious connection to make. In the world of the road trip, it's pretty clear that the populace's disconnection from reality is a Bad Thing: the lives of people are brutal and confused and social progress is made impossible. It's suggested that this is because they are all exposed constantly to these noise-filled media channels where all content is false, generated by algorithms with varying hidden motives. The obvious implication is the what keeps the lives of the city people better is their connection to reality and true information - keeps them healthy, safe, and allows for progress.

The back half of the book isn't about the real world at all, though. It's about a digital afterlife where human consciousnesses* are uploaded after people die. This world begins when the first uploaded person (Dodge) finds himself exposed directly to world of chaos, that he learns to shape into meaningful things, thereby becoming the creator god of a new plane of existence. It's never said outright, but the chaos is various cloud-based (i.e. internet-based) computational activity, which means nothing at all to a human mind that is connected to it without an interface; by molding it into meaningful stuff (from Dodge's perspective), this computational activity is being replaced with new computational activity (from the outside-world perspective).

At first I thought that the book would get into an actual connection between this cloud-world of noise and the garbage-information world of the hinterland. But that connection never happens, and after a while I stopped expecting it and forgot about it. But after finishing the story I realized a different connection: the people of the digital afterlife are themselves all exposed to a false world - it's a computer game, basically - but it's ok, a Good Thing, and the ultimate meaning of the story is found there. Is it an inversion of the situation revealed in the road trip?

Sort of, I think. But also it's a comment on curation: the world Dodge creates is real in that everyone that inhabits it experiences it the same way. There are actual truths there, though they are ultimately shared psychological truths - at one point Dodge discovers that he can't change the world if other people are watching. 

This sets up a very different situation, but with obvious parallels to and deviations from the road trip world. In the real world, truth is essentially a physical thing: things exist physically, or events happen physically, and that's what makes them real, and what makes ideas about them true. People in the hinterland have beliefs that are largely false, because they are about things and events that don't exist or didn't happen. 

In the afterlife, there is no physical existence in the normal sense - physically, all the objects and places that people experience are actually processes running on vast banks of quantum computers. So strictly speaking, the things people believe in are all false, or at least not true. Not only that, but people in the afterlife have no knowledge of the 'real' world on the outside. Truth in the normal sense is impossible. Yet, because everyone agrees on this reality, we can think of beliefs in this world as having a kind of second-order truth value. Beliefs are at least meaningful and grounded, even if they are grounded in something (seems-to-be rocks and trees) that is not what it actually is (seems-to-be computers in buildings).

So then I wonder - is this a comment on the earlier part of the story? Because we can see the degenerated people of the American hinterland in the same way: their beliefs might be shared delusions or hallucinations, or vast conspiracy theories, but if they are meaningful and grounded, isn't that as good as what people have in the digital afterlife? Or, are the afterlife people in just as dire and meaningless a situation as the hinterlanders?

The book doesn't try to make this equation, I'm the one making it. The digital world is portrayed as wonderful for some, and nightmarish for many others, while the hinterland is depicted (indirectly) as more uniformly nightmarish. But again, maybe there are those in the hinterland that are living well, living their best lives despite their detachment from the larger realities. Is Dodge equivalent to a benevolent pirate king living out in the Nebraska wasteland?

At any rate, I was surprised at these connections, how they started to creep up on me.

*Re consciousness. I think that Stephenson is sufficiently vague about exactly how consciousnesses are simulated that I could suspend disbelief, or fill in the blanks myself. It sounds like the idea is that, with the connectome of a human brain, you just simulate the network on a massive parallel computer, giving each neuron its own computer processor. Maybe in some version of that, IIT consciousness might be possible (though I think probably not - but maybe)?

A bigger problem with the idea as he describes it is that a connectome could not be enough to simulate a brain, even if you had the connectome right down to every synapse, and even if (as we think is true) neurons connected with synapses are actually the right substrate of consciousness. That's because you don't know the rule for each neuron. A neuron has all these inputs, thousands of synapses on its dendrites, but what does it do when the neurons on the other side of those synapses are in whatever state? The connections don't tell you anything about that - you have to know something about how each neuron works, and what makes it harder is that there are so many kinds of neurons, so many kinds of synapses, and they might all follow different rules.

But those are details that could be filled in with enough imagination.

It was a great book, enjoyed it. 9/10. (minus 1 for being too long or too short - there's a bit more that could have been explained just about how the world worked, and the connections between the inside and outside of the afterlife, giving us a nice 1200 page book, or a part 1 and part 2 - or it could have been pared down to lessen expectations for those kinds of details. and the ending, considering how much we built up to it, was awfully abrubt, but good.)

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

A point on interpreting inattentional blindness studies

On Inattentional Agnosia

In a recently published study, Cohen et al showed that, under very naturalistic conditions (viewing 3D natural scene videos in VR), observers often fail to notice that the entire periphery of the visual stimulus has been rendered colorless, i.e. completely desaturated. Cohen et al conclude that the visual periphery is far less colorful than one might have thought. They state this conclusion in several ways:

“these results demonstrate a surprising lack of awareness of peripheral color in everyday life”
-here qualifying the phenomenon as ‘lack of awareness of peripheral color’. Later, they say it less ambiguously: “If color perception in the real world is indeed as sparse as our findings suggest, the final question to consider is how this can be. Why does it intuitively feel like we see so much color when our data suggest we see so little?”.

So, Cohen et al believe that their data suggest we see very little color. This particular claim is logically absurd, however. I explain why in the following:

Cohen et al clearly believe that the phenomenon they present is a case of inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness phenomena are frequently encountered in visual experience, and are not difficult to bring about in experimental scenarios. Typically, an observer is shown some stimuli connected to an explicit or implicit task; during the course of the task, some unexpected stimulus is inserted, and the observer may fail to notice. These failures to notice are often very retrospectively surprising, since once the observer knows what to look for (once they’ve been debriefed) it is easy to see the missed stimulus. Experimenters often conclude from these results – both the failures to notice and the retrospective surprise - that, in one way or another, the observers (and the rest of us) must see far less than they think they do. But this is not the kind of conclusion that Cohen et al are drawing.

The most famous example of an inattentional blindness phenomenon has got to be Simons and Chabris’ gorilla. In their experiment, observers watched a video of several people playing a ball-passing game. The players move around constantly, throwing the ball back and forth; the observer’s task is to count the number of times that certain players catch the ball. With no warning, halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit wanders into the middle of the ballgame, stops and waves at the camera, and then wanders back out of the frame – the ball game continues. Many observers do not notice the gorilla at all!

Simons and Chabris used this and similar results to advance a version of the “we see less than we think” argument. But what if we transplant Cohen et al’s conclusion to the gorilla experiment?

Here is a sentence in general terms that describes both studies:
“Observers viewed a complex stimulus that engaged their visual attention. After a while, a change was introduced to the stimulus that was retrospectively obvious. Many observers did not notice the change.”

Now, here is the reasonable, broad conclusion (a la Simons & Chabris):
“We must not notice as many things as we would expect based on what seems to be obviously noticeable.”

And here is the unreasonable, specific conclusion (a la Cohen et al):
“We must always be having the kinds of experiences evoked by the changed stimulus.”

In the Cohen et al study, they replaced a colorful scene with a colorless scene; observers didn’t notice; so, according to their reasoning, we must actually be having colorless experiences all the time (or more precisely, experiences of “so little” color). Otherwise, the reasoning seems to go, we would notice the change from colorful to colorless. We don’t notice it because it was colorless all along (they do include a caveat that maybe it’s the other way around, that even the grayscale scene evokes a colorful ‘filled-in’ experience, but that doesn’t seem to be their favored interpretation).

For the gorilla study, a gorilla was introduced incongruously into a ball game; observers didn’t notice; so, we must actually be having experiences of incongruous gorillas all the time (or, maybe more precisely, experiences of gorillas in ball games?). Otherwise, we would notice the change from a no-gorilla to an incongruous-gorilla scene. I don’t want to go on with this because it’s obviously absurd. But isn’t it the same logic as the color argument?

The absurdity comes in part from arguing from a complete lack of evidence: they are taking absence of evidence (failure to notice the change) to be evidence of absence (of color experiences). The experiments they are doing have no bearing, it seems to me, on whether or not their observers are actually experiencing color in their peripheral vision.

But more than this, the absurd conclusion comes from a lack of engagement with the important concepts at play. Color, most importantly. What does it mean to see color? That's for another time, I guess.

Before I finish here, an attempt at charity:

Perhaps the logic Cohen et al would derive from Simons & Chabris is somewhere in between the broad & reasonable, and the narrow and unreasonable:

"If we do not notice something, we are not experiencing it."

This is a strong claim, which I know that Cohen et al and many others would more-or-less endorse. But it does demand some engagement with some basic questions: if one's experience is colorless, what is it like? Is it like experience of a monochrome scene? Why are shades of gray excluded from 'color' status? What is special about 'chromatic hues'? Is there really less to seeing a monochrome scene than there is to seeing a color scene? Think about it: if you are seeing a spot as blue, that precludes your seeing it as any shade of gray, just as much as it precludes it from being yellow or red or whatever. Each part of the visual field always - it seems, at least - has some color in the broad sense.

In fact, Cohen et al did find that subjects always noticed if all color, in the broad sense, was removed from the periphery, i.e. if it were replaced with a flat gray field. Which would seem to defeat their basic conclusion that we are not seeing color, or much color. So, again, what is supposed to be so special about chromatic hues? Interesting questions, definitely.

Thursday, March 05, 2020

A dialogue! (old but good)

I ask you to point your eyes up towards the clear sky and to tell me what you see. “An expanse of blue,” you say. I nod and say, “Ah, so simple. Blue is just one thing – your visual experience is so simple. Is that surprising?” 

This doesn’t sound right to you. You shake your head. “No, it’s not simple. There’s blue everywhere. Every location is blue; every part of the space is blue. It’s clearly not simple – it’s a vast structure of blue spots. I’m not even sure how to describe it to you.”

“Well,” I say, “you’re most likely confabulating this description. Through your life experience with using vision, you know that the sky is extended spatially, and that if you move your eyes around you’ll still see blue, and you know from moment-to-moment that the last thing you saw was what you’re seeing right now – simple blue – so you are illuded into claiming you see an expanse of blue. But you actually see no such thing.”

“How can you claim this?” you ask. “Why should you doubt what I tell you?”

I shake my head sadly. “Subjective reports are known for their fallibility. People often claim to have seen things that they could not have seen; they claim their experiences have qualities that they cannot have. But I’ll suspend my disbelief for a bit. Can you convince me?”

You seem a little annoyed, but you nod. “Perhaps.”

“Okay. How many parts are there to this blue expanse?” I ask. You don’t know. We go through some basic tests and it seems that you can’t really tell me about more than a handful of spots at once – yet you persist in claiming that the actual number of blue ‘spots’ is vast.

“Are they all there at once?” You seem to think that they are. “Could it be that the parts are there only when you look for them?”

“No,” you say, “it feels like a big, continuous expanse of blue. It’s not a little searchlight.”

I proceed. “But I’m asking you to convince me of that, not just to tell me again and again. As far as I can tell, you can only report the color of a few spots at a time – a big ‘sky-sized’ spot, or a few little ‘point-sized’ spots. But your momentary capacity seems to be extremely small – where is this huge expanse? And how does it make any sense that you should experience such enormous complexity, but be able to interact with only a vanishingly small portion of it?”

You seem unsettled: “Why,” you ask, “would I claim to see an expanse of spots when I only see a few at a time? What do I gain by confabulation?”

“But it’s a meaningful confabulation – you are unaware of the limits or boundaries between your momentary visual experience, your memories of recent experiences, and your expectations of what future experiences will be like. The reports you generate are more a confusion of these different processes, rather than a confabulation.” I concede a word, but little else.

“Well then,” you say slowly, “what does this confusion feel like? Might it feel like an expanse of blue? Or do you assume that only the perceptual process constitutes experience?”

I miss your point. “But we’re exactly talking about perceptual experience – of seeing blue – don’t try to shift the goal posts.”

“No, we aren’t talking strictly about perceptual experience, though I do think my experience is fairly categorized as perceptual rather than memorial or expectative. You’re the one who introduced other ‘processes’ into the conversation.”

“Well, this can’t work,” I say. “I can concede the process thing, but this doesn’t address the reportability issue at all, and it’s highly implausible, even worse than if you put everything in ‘perception’. Are you claiming that you experience all your memories or all your expectations, at once?”

“No no,” you dismiss the idea with a wave of your hand. “I was just asking – what do you think such confusion should feel like?”

“Like what you’re feeling now,” I say.

You roll your eyes. “Come on. Clearly the confusion you’re suggesting should feel very different from what I am feeling – or no, from what I claim to be feeling. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this debate.”

“Well, I can’t say exactly. You are experiencing what you have access to, and you can report what you have access to; so your experience must be of a narrow set of blue spots. And you claim otherwise because whenever you check other spots, you immediately begin to experience them – so you mistakenly believe that they were there all along. Your experience isn’t what you think it is – and it isn’t what you claim.”

You seem perplexed. “Does that mean that unless I am queried about my experience, I am not under this illusion? I only become mistaken when asked to describe what I’m experiencing?”

“Maybe?”

You decide to change tack. “Okay. Can you tell me what substantive difference there is between this illusory or mistaken experience and an actual experience of a blue expanse?”

“Well, it would be a huge difference – the illusory experience is actually very limited and consists of very few parts, including the few blue spots and a particular set of expectations and memories that lead you to claim that you see an expanse of blue. The actual experience of a blue expanse would be just that – many many more spots, and no necessary memory or expectation aspects, though you’d probably also have those in addition.”

“I can’t help but think,” you say carefully, “that you’re doing something slippery here. You want to know why I claim to see a blue expanse, and your explanation has to do with these non-perceptual processes and how they seamlessly support my very limited perceptual process. And you reject my explanation for my claim – that I really am experiencing a blue expanse – because I can’t report the whole expanse to you. But can I report all my memories and expectations to you? Do you know how to collect such data?”

“I think that the fact you’re able to so quickly report on what you see at randomly cued locations suggests that those processes must be at work.”

“Surely they are, and I can tell you that I do indeed have experiences of memory and expectation. But I’m wondering why you think you must reject my explanation but are satisfied with your own.”

“Certainly I’m not satisfied – there is much to learn. We really understand perception etc rather poorly at this stage.”

You shake your head.

Thursday, December 05, 2019

EHS

Falling asleep two nights ago, I realized I was hearing a terrible noise, a roaring, screaming cacophony; but then, when I realized it, I also realized I wasn't hearing anything at all. For a while, maybe tens of seconds or a few minutes, I had been lying there listening to this noise, with a vaguely uncomfortable feeling, mind drifting - falling asleep, in other words. On attending to it, I seem to have broken myself out of a hypnogogic auditory hallucination - the experience faded after a few seconds of my concentrating on the fact that, actually, I wasn't hearing anything at all, and as far as I know it didn't come back, and I fell asleep.

The next day I told Jonathan about it, and he reminded me of "Exploding head syndrome", which is usually described as a sharper, more acute noise ("snapping of the brain" was a term coined by a doctor in 1920), but I think what I experienced fits. Maybe it's happened before - probably, I think - and either I proceeded to sleep without the lucid break, or I've forgotten the details. It doesn't happen often, at least.

The experience was basically like auditory imagery, similar quality as hearing music or voices in your head; but whereas those kinds of experiences generally seem (to me) to be endogenous and even self-willed (even when it's a tune you can't get out of your head), this sound felt out of my control. It was frightening, but as I attended to it it was clearly a completely internal experience - less real than tinnitus, but in retrospect I think more than just a typical auditory image. I say this because now, when I try to imagine the sound, I can get a rough idea of it but I can't really experience it as really as I was during the episode; and when I imagine a piece of music, or a voice, these also seem less substantial.

At any rate, once I attended to the experience, and reassured myself that in fact I was hearing nothing and that it was a hallucination, the cacophony dissolved into the regular silence of auditory imagining. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the long holiday weekend? Exhaustion?

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Parahypnic Hallucinosis?

Remember this episode:
http://xuexixs.blogspot.com/2018/08/blinking-plants.html

That was my bout with what I termed 'gardener's hallucinosis', where I spent all day pulling clear weed and etc from the gardens, and wound up with vivid blinking hallucinations. I likened it to the 'eyes open' geometric hallucinations I sometimes had back in my migraine days.

Well I've noticed a few times lately something similar happening under a specific circumstance. The circumstance is: I fall asleep in my daughter's room as I read her to sleep. I wake up a couple of hours later, stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I go get in my bed.

It doesn't happen every time, but sometimes - and last night very vividly - on waking in this way I have vivid and complex geometric hallucinations. Fine-grained, colorless - much of the content is just of very, very fine beads or dots, flickering and moving - but mixed into it are larger-scale features. Last night, the features were like a high-pass Kandinsky painting: discs and long, smoothly-curving lines, all moving and twisting around randomly, but no particular surface colors except for grayness, or darkness.

I could see it all fairly clearly with eyes opened, until I turned on the bathroom light and then the experience faded.

Maybe not coincidentally, I have been having minor headaches lately, and I think there was one yesterday. My brain must be in a state?

Monday, August 13, 2018

Gardener's Hallucinosis?

Interesting experience yesterday, Sunday.

Spent ~5hrs outside in the gardens, pulling weeds. Had done the same for a few hours on Saturday. When I came inside for good, about 5 or 6, I started to hallucinate during blinks - when I blinked my eyes, especially when not prepared for it, I would see images of the plants I had been pulling all day. Sometimes very clear, seeing leaves with their serrations and textures, and tendrils curling around - the images were coherent and (mutedly) colorful, seemingly randomly selected but each was a recognizable one of the real plants I had seen, mostly members of the 2 or 3 most common weeds of the day.

Sometimes the images were strong enough to be distracting, making it hard to see - or to recognize - what was actually before my eyes. But I think they were only actually visible during the blinks. I managed over time to notice some properties of the images - I could hold my eyes closed after an effective blink. It was still unclear to what extent I was *really* seeing the fine details, or whether the actual images were coarser and just 'suggesting', as in normal visual imagery, the fine details. Holding my eyes shut, it seemed that the form of the afterimages or noise, in the eyes-shut darkness, guided the structure of the hallucination: spots of afterimage seemed to appear as leaves, streaks as stems or tendrils. But it was not so clear as to be certain of this.

The experience lasted until I went to bed, 6 or 7 hours later, but it had attenuated by then. I slept and remembered several dreams that had nothing at all to do with plants (one I remember, now, was that my lab seemed to be based in the house I grew up in, and some newcomers were using space in the den - dream-Giulio warned me not to give them to much space, or they'll think they can take more). When I woke up this morning, the phenomenon returned for another hour or so, but is gone now.

The phenomenon resembled, to me, the kinds of hypnogogic hallucinations some people have after long, repeated activity ('the Tetris effect'), but I can't find reports of this in normal waking experience (albeit during blinks). I described it to Giulio and others, the physiological explanations are kind of clear, but as to why it happened to me and why it isn't much more common, that's an open, strange question.

Another thing it reminded me of, was back in the migraine days, seeing geometric web patterns after waking, sometimes during blinks. Similar kind of dynamic, but I don't think those experiences ever lasted more than minutes, definitely not many hours.

Tuesday, February 06, 2018

IIT and Star Trek

[I originally posted this to a Star Trek forum because I am a Star Trek nerd but here it is for better posterity:]

"Complex systems can sometimes behave in ways that are entirely unpredictable. The Human brain for example, might be described in terms of cellular functions and neurochemical interactions, but that description does not explain human consciousness, a capacity that far exceeds simple neural functions. Consciousness is an emergent property.” - Lt.Cmdr. Data

A post the other day about strong AI in ST provoked me to think about one of my pet theories, there in the title: Data is conscious, the Doctor is not, and other cases can be inferred from there. Sorry that this is super long, but if you guys don't read it I don't know who will, and my procrastination needs an outlet.

First, some definitions. Consciousness is a famously misunderstood term, defined differently from many different perspectives; my perspective is that of a psychologist/neuroscientist (because that is what I am), and I would define consciousness to mean “subjective phenomenal experience”. That is, if X is conscious, then there is “something it is like to be X”.

There are several other properties that often get mixed up with consciousness as I have defined it. Three, in particular, are important for the current topic: cognition, intelligence, and autonomy. This is a bit involved, but it’s necessary to set the scene (just wait, we’ll get to Data and the Doctor eventually):

Cognition is a functional concept, i.e. it is a particular suite of things that an information processing system does, specifically it is the type of generalized information processing that an intelligent autonomous organism does. Thinking, perceiving, planning, etc, all fall under the broad rubric of “cognition”. Humans are considered to have complex cognition, and they are conscious, and those two things tend to be strongly associated (your cognition ‘goes away’ when you lose consciousness, and so long as you are conscious, you seem to usually be ‘cognizing’ about things). But it is well known that there is unconscious cognition (for example, you are completely unaware of how you plan your movements through a room, or how your visual system binds an object and presents it as against a background, how you understand language, or how you retrieve memories, etc) - and some theorists even argue that cognition is entirely unconscious, and we experience only the superficial perceptual qualities that are evoked by cognitive mechanisms (I am not sure about that). We might just summarize cognition as “animal-style information processing”, which is categorically different from “what it’s like to be an animal”.

Intelligence is another property that might get mixed up with consciousness; it is generally considered, rather crudely, as “how well” some information processing system handles a natural task. While cognition is a qualitative property, intelligence is more quantitative. If a system handles a ‘cognitive' task better, it is more intelligent, regardless of how it achieved the result. Conceiving of intelligence in this way, we understand why intelligence tests usually measure multiple factors: an agent might be intelligent (or unintelligent) in many different ways, depending on just what kinds of demands are being assessed. “Strong AI” is the term usually used to refer to a system that has a general kind of intelligence that is of a level comparable to human intelligence - it can do what a human mind can do, about as well (or better). No such thing exists in our time, but there is little doubt that such systems will eventually be constructed. Just like with cognition, there is an obvious association between consciousness and intelligence - your intelligence ‘goes away’ when you lose consciousness, etc. But it seems problematic to suppose that someone who is more intelligent is more conscious (does their experience consist of “more qualia”? What exactly does it have more of, then?), and more likely that they are simply better-able to do certain types of tasks. And it is clear, to me at least, that conscious experience is possible in the absence of intelligent behavior: I might just lie down and stare at the sky, meditating with a clear mind - I’m not “doing” anything at all, making my intelligence irrelevant, but I’m still conscious.

Autonomy is the third property that might get mixed up with consciousness. We see a creature moving around in the environment, navigating obstacles, making choices, and we are inclined to see it as having a sort of inner life - until we learn that, no, it was remote-controlled all along, and then that apparent inner life vanishes. If a system makes its own decisions, if it is autonomous, then it has, for human observers at least, an intrinsic animacy (this tendency is the ultimate basis of many human religious practices), and many would identify this with consciousness. But this is clearly just an observer bias: we humans are autonomous, and we assume that we are all conscious (I am; you are like me in basic ways, so I assume you are too), and so we conflate autonomy with consciousness. But, again, we can conceive of counter-examples - a patient with locked-in syndrome has no autonomy, but they retain their consciousness; and an airplane on autopilot has real (if limited) autonomy, but maybe it’s really just a complex Kalman filter in action, and why should a Kalman filter be conscious (i.e. “autonomy as consciousness” just results in an endless regression of burden-shifting - it doesn’t explain anything)?

To reiterate, consciousness is “something it’s like to be” something - there’s something-it’s-like-to-be me, for example, and likewise for you. We can turn this property around and query objects in nature, and then it gets hard, and we come to our current problem (i.e. Data and the Doctor). Is there something-it’s-like-to-be a rock? Certainly not. A cabbage? Probably not. Your digestive system? Maybe, but probably not. A cat? Almost certainly. Another human? Definitely. An autonomous, intelligent, android with human-style cognition? Hmmm… What if it’s a hologram? Hmmm….

That list I just gave (rock; cabbage; etc) was an intuition pump: most of us will agree that a rock, or a cabbage, has no such thing as phenomenal consciousness; most of us will agree that animals and other humanoids do have such a thing. What makes an animal different from a rock? The answer is obvious: animals have brains. Natural science makes clear that human consciousness (as well as intelligence, etc) relies on the brain. Does this mean that there’s something special about neurons, or synapses, or neurotransmitters? Probably not, or, at least there’s no reason to suppose that those are the magic factors (The 24th century would agree with this; see Data’s quote at the top of this essay). Instead, neuroscientists believe that consciousness is a consequence of “the way the brain is put together”, i.e. the way its components are interconnected. This interconnection allows for dynamically flexible information processing, which gives the overt properties we have listed, but it also somehow permits existence of a subjective point of view - the conscious experience. Rocks and cabbages have no such system of dynamical interconnections, so they’re clearly out. Brains seem to be special in this regard: they are big masses of complex dynamical interconnection, and so they are conscious.

What I’m describing here is, roughly, something called the “dynamic core hypothesis”, which leads into my favored theory of consciousness: “integrated information theory”. You can read about these here:http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness The upshot of these theories is that consciousness arises in a system that is densely interconnected with itself. It is important to note here that computer systems do not have this property - a computer ultimately is largely a feed-forward system, with its feedback channels limited to long courses through its architecture, so that any particular component is strictly feed-foward. A brain, by contrast, is “feedback everywhere” - if a neuron gets inputs from some other neurons, then it is almost certainly sending inputs back their way, and this recurrent architecture seems implemented at just about every scale. It’s not until you get to sensorimotor channels (like the optic nerves, or the spinal cord) that you find mostly-feed-forward structures in the brain, which explains why consciousness doesn’t depend on the peripheral nervous system (it’s ‘inputs and outputs’). Anyways, this kind of densely interconnected structure is hypothesized to be the basis of conscious experience; the fact that the structure also ‘processes information’ means that such systems will also be intelligent, etc, but these capacities are orthogonal to the actual structure of the system’s implementation.

So, Data. Maybe Data isn’t conscious, but just gives a great impression of a conscious being: he’s autonomous, he’s intelligent, he has a sophisticated cognitive apparatus. Maybe there’s nothing “inside” - ultimately, he’s just a bunch of software running on a robotic computer platform. People treat him like he’s conscious (Maddox excepted) just because of his convincing appearance and behavior. But I don’t think it’s an illusion - I think Data is indeed conscious. 

Data’s “positronic brain” is, in a sense, a computer; it’s artificial and made from artificial materials, it’s rated in operations per second, it easily interfaces with other more familiar kinds of computers. But these are really superficial properties, and Data’s brain is different from a computer in the ways that really matter. It is specifically designed to mimic the structure of a human brain; there are numerous references throughout TNG that suggest that Data’s brain consisted critically of a massive network of interconnected fibers or filaments, intentionally comparable to the interconnected neurons of a biological brain (data often refers to these structures as his “neural nets”). This is in contrast to the ‘isolinear chip-bound’ architecture of the Enterprise computer. Chips are complicated internally - presumably each one acts as a special module that is expert in some type of information processing task - but they must have a narrow array of input and output contacts, severely limiting the extent to which a chip can function as a unit in a recurrently connected network (a neuron in a brain is the opposite: internally it is simple, taking on just a few states like “firing” or “not firing”, but it makes tens of thousands of connections on both input and output sides, with other neurons). The computer on 1701-D seems, for all intents and purposes, like a huge motherboard with a ton of stuff plugged into it (we can get to the Intrepid class and its ‘bio-neural chips’ in just a bit).

Data, then, is conscious in virtue of his densely recurrently interconnected brain, which was exactly the intention of Dr Soong in constructing him – Soong didn’t want to create a simulation, he wanted to create a new being. I contrast Data at first with the Enterprise computer, which is clearly highly intelligent and capable of some degree of autonomy (as much as the captain will give it, if you believe Picard in 'Remember Me’). I won’t surmise anything about “ship cognition”, however. Now, if the ship’s computer walked around the ship in a humanoid body (a la EDI of the Mass Effect series), we might be more inclined to see a ghost in the machine, but because of the ship’s relatively compartmentalized ‘chip focused’ structure and it’s lack of a friendly face, I think it’s very easy to suppose that the computer is not conscious. But holographic programs running on that very same computer start to pull at our heartstrings - Moriarty, Minuet, but especially… the Doctor.

The Doctor is my favorite Voyager character (and Data is my favorite of TNG), because his nature is just so curious. Obviously the hologram “itself” is not conscious - it’s just a pattern of projected photons. The Doctor’s mind, such as it is, is in the ship’s medbay computer (or at times, we must assume, his mobile emitter) - he’s something of an instantiation of the famous ‘brain in a vat’ thought experiment, body in one place, mind in another. The Doctor himself admits that he is designed to simulate human behavior. The Voyager crew at first treats him impersonally, like a piece of technology - as though they do not believe he is “really there”, i.e. not conscious - but over time they warm to his character and he becomes something of an equal. I think, however, that the crew was ultimately mistaken as to the Doctor’s nature - he was autonomous, intelligent, and a fine simulation of human cognition and personality, but he was most likely not a conscious being (though he may have claimed that he was).

Over and over, we hear the Doctor refer to himself as a program, and he references movement of his program from one place to another; his program is labile and easily changed. This suggests that his mind, at any given moment, is not physically instantiated in a substrate. What I mean by this is that while a human mind (or Soong-type android mind) is immediately instantiated in a pattern of activity across trillions of synapses between physically-realized interconnected elements, the Doctor’s mind is not. His mind is a program stored in an array of memory buffers, cycling through a system of central processors – at any given moment, the Doctor’s mind just just those few bits that are flowing through a data bus between processor and memory (or input/output channel). The “rest of him”, so to speak, is inert, sitting in memory, waiting to flow through the processor. In other words, he is a simulation. Now, to be sure, in a lot of science fiction brains are treated as computers, as though they are programmable, downloadable or uploadable, but in general this is a very flawed perspective - brains and computers actually have very little in common. The Star Trek universe seems to recognize this, as I can’t think of any instances of outright abuse of this trope in a ST show. One important exception stands out: Ira Graves.

Ira Graves is a great cyberneticist, so let’s assume he knows his stuff (let’s forget about Maddox, who was a theoretically impoverished engineer). He believes that he can save his consciousness by moving it into Data’s brain. But Data’s brain is not a computer in any ordinary sense, as we detailed above: it’s a complex of interconnected elements made to emulate the physical structure of a human brain. (This is why his brain is such an incredible achievement: Data’s brain isn’t a miniaturized computer, it’s something unique and extraordinarily complex. This is why Lal couldn’t just be saved onto a disc for another attempt later on - Data impressed himself with her memories, but her consciousness died with her brain.) Anyways, Ira Graves somehow impresses his own brain structure into Data’s positronic brain - apparently killing himself in the process - and seems happy with the result (though he could be deluded - having lost his consciousness, but failing to recognize it). In the end, he relinquishes Data’s brain back to Data’s own mind (apparently suppressed but not sufficiently to oblieterate it), and downloads his knowledge into the Enterprise computer. Data believes, however, that Graves’ consciousness must have been lost in this maneuver, which is further support for the notion that a conscious mind cannot “run on a computer”: a human consciousness can exist in Data’s brain, but not on a network of isolinear chips.

The Doctor, in the end, is in the same situation. As a simulation of a human being, he has no inner life – although he is programmed at his core to behave as though he does. He will claim to be conscious because this makes his humanity, and thus his bedside manner, more effective and convincing. And he may autonomously believe that he is conscious – but, not being conscious, he could never know the difference, and so he cannot know if he’s making an error or not in this belief.

I think that here we can quickly bring up the bio-neural gel packs on Voyager. Aren’t they ‘brainlike’ in their constitution? If the Doctor’s program runs on this substrate, doesn’t that make him conscious? The answer is no – first, recall what Data had to say about neural function and biochemistry. Those aren’t the important factors – it’s the dense interconnectedness that instantiates an immediate conscious experience, and we have no reason to believe that the interconnection patterns of an array of bio-neural gel packs is fundamentally different from a network of isolinear chips. Bio-neural thingies are just supposed to be faster somehow, and implement ‘fuzzy logic’, but no one suggests they can serve as a substrate for conscious programs. And furthermore, the Doctor seems happy to move onto his mobile emitter, whose technology is mysterious, but certainly different from the gel packs. It seems that he is just a piece of software, and that he never really has any physical instantiation anywhere. In defense of his “sentience” (Voyager episode ‘Author, Author’), the Doctor’s crewmates only describe his behavioral capacities: he’s kind, he’s autonomous, he’s creative. No one offers any evidence that he actually possesses anything like phenomenal consciousness. (In the analogous scene in ‘Measure of a Man’, Picard at least waves his hand at the notion that, well, you can’t prove Data isn’tconscious, which I thought was pretty weak, but I guess it worked. I don’t know why they didn’t at least have a cyberneuroscientist or something testify.)

So that is my case: Data is conscious, and the Doctor is not. It’s a bit tragic, I think, to see the Doctor in this way – he’s an empty vessel, reacting to his situation and engendering real empathy in those he interacts with, but he has no pathos of his own. He becomes an ironically pathetic character – we feel for him, but he has no feelings. Data, meanwhile, in his misguided quest to become more human and gain access to emotional states (side note: emotion chip BLECH) is far more human, more real, than the most convincing holographic simulation can ever be.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

IIT and Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 is probably the best movie I've ever seen in a theater - definitely the best sci fi movie I've seen. The movie is a detective story about a replicant - an artificial human - who uncovers a mystery that has personal implications for himself, and broader implications for the dystopia that he lives in.

Are replicants conscious? It's hard to argue that they wouldn't be, and the movie doesn't seem to suggest they aren't. Instead, the movie focuses on memory and how your memories make you real or not - if your memories are false, you are a kind of false person in the world of 2049, and this is how people in the movie justify their enslavement of the replicants. The main theme of the movie is memory - are my memories real? If they're real, are they really mine, or someone else's? Does it really matter?

That stuff is all interesting, but like I said, consciousness is not the question with the replicants. It is the core question regarding one of the main characters: Joi the holographic girlfriend. We can speculate now on whether or not Joi is conscious. The movie is ambiguous about this, but there seems to be a subtext that she is not conscious, but that the main character (K), and we the audience, are supposed to believe that she is. And while there is this ambiguity, the resolution of the ambiguity is deeply meaningful to the story (just like the original Blade Runner, such a significant ambiguity is left unresolved).

First, to be clear on IIT terms: replicants are conscious because they are basically humans with human brains (and humans are clearly conscious) - what makes replicants different is that they are constructed as adults, with memories implanted (or not) to give them a more natural psychology. In the original Blade Runner, replicants like Roy Batty were assumed by their masters to be essentially psychopathic by nature, and the subsequent implantation of false memories was instituted to make them more psychologically healthy. But for a 'system in a state', the truth or falsity of memory is an extrinsic fact - from the IIT point of view (and probably any other modern theory of consciousness, or of the brain) it doesn't matter for the system itself. So replicants are conscious.

Joi, on the other hand, is not a human with a human brain. She's a holographic projection generated by a computer. The hologram of course is nothing but an image; what matters is in the computer. Computers as we know them cannot be conscious in any meaningful sense: the system is a very small set of very very fast switches, entirely feedforward at the most complex, finest grain, and extremely simple at coarser grains where we might see something like feedback or lateral connections. If computers in 2049 are like computers we know, Joi is not conscious - but computers might be very different. Joi has some kind of dedicated local unit, mounted on the wall in K's apartment - perhaps the computer in that unit is a neuromorphic system that replicates the connectivity structure of a human brain. But the picture of technology in the movie doesn't suggest this level of sophistication - I think that if we want to argue that Joi is conscious (in order to counter-argue) we need to weaken some assumptions.

Maybe Joi is conscious, but her consciousness is absolutely different from a human consciousness. That still requires some kind of neuromorphic computer, but it doesn't have to reflect the structure of the human brain, but there's a problem there that boils down to unreliability: if you want a simulation of a human being, you probably want something that's utterly controllable, like a performance - and where it's uncontrollable, it should still fulfill the simulation's desiderata. But consciousness is exactly uncontrollable - it's a closed locus of causal power (according to IIT) - so if your machine is conscious and you want it to simulate a human being, then its consciousness ought to resemble a human consciousness. Joi seems to do a very lifelike impression of a human being, so we have two choices - either she is conscious and her consciousness is specified by a neuromorphic computer that reproduces human neural connectivity, or she is an unconscious simulation.

As I said above, an artificial human brain (in the sense of an electronic device) seems beyond the technology of 2049; but even if it is in reach, it is hard to reconcile with the way Joi is quickly cut and copied over to her mobile emitter. First, it would mean that not only are there artificial human brains in 2049, but they are tiny enough to fit in the palm of your hand; second, it would mean that this brain can be constructed (or connected) in seconds, since remember that according to IIT it is a causally-interacting physical substrate that specifies consciousness - a computer program stored in memory is not causally-interacting in any important sense. I just don't think either of these is plausible in context.

So that leaves us with Joi the unconscious, but highly convincing, holographic girlfriend. Seeing Joi this way is easy when she first appears in the movie, but rather quickly it becomes clear that she is a dramatic and interesting character. Just like any other character in a movie or a play, it is then very difficult to imagine that she is not conscious. We know that the actor playing her is conscious, which makes it even more difficult. But if we try, we can see her as an entirely mechanical projection, like Siri or a chatbot, something that emulates humanity down to little details like evincing emotions like love and hope and excitement, and insistence on her own choices. But evincing emotion is not the same as feeling emotion - while there was an actor (Ana de Armas) that performed the character, there is nothing there on the screen while we watch the movie, and whether or not the actor was ever even real (or whether the performance is entirely artificial) doesn't matter to the fact that the performance on the screen is just a mechanical, unconscious projection. K the Blade Runner is in a similar situation: Joi is convincing, and maybe K himself cannot recognize that she is not intrinsically real, but she is nonetheless unreal.

This seems to me to contribute important meaning to the story, and it does resonate with some clues that are given out bit-by-bit, i.e. it seems the filmmakers probably also thought that Joi is not really real (not conscious). We see ads in the background of 2049 LA for Joi, touting that she is everything you want, and this is exactly what K seems to get. And K, who seems to despair at losing her (and losing other things), seems to recognize this (or remember it) when one of those ads reaches out to him and calls him by the same name that 'his' Joi had given to him. His copy of Joi wasn't even customized (it had all the 'factory settings'), i.e. not only is she unreal, she isn't even unique. So as a conscious being himself, K really is alone - his only companion is just a performance without an actor.

I think that, then, we're left with a hard question that aligns with the main theme of the story, which is (as I understood it) does it matter if my memories are mine, or if they are real? If none of my memories are real, am I real, do I matter? That theme gets a resolution: it is clear that K is real, he matters in important ways, and that his memories, real or not, nevertheless guide him significantly. The hard question is: does it matter if you are real? I mean that from the first person: I know I am real, but are you? Does it matter if you are or not, at least, does it matter to me? Well.. in a sense it is the same problem as the main theme - you are something I perceive, just as you might be something I remember. What matters, we might like to think, is whether or not I am real, whether or not I make my own choices of significance - and as pertains to you, whether or not you (real or not) have a significant role in my reality.

And, I think, K is left in a similar place with both versions of this problem; Joi had an effect on him, it seems clear to me, encouraging him and helping to destabilize him towards his ultimate fate, just as his memories did. But whereas (his) Joi is destroyed and lost to him, his memories - "all the best ones", at least - survive even when he dies, because they also belong to others. This happens to be an inversion of Roy Batty's famous observation that his memories will be lost with him.

Ok, enough!

Friday, September 16, 2016

IIT & Pacific Rim

I'm going to start posting short observations of how IIT would explain or be problematic for certain ideas in sci-fi movies or books.

To start: The film "Pacific Rim", a sci-fi action movie where the main characters are pilots controlling gigantic robots. The pilots control the robot through a direct brain-machine interface, but the job is apparently too much for one pilot so there are always at least two pilots. The two pilots have their minds joined by a "neural bridge" - basically an artificial corpus callosum. While joined, the pilots seem to have direct access to one another's experiences in a merged state called "the Drift" - it seems that their two consciousnesses become one.

This scenario is the predicted consequence, according to IIT, of sufficient causal linkage between two brains - at some point, the connection is sufficiently complex that the local maximum of integrated information is no longer within each pilot's brain, but now extends over both brains. What would be necessary to achieve this? The movie doesn't attempt to explain how the brain-machine interface works, but it must involve a very high-resolution, high-speed parallel system for both responding to and stimulating neurons in each pilot's brain.

One way of doing this would be cortical implants, where high-resolution electrode arrays are installed on the surface of each pilot's brain; this is at least plausible (if not possible) given existing technology. However, none of the pilots show signs of a brain implant, and the main character Mako Mori seems to become a pilot on pretty short notice, although she has apparently been training for a long time - maybe all trainees are implanted? A big commitment.

A more hand-wavy Star Trek kind of technology would involve some kind of transcranial magnetic field system that is powerful, precise, and fast enough to both stimulate individual neurons (current TMS systems certainly cannot do this) and measure their activity on a millisecond timescale (current fMRI systems absolutely cannot do this); however, the pilots simply wear helmets while piloting the robots (although Dr Newton, who almost certainly does not have any brain implants since he is not a trained pilot, does use some kind of transcranial setup to drift with a piece of monster brain), which I think makes a transcranial system very unlikely.

If I had to guess, wireless cortical implants are the only plausible means of establishing the Pacific Rim neural bridge, but some sort of transcranial system hidden in the pilots' helmets and based on some unimaginable technology is not excluded.

Verdict: Pacific Rim's "drift" is IIT Compatible

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

IIT and Sci-Fi

(Fake date on this post - wrote it in 2015, not sure of the date - back-posting it here)

This isn't a coherent post - just a list of some random thoughts having to do with IIT and science fiction scenarios that I'm familiar with. I can't claim to have any strength in the latter category: I'm not a big sci-fi reader (especially not in the last few years), and even the best sci-fi movies (I watch 20 times more movies than I read novels) don't tend to take you very far (excepting good time travel movies).

I just think that some of these examples (or others that you, dear reader, might think of) could help in illustrating some interesting IIT-based possibilities.

1. The book Foundation's Edge, by Isaac Asimov, ends on a question about a "supermind", a world where all life - human and otherwise - shares a single planetary consciousness. But it's something earlier in the book that has stuck with me; when the main character, Golan Trevize, is exiled from planet Terminus, he is given an advanced starship. Trevize is confused by the lack of traditional controls - instead, he learns that the ship is piloted by connecting a user's mind to the ship itself. In doing so, Trevize finds that he is now aware of not only the ship's control system, but his perceptual awareness now seems to include the space surrounding the ship: his consciousness now includes the ship:

"And as he and the computer held hands, their thinking merged and it no longer mattered whether his eyes were open or closed. Opening them did not improve his vision nor did closing them dim it. 
Either way, he saw the room with complete clarity—not just in the direction in which he was looking, but all around and above and below. 
He saw every room in the spaceship and he saw outside as well. The sun had risen and its brightness was dimmed in the morning mist, but he could look at it directly without being dazzled, for the computer automatically filtered the light waves. 
He felt the gentle wind and its temperature, and the sounds of the world about him. He detected the planet's magnetic field and the tiny electrical charges on the wall of the ship. 
He became aware of the controls of the ship, without even knowing what they were in detail. He knew only that if he wanted to lift the ship, or turn it, or accelerate it, or make use of any of its abilities, the process was the same as that of performing the analogous process to his body. He had but to use his will."

In IIT terms, the connection between his mind and the ship's systems has been made that allows states of the ship's electronics to causally constrain states of Trevize's brain - at the same time that states of his brain constrain those electronics. There is an irreducible global maximum in integrated information that extends outside Trevize's skull, and into the ship's computers.

Asimov doesn't elaborate on what it is "like" for the ship without a pilot - does it integrate information on its own, constituting a waiting ship's consciousness, ready always to link up with the pilot? If so, the link is like an artificial corpus callosum, joining two independent minds into one whole, and we can suppose that the ship persists as a conscious agent even in the absence of a pilot. Or maybe the ship is disintegrated without a human component - in a state something like slow-wave sleep, with systems online but carefully disconnected in such a way that without a pilot, there is no "ship" - just a collection of parts and mechanisms, like an ordinary machine.

2. Speaking of artificial corpus callosums, there is the excellent Pacific Rim to consider.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The IIT is falsifiable

Sadly I have come to a period of procrastination - five straight months of work, and here it is. It's understandable; in coming up with some final analyses for what is sure to be one of the best papers I ever put together, I've allowed the dimensionality of my data to explode, at the same time that I'm trying to rewrite the code that produces that data so that it can be run on a supercomputer, and at the same time that I'm trying to generate a poster on the work with an eye to current developments. So, the paper has, for this week at least, ground to a halt, and I'm sitting here staring at pages of code and thousands of .mat files and making spreadsheets to try to force some organization on the process.

Okay, deep breath.

I'm doing some highly integrative neuroscience - I'm applying complex information-theoretic measures to human neural data, in such a way that behavioral data produced by those humans can guide my interpretations. It's complicated.

The theory I'm working under is called the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. Consciousness is a fraught area of science and philosophy - everyone has an opinion, even if they think they don't - and the people who know their opinions are really, really excited about them. Some of those people are kind of weird. But the IIT, I think, is actually a rather mundane theory - it's very abstract on the one hand, but it doesn't, by its nature, make any big metaphysical claims about existence, or try to tie itself to evolution or quantum physics. Rather, the IIT aims to be a theory of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) - why is it that some parts of the brain correspond to conscious experience, while others don't? At this level, it competes with other theories of NCC, most notably the Global Neuronal Workspace theory (GNW), although they take opposite approaches - the GNW looks first at the brain, at the NCCs themselves, and tries to explain the specific neural processes that we can see, objectively, are producing consciousness. The IIT, on the other hand, looks first at conscious experience, and, from the inside-out, tries to explain what properties consciousness has by proposing an algorithmic or mathematical expression of that experience.

I know the IIT better than the GNW, and I prefer the approach of the IIT, but I think that eventually these two theories will meet in the middle, and we'll have a real, general theory of consciousness. Might not be for a while, but it will happen.

What the GNW gives you is a description of the brain's mechanics, and post-hoc philosophizing about how certain types of connections in the brain distribute information throughout a central network, and that this distribution is the promotion of something to the status of consciousness. This is based on seeing, objectively, that these things are correlated, so the GNW is a theory of the NCCs at its very root. To some eyes, this makes it the more plausible competitor, since it's based in objective reality.

The IIT, being based in subjective experience (by extracting 'axioms' about consciousness - it's integrated, it's informative, it's bounded, it has structure) is different from the GNW especially in that it isn't specifically based on any principles of neuroscience. It's a mathematical theory, a theory of information transmission in networks. It is, of course, expressed with the obvious intention of being applied to facts of neuroscience, and it seems to do well in this respect. Put simply (I'm obviously not trying to explain the IIT here), if you point the IIT at a brain, it should give you back a prediction (you know what I mean) of whether or not that brain is conscious, which parts are doing the job, and how the doing is organized. This last part is one thing that makes the IIT so interesting - it gives a way of describing the internal structure of what it claims is conscious experience.

So, this is what the IIT is intended for - to predict how consciousness arises in a brain. In this it is indeed falsifiable. An attack I've seen on the IIT from several sources - most recently some of the duller commenters on Scott Aaronson's much better attack - is that it isn't falsifiable, but this is clearly not correct. Tononi (the theorist behind the IIT) gives one clear example of how to falsify the theory: take two substances, both of which disrupt neural activity, but only one of which degrades the capacity of the brain to integrate information (in the specific terms of the theory). You could equalize the substances in other ways - make it so that one impairs attention, or some other manipulation that under a given theory should destroy consciousness - and then find out whether or not your (human) subject has lost consciousness. The IIT should predict exactly which interventions disrupt consciousness and which do not. In fact, it should predict which parts of consciousness are degraded - is vision lost, or hearing, or etc. If the theory fails, then it's wrong. So, the IIT is falsifiable.

But when the critics say it's unfalsifiable, they aren't thinking about the object of the theory - human (or animal) consciousness. They're thinking about panpsychism, and thus missing the whole point. It's true - the IIT predicts that systems that aren't brains can possess consciousness, and that it can be completely alien to human consciousness - no perception or cognition, for example. To many people this is 1) totally incoherent (this is Aaronson's criticism) and 2) unfalsifiable and thus the mark of a bad theory. But that a theory generates unfalsifiable statements is never grounds for dismissing the theory - thsi is basic logic (cf. Popper). What matters it that, in the realm where it's meant to explain something, the theory does its job. If you have two theories that explain equally well, but one generates incoherent, untestable predictions, then you can proceed with parsimony, but you have to have the alternative first. Occam's razor can't be used when you have no competition (unless you'd rather have no theory at all - and this is an ideological point rather than a scientific approach to a problem).

And anyways, even the panpsychism problem (taking the meaning of panpsychism very loosely, since IIT doesn't predict that everything is conscious - just that things that aren't brains can be conscious) isn't definitely untestable - the theory predicts that different conscious things are, in principle at least, linkable. So, if IIT says that a certain not-a-brain system is conscious, then the IIT adherent can simply plug his brain into the object, and if the theory predicts that the adherent's consciousness is linked to the not-a-brain system, then firsthand knowledge is the proper test. That's science fiction stuff there (the film Pacific Rim's drift technology was an implementation of the idea), but the IIT says it's technically possible. So, the ultimate test of the IIT might turn out to be technology - if every IIT-based device fails to produce predicted effects on consciousness, then the theory will be abandoned.

That's all I have for now. June is almost over. One more month in Australia, then home. Back to the grind...

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Sorry May


Okay, so this picture illustrates why I am not a Tegmarkian. Tegmark, if you don't know, is a clever cosmologist at MIT who's put forward (a book on) the thesis that mathematics is the ultimate reality, and that all mathematics is in fact a kind of reality - that there is a mathematical multiverse, which we know exists on account of the mathematics existing.

So I don't buy this. I'm diametrically opposed to this idea. Not opposed, really - I don't care too much, but I am opposed in that I believe the complete opposite. Mathematics - and physics as a subset of mathematics - is an artifact of the human mind, that's all it is. The fact that the world exists in some form is curious, although it seems incoherent to me that we can actually know anything about its true nature - but to suppose that its true nature is mathematics seems so backwards that I just wanted to write some things down.

I get where he's coming from. The world does exist, there is a reality, and it is somehow regular and consistent - it has properties that repeat or sustain, and why should it? Its continuities and discontinuities are all so numerically describable, and why should they be? And the most basic elements that we know to exist - photons, quarks, magnetic fields - seem to be perfectly and completely described as systems of numbers. And why should this be?

My mind seems to have taken the easy way out, because it just screams: but numbers and math are things that human minds *do*! They describe the world because the brain is a description machine, that's what it *does*! If the curious thing is that the description is so perfect and complete, then I have two responses - the space of possible descriptions that the mind can form is so vast, so impossibly vast, that it would be surprising if we could *not* find consistent systems of description for the world; and no description of the world is by any means *complete*.

The completion point is worth going on about. The scope and complexity of the natural world is impossible to comprehend. It's absolutely impossible to describe it all - and I'm saying this as a scientist with full faith in science as an endeavor for helping us to understand the world. We might choose some very narrow sliver of reality and subject it to intensive study, and then, there, we can describe it in such detail that we feel that it's okay to say we've basically got it all down. But that's it - those little, tiny, infinitesimally small splinters, and we think we have a complete description? What we have is a consistent system - mathematical physics - that can be used to describe anything we come across, but each description will be new, different, from what has been seen before.

So no description is complete. Okay, maybe that's a straw man, but I don't think so. Tegmark wants to claim that not only is physics a (potentially) complete description of our reality - or no, not a description, but *the thing itself* - but that realities we haven't yet encountered, i.e. realities *outside our reality* are contained within it. He likes the example of the discovery of Neptune. Astronomers had noted disturbances in the orbit of Uranus, and finally realized that there must be another planet even further out - they realized this mathematically, in such detail that they knew where to point their telescopes to find Neptune, and they did so, successfully.

Tegmark wants to use this example to imply that mathematics is a kind of tapestry containing all reality, and that by following it out from what was known, an *entire planet* was discovered, first in the mathematics, and only later by human senses. But this doesn't prove any kind of point about the reality of mathematics, and it's not even true, strictly, that Neptune was first discovered in a mathematical form. It was first discovered in the form of its gravitational influence, which affected Uranus. It's just that at first, astronomers didn't understand what they were seeing - they had to *do some math* in order to understand. But the data were all there - the measurements of Neptune in the flesh were there already, before Galle saw it with his own eyes (and others had seen it before, all the way back to Galileo, albeit not knowing what they were looking at).

The point here is that, really, new knowledge about the world can only come from new data about the world. Mathematics based on reality that has been observed - i.e. physics - can then tell you how to understand those data, but it is only that, a tool, an activity of the human observers. It doesn't exist outside of human endeavor. I am dead set in this opinion.

Anyways, so I basically had that conversation with myself last night on my walk home, and then I made that figure. It should be self-explanatory, but just in case: the biggest circle, the purple one, is the realm of all possible human thought. The circles within are not to any idea of scale, of course. There are many domains of human thought,and the next two that I've outlined are descriptions and axiomatic systems. Both of these I mean in the broadest sense you can imagine.  Physics falls within the realm of axiomatic systems of description, or it should (Hilbert's sixth problem). Within axiomatic systems you have consistent axiomatic systems, which should contain a correct physics, if it exists - i.e. if the Standard Model and General Relativity could be united. Taken as separate systems, I think that each of these theories alone counts as a consistent system, but together, so far, they do not.

Tegmark's reality is the domain of consistent axiomatic systems of description, of which our physics is (presumably) just a tiny part. Any other consistent system of physics would also fall in this domain, and Tegmark believes that each of these systems must also correspond to its own universe, just as our physics corresponds to ours. I think it's a fantastic idea, which I might illustrate by putting a big 'fantasy' circle somewhere in there, in between human thought and physics.

Friday, January 24, 2014

overflow

quick note on something unimportant:

my qualia clearly overflow my behavioral access to them.

say there's a thing here. a can of beer (cans I think are more prosaic), with its characteristic physical attributes.

when i look at it, i have an experience of it. much of that experience is strongly, closely correlated with the physical attributes of the can. you can take this for granted, or you can confirm it by ask me questions and carefully collecting my responses. the can's geometric properties, its shape, its albedo and texture, things like that. other parts of my experience are not correlated with attributes of the can, but are quirks of my own systems. colors, a/modally completed contours, illusory depth from shading, meanings of symbols, etc.

all of this you can, in principle, recover from me by making certain types of measurements - basically, you prompt me with questions or decisions, and i give you responses. these can be words, numbers, button presses, ratings, slider adjustments, essays, etc.

let's say i give you all the time in the world. you have time to run every test you can think of. you can run every task until performance asymptotes, and you can estimate any parameter that you can dream of. every aspect of this can of beer that i have any ability to respond to, to access behaviorally, is your data.

is there anything left to my experience that you have not collected, that you cannot find in your data and models?

my qualia are overflowing!

(you can make this same sort of argument for physics - i measure the physical attributes of an object until i can't find any more to measure. you can then point out, well, isn't there something left? the thing itself? but then i can ask you, what is there, about that thing, that is not described or captured in my measurements and models? what can you point to? that the thing is *there*? well, I have its thereness perfectly specified in a coordinate space. that the thing is *substantial*? well, i've got every aspect of its substantiality described by my equations of quantum electrodynamics. what is left? i think that, ultimately, there's nothing for you to point to, because in every case, i can show you how i've measured or modeled whatever it is. i don't see how the case is the same with phenomenal experience.)

Tuesday, January 07, 2014

idealism 2

The days are counting down, just weeks now until the Big Shift. This evening, ideas swirling through my head, especially a reiteration of the first version of this post. I wanted to resketch those ideas, so here we go, in less detail but more formally:

1. There is a real world that exists in some form that we can perceive, accurately or not.
1.1. The substance of this real world is not physical or objective or dualistic.
1.2. The substance of the world is subjective and phenomenal.
2. All us humans (and many other creatures) experience phenomenal consciousness.
2.1. Phenomenal consciousness is a substructure or subfunction of a brain.
2.1.1. Consciousness is not the only type of phenomenal substance (reiterating 1.).
2.2. Experience of phenomenal consciousness is analogous to a space with things in it.
2.2.1. Things that are 'in the space' of consciousness are things that one is 'conscious of'.
2.3. Objects are neural parsings of stuff in the real world.
2.3.1. Objects can be informatively (yet redundantly) labeled 'neural objects'.
2.3.2. A substructure of a neural object that is present in consciousness is an 'object-in-consciousness'.
2.4. The stuff in the world that is parsed into objects is also subjective and phenomenal.
2.4.1. Generally this stuff is not conscious.
2.4.2. An exception is when the stuff is a living brain.
2.5. We generally recognize that stuff in the world is not conscious.
2.5.1. We come to this conclusion because conscious objects are within the space of consciousness, but do not themselves contain conscious spaces (except for brains, and we only know they do because they say so).
2.5.2. For 2.5.1. to be true, one consciousness would need to be able to emulate another.
2.5.3. Despite the truth of 2.5., it is arrived at for the wrong reasons.
2.5.3.1. We mistake objects-in-consciousness for stuff in the world.
2.5.3.2. Since we make this mistake, and since objects-in-consciousness are not themselves conscious, we believe (correctly) that (most) stuff in the world is not conscious.
2.5.4. We are perplexed that brains are conscious, yet do not appear to be.
2.5.4.1. This is because we are mistaking brains, which are conscious, for objects-in-consciousness, which we have already mistaken for stuff in the world.
2.5.4.1.1. This is a subtle error, because if the middle step is left out, it seems not to be an error (we are confusing brains for stuff-in-the-world, which they are).
3. The hard problem of consciousness is the apparently uncrossable gulf between phenomenal subjective experience as-a-brain, and the non-phenomenal objective status of-a-brain.
3.1. Items 1. and 2. shows how this gulf is a consequence of a sequence of mistakes about the status of stuff-in-the-world and of objects-in-consciousness.

This is a type of idealism - which of the many subtypes I'm not sure - that is, while not popular (as far as I can tell), at least tolerable in philosophical circles. I'm liking it more and more!

Monday, October 14, 2013

objectivity

I finished Chalmers' book - The Conscious Mind - this weekend. A funny thing was that the next-to-last chapter, basically just a set of musings on the relationship between his proto-theory and artificial intelligence arguments, didn't interest me at all. This is funny because if this was 2001, I probably would have skimmed the book up to that chapter and then read it over and over and over again.

It's an excellent, important book. I wish I'd read it back when, but now was good enough timing. As I mentioned in a previous entry, just about all of my thinking on philosophy of mind and consciousness in this book; I think some of the ideas I developed naturally, like a lot of people do, but I've also read many of Chalmers' papers over the years, and a couple I've read many times, so he's undoubtedly responsible for straightening my thoughts on the subject.

But this book, it's one of those cases where reading is like sharpening your mind. You may have a set of knives, but you've let them clatter around in a drawer for a while, used one here and another there, and so they get banged up and dulled and maybe a bit tarnished, and so finally you sit down with the whetstone and a cloth and sharpen and clean, and there, a drawer full of shining, sharp knives. That's what it was like, reading this book.

In a way, it just sort of set me up with new vocabulary, or ways to structure my thinking about perception and experience, and why they are interesting, and what the alternatives are in thinking about how they are interesting. Sometimes, this is enough to take away from a book - it helps you organize, doesn't revolutionize your thought, but it helps you straighten things out, like putting the knives into categories, with the tips and blades all facing together.

But he also inspired me, and hopefully just at the right time (though I was asking for it, looking for it, so it's silly to bring up the notion of coincidence). He talks about psychophysics - although in more basic terms than the conventional science - and he presents it as a way of using subjective experience as evidence, as a thing to be explained. This was how I felt about it for a long time, but as the years and papers and experiments wheel on, you can't help but start to see things operationally, in terms of functions and moving parts, and you operationalize your subjects too, and they become black boxes that press buttons. This is so wrong!

It's wrong, and I used to know it was wrong, and I've maintained a sense that it's wrong - I recognize that this sense is part of what sets me against the West Coast internal noise crowd in modern psychophysics, and which allies me so much to the European tradition. But I'd kind of forgotten, explicitly, how it's something of a travesty against psychophysics to operationalize your subjects, especially if you're interested in psychophysics per se, and not in using it as a means to another worthy end.

What I'm rambling about is what we all know - when you have a subject in a psychophysics experiment, and you give them instructions on how to do the task, you are asking them to take hold of a phenomenal object, and to give you responses based on that object. Often the object is so ineffable that it can only be explained by example - 'this, you see this? when you see this, press this button; or, press this button when you think you see this, here'. The central object in the entire experiment is the thing that is seen. The instructions to the subject are the closest that the experimenter comes to the phenomenon of interest. But it's too easy, I see now, to slip into the mode of giving those instructions and then thinking that the phenomenon is in the data, and that by describing the data or understanding the data, you're understanding the phenomenon.

Ultimately, maybe, it's just semantics. Ultimately, all you have to analyze in any rigorous sense is the data. But I think that many psychophysicists forget, and start talking only about performance - I've done this many times now. I've gone long enough without enough inspiration, for years now, only seeing it peek through now and then, always having trouble circling back to the real object of fascination. But this book, Chalmers' book - or probably, just a few choice passages from the book - has renewed my clarity, and as I said, just in time, because I feel that the importance of these ideas, for my research and my writing and my very career, is swinging right into center stage.

Also, I have a headache right now, officially it's been 59 days since the last, longest gap since record keeping began (May 2012). I gave it a 3.5, but I'm going to go raise that to a 4.5 now, it's getting worse.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

not idealism

okay, after the epiphany of the last post, i did a little re-reading of some basic boilerplate, and i'm thinking that what i'm calling 'idealism' there is really a type of pure panpsychism, saying that everything is a subjective state. it's non-dualistic simply in that it flips the hard question around: what evidence is there for, or how to you conceive of or explain, non-subjective states? from the materialist/physicalist point of view, the subjective state seems impossible to understand, which leads to the dualist perspective. but then, on the other side, you do away with 'physical' completely. everything is a subjective state, analogous to consciousness, but usually (almost always) without the complex representational structure. so in this system, dualism is like physicalism + panpsychism. idealism is usually used to describe a point of view where everything that exists is a representation, which i still think is craziness.

now, another not on metaphors for thinking: i am now finally (after probably 10 years of delay) reading Chalmers' book 'The Conscious Mind'. i've read many of his papers, some of which are summaries of the more digestible ideas in this book, so in a way i'm prepared for him. but it's a real philosophy book, and it gets difficult. since i can't hope to understand it all, i do a lot of close skimming, reading words and getting some meaning but not all meaning. i guess that's always the case. i had the thought that this process is like looking at objects in water of varying degrees of clarity. when you understand what you're reading, the water is clear, you can see all the surfaces, each new point of fixation is visible and well defined, and you can see the whole structure. but when the water is muddy, you can't see the whole structure - you see parts of it poking into clear parts of the water (muddy water is never uniformly muddy, but the muddiness is in swirls, leaving 'open' spaces of clarity), and those maybe you can see clearly, but even they may be hazy. anyways, the visual metaphor for understanding - clarity, detail, focus, fogginess - really comes home when reading a philosophy text.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

idealism

read Koch's "confessions of a romantic reductionist" this weekend. nice book, and he's such an interesting character. i was slightly disappointed that there wasn't more to learn - it was thin (i don't normally finish a book in 2 days). not that it wasn't full of things to learn, but most of it wasn't new to me, i guess because i'm familiar enough with the literature.

it did spark one interesting thought that i'd never really had before, and it wasn't really in the book itself - you know how these things work, you might be primed in some way for something, and then someone says the right thing in the right way, and something new appears. here's what i thought:

(as a warning, the book is all about consciousness, the science of trying to explain what consciousness, i.e. subjective consciousness is. all discussion of this topic needs to be prefaced with warning that you're getting into something deep. so there it is.)

information theories of consciousness, like Tononi's or Chalmers' (such as it is), are basically dualist theories. they say that the stuff of reality has two aspects - one is the objective, measurable, interactive aspect, that we can measure in terms of physics (in the familiar sense of the word). the other aspect is subjective, intrinsic, and emergent - emergence in the sense of information, of a systematic quality that is real and not conceptual or based in observation - and it can be calculated or understood in theoretical terms (e.g. in the terms of Tononi's theory), but it cannot be measured in a relational sense.

this is not the new thought that occurred to me. i'm already on their side. i'm not a physicalist, which i think is a small-minded position, in that it shows that the person just hasn't gone far enough in thinking about the difficulty of the problem (i.e. the Hardness in Chalmers' terms). physicalism says there is only the objective stuff, and that whatever emergence there is a function of observation - i.e. a system is described by some agent, like a human scientist, and the scientist recognizes that the system has properties that are not included in the components of the system, and yet which flow from the combination of the component qualities - this kind of emergence is more a fact of higher-order recognition on the part of the observer. there is nothing actually there in the system that corresponds to the emergent quality.

still, this is not the new thought. here it is: idealism. not a new thought, but new for me. i've always been much more set against idealism than against physicalism - not agreeing with either, but mostly agreeing with physicalism, just that there's something missing there. but idealism, all wrong. but for the first time, on reading the Koch book, I got a reasonable picture of idealism in my head, and he wasn't even talking about it. the picture is this: say that all reality is subjective, and there is no objective reality at all. this is ultimate panpsychism, that everything is psyche of some level. but what makes a mind special? what is consciousness? why does there seem to be such a divide between the inner substance of our minds and the 'physical' character of the biological brain? i figured it out (in this system): physical qualities are just mental representations. the representations cannot be identical with the things they represent, of course. when i see a dog, the 'seeing' is a set of representations of various aspects of dogness. this seems fine, because i have no reason to be confused about the mismatch between my perception of a dog and the dog itself, because i am not a dog. same goes for rocks, clouds, houses, etc. but when i see a brain, or study a neural system or a neuron, knowing that i am a brain, the mismatch is so pronounced that i can't miss it. i am - my consciousness is - a brain, and yet, this representation of a brain is so fundamentally unlike my consciousness. where, in there, in that thing, does the consciousness emerge? what explains it?

in the idealist view, the explanation is purely psychological, cognitive. there is no actual distinction between mind and brain. the brain i am studying is just as much of a subjective entity as i am, but my representation is vastly inadequate. i can only 'understand' a bit of it at a time, and only in abstractions or formulations or approximations, no matter how clever i am. brains and neurons and other objective, physical, phenomena are only the limited psychological efforts of human consciousness to represent essentially unrepresentable other consciousnesses. the limitation might just be of design - the brain isn't evolved for the purpose of representing or emulating other brains. if it were, if it had equipment making such emulation possible, then observing other brains would be equivalent to observing their consciousnesses. but there may be computational limits - there must be - that make this impossible or very unfeasible. so, if a dualist theory of consciousness like Tononi's is perfected, it may be translatable into idealist terms as explaining the difficulty or intractability of emulating one idealist system on another.

a lot of this sounds very familiar - the idea that we are confused, naturally, into thinking that our percepts or our concepts, which are neural descriptions of the real world, are the real world in a direct sense. there are few direct realists out there, who believe that the dog is the dog - most of us realize that the dog is a mental representation of the dog out there. but we then invoke physicalism in noting that the dog out there is objective and 'real' and physical in a sense that is somehow different from the subjective world of qualia that interfaces between our minds and the world. this is different from what i'm getting at here - in the idealist view, out there and in here are qualitatively the same. qualia everywhere, within and without. the only difference is that our qualia are representational, while non-brain qualia aren't (usually).

this all sounds reminiscent of certain religious ideas, very buddhist or maybe hindu, the idea that everything is ultimately consciousness, and that the 'real' world is an illusion or a cognitive mistake. not saying i believe it, just that it was a sort of realization of a possibility that i had while reading an interesting book this weekend.