Consciousness: Navel Gazing and Hallucinations

Consciousness is a fascinating topic prompting questions such as: ”How does consciousness arise?”, “Does consciousness survive death?”, and “Will AI ever be conscious?” I’ve often wondered what research has to say about these questions. Is there any truth to claims of proof of life after death or AIs being on the verge of taking control? Although this subject may seem off topic for a sustainability newsletter, I found some fundamental lessons in my research about how we all perceive the world that will help me deal with climate deniers or other folks who seem to have lost the plot. For full disclosure, I am in no way a consciousness expert, although I have been a research scientist for four decades now. So I took a dive into the consciousness literature and here is what I’ve found.

Most academic papers on consciousness seem to be of the form “Consciousness is either A or B. My research says it is A. B is wrong.” But there were so many ways that the writers divided consciousness: inner versus outer awareness, a manifestation of the brain or a nonphysical source, experiential consciousness versus functional consciousness, that I was at a loss trying to understand how all the results fit together. After much gnashing of my teeth, I came to realize that one of the keys to understanding the consciousness research is understanding what people mean by “conscious”.

It may seem a bit pedantic to require a definition of conscious for we all have an idea about what it means. But consider that there are over 40 definitions of “conscious” such as inner life, introspection, imagination, volition, cognition, experience, feeling, perception, awareness, awareness of awareness. Thankfully, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes four kinds of consciousness that bracket much of the its meaning: knowledge, intentionality, introspection, and phenomenal experiences. The first two, knowledge and intentionality can be understood with examples: “I am conscious of the snake by my foot” (knowledge) and “I am conscious of the impact of my consumption on the natural world” (intentionality). Both knowledge and intentionality are part of what I mean when I use the term “eco-conscious” to sum up various aspects of being environmentally aware. But these aren’t really what we are thinking about when we are questioning AI’s having consciousness or if consciousness survives death.

Issues of the origin and longevity of consciousness align more with phenomenal and introspective consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness encompasses all kinds of awareness of experiences - what is it like to feel pain, to taste, to endure heart ache, or to have imaginative experiences. Some scientists refer to phenomenal consciousness as personal hallucinations - more on this later. Introspection is our awareness of ongoing or previous mental states and processes, i.e. navel-gazing. Some philosophers believe that the meta-consciousness of introspection builds on, and is made possible by, phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal and introspective consciousness are at the root of most of the juicy consciousness questions.

So how does the phenomenal consciousness work, how do we perceive experiences? The picture that we have of our surroundings is actually our brain’s interpretation of the light and sounds and other bits of info that our body collects and sends to the brain. The brain itself is locked in a dark bony cage and has no direct experience with the flowers in the vase or the other people in the room. Instead, our brain creates and updates pictures / models / interpretations of our surroundings to help keep us from harm, to find food, allies and mates, and to make predictions. But these models are not 100% accurate.

For example, visual illusions demonstrate how our brains can be readily tricked to misconstrue colors, sizes, or motion. There are some excellent illustrations here. Illusions arise in a number of different ways but rely on our expectations such as: shaded colors are brighter than the number of photons our eyes are receiving - so our brain interprets colors in shade as brighter. Our brain also smooths over the snapshots that our eyes capture - for our eyes don’t scan a scene smoothly but rather jump from snippet to snippet. But rather than seeing these disjointed snapshots, our brain knits together a cohesive image of our surroundings. Our model of reality will also depend on our genetics, e.g. one’s eyesight, and the functioning of our body e.g. feeling like the world is spinning when we are dizzy or drank too much.

There are also psychological aspects to what picture our brain paints, we bend our ideas to fit what we expect or even to fit our desires. Apparently Russians see eight colors in the rainbow versus the seven most Americans see, distinguishing two variants of blue. The Japanese consider blue and green to be shades of the same color. Our picture of reality is influenced by our cultural expectations. Consider further that I will question anything Rush Limbaugh may have said, while others will believe him. Some philosophers go so far as to call our brains’ interpretations of reality “hallucinations”. While this may at first seem a bit over the top, remember that the impressions we have of the real world are in fact manifestations of our brain - informed by reality, hopefully - but not an exact replica of the physical world. I find it very helpful to remember that people who support Trump have a different hallucination of reality than I do. It reminds me that it will take time to find common ground but it is not impossible.

As mind-blowing as it is to contemplate the fact that we don’t perceive the physical world precisely, it is even stranger to try to explain introspective consciousness: why do we think about our knowledge and how do we know things in the first place? In short, how does navel-gazing consciousness arise?

Many neuroscientists believe that consciousness arises out of the brain’s physicality. They have been very successful in learning about the basics of brain structure and which areas of our brains ‘light up’ when we think about various things. They have learned that the human brain contains something like 80,000,000,000 (80 billion) neurons. Each neuron has a network of thousands of outgoing fibers, called axons, that carry micro-electric signals from the source neuron to synapses on the surface of other neurons. The 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) synapses in a human brain are where all the action happens. When a synapse receives a signal from another neuron, it may excite the neuron it is attached to, or inhibit it, or activate a second message altering the internal chemistry of its neuron. Synapses themselves can also change in response to the pattern of incoming signals. Indeed it is this so called “activity-dependent modification” of the synapses that is believed to underlie memory and learning.

Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and EEG (electroencephalography), among other techniques, scientists have been able to explore what parts of the brain are active during cognition, emotional responses, and perception as well as to understand the brain’s organization, its connectivity and its plasticity. These non-invasive techniques are revolutionizing our understanding and treatments of autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, schizophrenia, and depression.

But as useful and magnificent as all this mapping is, it still doesn’t answer the fundamental question of how consciousness arises. This is the “hard problem” of consciousness, which I crudely paraphrase as “even if we can map the entire brain we still don’t know how the physical processes in the brain translate into subjective experience”.

Many researchers believe that mapping will never explain consciousness because mind and matter are of different realms. Historically, this belief was label dualism to refer to the two realms. Many dualists believe that science, which is a third person, objective view of the universe, will never be able to explain the mystery of consciousness, which is both first person and subjective. In opposition, are those who believe consciousness is a manifestation of physical properties, these are the materialists, and many neurologists believe this. And there is a final group of researchers who believe the mind/matter distinction is misleading and causes us to research the wrong questions- though I’ve been unable to suss out what they think are the right questions.

The materialists have endeavored to answer the hard problem with a number of theories of consciousness. Perhaps most well known amongst these is the global workspace theory. As you may expect, global workspace theory holds that when our attention zooms in on one idea, multiple parts of our brain are recruited to consider and respond to the idea. Consciousness, they argue, is simply the wide accessibility of a piece of information to many cognitive systems at once, as well as the possibility of widespread broadcasting of a response. This theory arose in part out of studies of AI but also builds on the scientific observation that humans can only consciously pay attention to one thing at a time.

This doesn’t mean that we aren’t processing information about a dozen other things, but rather that it is being done unconsciously. Have you ever been deep in thought about some problem and realized you’d driven the whole way home? Or even driven to the wrong place? You were paying enough attention to not get in an accident but your weren’t conscious of driving. Indeed, most of our mental processing is unconscious. When we take a drink we do not consciously think lift my arm, grasp the cup, bend the elbow, open the mouth … We do all that unconsciously. However, even though we only perceive one interpretation of a given scene or event, our brain continues to process other interpretations in the background. A classic example of this is when we think we’ve seen a friend in the distance but as our brain receives more information, we shift our interpretation to having seen our friend’s sibling or simply a tree trunk. This offers a possible explanation for ghost sightings - our brain interpreted a shadow as a person and, notably, was more likely to do so if our culture accepts the idea of ethereal visitors.

The fact that we are only conscious of one reality at a time, has had a surprisingly large impact on me. I’ve realized that I spend an inordinate amount of time in my head: I think about what people said, about my chore list, about how to heal the wounds in our country, about climate change. Recognizing that my conscious thoughts have been dominated by introspective consciousness, has helped me to be more present in any given moment. In other words, it’s helped me to balance out my navel gazing with more hallucinations of my surroundings.

But let’s get back to how consciousness arises. Global workspace theorists suggest that the global workspace structure of our brains evolved as a way to select a piece of information, hold onto it overtime, process it from various view points, and then to instigate a response across the brain. The global workspace could thus enable us to plan long term as opposed to say a bacteria that will only respond to immediate needs.

The materialists have several other theories of consciousness. Another interesting one is integrated information theory which holds that information itself is a fundamental field of nature, just like mass, length and time. The sum of all the generated information is thought to be proportional to the level of consciousness for proponents of the integrated info theory. This implies that there already exist non-biological systems that have consciousness. Rocks for instance hold information about the temperature and pressure at which they formed and thus have a dash of consciousness. If this is so, then AIs already have consciousness. Some counter that these materialistic theories (global workspace theory and integrated information theory) are not actually theories but rather descriptions of consciousness. According to Schurger et al, these materialist theories of consciousness offer no explanation of how consciousness arises but merely pointing out correlations.

One interesting point, that doesn’t explain where consciousness comes from but does touch on the AI problem, is that our brains are biological systems that are quite different from computers. Our brains are extensively influenced by our bodies, especially by the gut which regulates our moods and immune responses. Indeed, our brain is largely taken up with regulating the systems that keep us alive - rather than navel gazing or hallucinating about reality. Anil Seth summarizes that we are conscious because we live through, because of, and with our bodies. This suggests that robots will never achieve consciousness without biological components. Other differences between our brains and computers have to do with how we store and process information. Unlike computers, our brains are not digital. Neurons don’t just have 0 and 1 states but rather can have non-integer values like 1/2 or 0.1536. And even more strikingly, our neurons are more akin to a drum’s membrane than a 0 or 1 counter or even a fractional counter, for our neurons have different modes of vibration. They can superpose vibrations, they have physical memory and some small amount of storage, and they react dynamically rather via a formal computation process like a computer does. Certainly computers will, and already do, exceed human capabilities for things like remembering details or quick maths calculations. But will they ever have consciousness? My guess is no, but that’s more a matter of hallucination than a scientific conclusion.

In summary, our study of consciousness is still stuck on the fundamental questions of whether consciousness. We have come to understand that our perception of reality is in fact an hallucination based on observations, our biases, and our previous models. But that doesn’t answer the question of where our consciousness comes from. In fact, our understanding is very much at the same place as Descartes was when he was struggling with these questions, almost four centuries ago. Having noticed that everything he knew of reality relied on his five senses, Descartes argued that his view of reality could well be an illusion created by an evil demon to deceive him. The only thing that he could be sure of was that he doubted his own existence. The very presence of this doubt, gave him assurance that he did exist. How could he doubt without existing? It was to sum up this line of reasoning that Descartes articulated humanity’s touchstone “Cogito, ergo sum”, or in English, “I think, therefore I am”.