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Split-Brain Patients, Confabulation, and the Nature of Consciousness
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Having established that all we do is react to the outside world, there are two possibilities:
1) Our decisions are not based on pre-established facts. Despite being the same person we make inconsistent choices. The outcome is then essentially probabilistic.
2) We react in a pre-determined manner, based on our personality. We consistently react in the same way because we are the same person and thus ultimately arrive to the same decision.
Since I find the first option both terrifying and defying some of what we think we know about the world, I am personally leaning towards the second.
Ultimately, even if we make the same choice every time, it is still us who make that choice. The choice remains ours. Separating a person from their subconsciousness is a dangerous prospect. A person is the whole, and every piece of research suggests that both the conscious mind and the subconsciousness work together to provide the final output, each both altering and relying on the other.
EDIT: Rereading the post, the last point seems to not be entirely clear. What I was trying to say is that the most scientifically-minded of individuals have a worrying tendency to hold to some sort of a 'dualist' view wherein the 'soul' is the conscious mind and the subconsciousness, along with the body, are somehow 'not truly part of the person' and are of the 'earthly prison' in the dualist view. A person's self is composed both of what is on the surface as well as what lies beneath.
EDIT2: I cannot at english today, it seems.
I wouldn't say that's true of scientists at all. Rather, society at large is still commanded by a Cartesian point of view.
Anyway, you would probably enjoy Dennett and his views on free will.
Oh totally, but that's Clark's point: we act as though the skin barrier is what allows us to interface with machines. But it's kind of obviously not! I mean, if a person uses a phone, no big. If a person IMPLANTS a phone then woah freaky cyborg. He makes the argument that so long as utility and transfer of information is the same, whether or not something penetrates got skin has nothing at all to do with whether or not you're a cyborg. Being a cyborg involves altering yourself via interface with tools, but not necessarily in a physical manner.
Transhumanists have a total tech fetish, everything gotta be robot parts, and it makes no sense.
Plus I like the general idea Clark puts forth of us being a collection of tools, rather than a consciousness with a "seat".
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Ahhhh.
Well then I agree
No transhumanists generally recognize that having to carry a phone around sucks, and it would be better if it was more like a natural function of my body.
I don't think anyone would object to say, a phone which was just a thin patch you could wear on the back of your head.
But then we get into other issues, like how great it would be if I could lock all the joints in my arm together, and then use my fingertip as the cantilever of an AFM on an arbitrary basis.
I don't really want anything all that special. I just want a body that works decently in the world I actually live in. One that doesn't make me miserable and harm itself just because it saved a few lives millions of years ago. I have this big huge logical brain, maybe it could actually have control over the functions of the body it's be strapped to.
This thread has convinced me that brain augmentations are probably a necessity really.
I mean it is batshit fucking insane that my conscious response to losing some data input is to wildly speculate as to what just happened, and then assume that's absolutely true.
No, do not do that. Calmly observe that something is wrong. I mean we have computer intrusion detection systems which do things better then our brain does.
Of course that does make me think that the consciousness of say, an AI or an augmented human would in fact be radically different if we engineered out weird processes like that. What would the world "feel" like if your consciousness was engineered to doubt it's sensory data, rather then what it seems to do (which is consider all input from the brain to the "consciousness circuit" as unquestioningly accurate).
It also seems like it has "brain in a box" ramifications: if you'll invent a reason as to why you can't move your arms, what else does that lead to? How degraded could say, data from your visual processing centers be before you'd notice that it was low-resolution virtual reality (so say, rather then your optical system, you instead feed signals to face-recognition, pattern recognition etc. - would you even be able to notice you weren't studying crisp images from your eyes).
I mean, I think his best example is speech and writing. You can consider them external tools that allow us to interact with the world and change it or ourselves. But we don't consider them artificial constructs because we access them easily.
That's not to say things can't be improved by implanting them, but that shouldn't be given precedence. Being next to neurons won't necessarily make information transfer more efficient. Storing your magic memory implant in your skull is only different from using a paper journal in that it is easier to keep with you.
That seems to be the major focus of a lot of the problem solving transhumanism does: stick the screwdriver to your hand! I mean I get it from an always be prepared perspective, but the difference between internalized and external tools doesn't usually seem to go beyond mild convenience. I could implant an ALU or use a calculator, the difference is mostly that in one case I have to go through neurosurgery.
But! I'm responding to you as though you'd said something different. I honestly had never heard a pure HCI proposal from the perspective of transhumanism. I've read more 'put your brain in a robot body!' proposals. I'm a big fan of focusing on making tools transparent first, and considering literal "I would like adamantium bones BECAUSE that provides me with a property only having adamantium bones can", or giving yourself a permanent third arm or whatnot. I'm actually much more interested in large scale body modification if you're going surgical, because at least you can't replicate that via efficient information transfer.
Edit: I'm totally in favor of brain implants, but I think it'll be forever and a day before there's anything decent. I mean right now we're still arguing some incredibly basic aspects of the brain. Like. "Does it realtime process information?" basic.
Also, I think you're presupposing some things about why consciousness. I mean, it isn't necessarily true that completely accurate analysis of sense data is preferable. We have some evidence, for instance, that perfect memory.is possible. But we don't have it! Which is weird. It is possible that's due to the blind idiocy of evolution, but it's also possible that this confers some advantage.
Now obviously I want the ability to TEST that and fuck if I'm not I'm favor of being a test subject for the memory-perfector, but I don't know that things like confabulation point to any kind of systemic error.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Take recent research like this.
I basically peed my pants when I read this quote as part of the paper (which was published in Nature, by the way):
For good or ill, we will probably be directly mucking around in the brain for a long time before we actually come to fully understand it, and likely that mucking about will lead to a lot of incidental understanding!
I've never really seen it explained or explored the way Winky did, and I think it's great. I absolutely believe that most or many or all people have a thorough logical reasoning capacity, regardless of how conscious they are of it. I think that a lot of the most profound advances in ethcs and philosophy were when someone was able to discover and articulate a thought process that was already going on subconsciously in millions of people.
No, no, no, don't start this. Free will has a perfectly usable meaning. It's only empty when you try to force the term to be some broader useless concept of non-determinism that doesn't even make sense.
I see what you're saying (and it's true--I was not adequately addressing it earlier). From what I understand, though, the Libet experiments have not established anything so robust.
This story is plausible for routine and low-consequence decisions. It is also plausible for certain cases involving brain damage. I think it is unwarranted to generalize from those cases to the totality of human action, however, including paradigm cases of reasoning and deliberation wherein, for instance, a person thinks for months (over a job offer, say), consults friends and family, and so on.
Like I said previously, however, it's not as though the conscious account doesn't influence decision making though. Rather, I think it's a crucial tool, as it updates our self-narrative in a manner that our behavior forming processes can work with. The notion is more that the conscious account of your mental processes, while incomplete, is the only real record you can store (because of some difficulty in translation of the processes that we actually use for cognition into information that we can store). Consciousness is how we update our mental profile of ourselves, and we work off of it in a sort of feedback loop.
This is to say a lack of consciousness causes a very different sort of behavior, and it can be demonstrated that there are individuals who go about performing behavior without consciousness (there are literal examples of patients who suffer from temporary 'zombieism'). One example was of a man who left work, got on and the off a train again at a different station all the while having a deficit of consciousness (like sleepwalking, kind of). He was making somewhat complicated decisions and actions, certainly more than what is merely reflexive, but he was doing so without any sort of thought or direction because he was lacking any sort of self-narrative to tell him what he should be doing.
Also, spending months coming to a conclusion isn't actually a single decision, but a long series of individual decisions that you made, analyzed, and then filed back away. You seem to be consciously making the decision because you're constantly performing feedback on it, meaning that that the feedback becomes a significant cause of the conclusion. You're basically consciously reshaping your brain until the point where you can subconsciously make the decision without consciously balking at it.
Well, Libet himself argued for the conscious veto, the "free won't", so to speak. No need to wait for months. The conscious mind gets consulted almost immediately after an action is initiated.
I view confabulation and such to be more troubling for the conscious mind in the long-term. Neurons seem to fire relatively slowly for a realtime process and it is, given the instances of what happens when bits of the neural machine breaks down, much more persuasive to think of consciousness as only feeling realtime; whilst mostly actually being heavily cached and only periodically fully engaged to grapple with required decisionmaking. Too energetically expensive, perhaps.
Personally I do not think conscious thought merely serves as a chronicler, but also (sometimes) takes part of the decision making process. I do not know if I am alone here but sometimes when I struggle with a difficult logical problem I have to externalize the thought process, thinking of it 'audibly', and 'walking my subconsciousness through it'. This leads me to believe that conscious thought serves a greater role than just feedback (at the least part of the time). The veto hypothesis similarly makes sense to me, as I often begin doing something then actually think of it 'audibly' and abort the action.
also unnecessary
to the vast majority of decisions you make your consciousness would either be superfluous or an active detriment
consider how bad the conscious mind is at almost any kind of information processing
To grey paladin:
the best way i find to think about it is as follows;
your consciousness is like the highest level of processing in the brain and the most general - it can deal with any problem or category of problems, but it deals with it badly. when you first start to do anything it is this level that applies to it first, eg riding a bike, and it works through forming an initial algorithm that then gets passed along to other areas. gradually as you get better at whatever it is, it bows out entirely leaving your newly formed algorithm to be dealt with by another, non-conscious part such as the cerebellum. this is true even of things such as chess, where an experienced player will be doing huge amounts of his analysis and decision making subconsciously - and it is interesting that it is this "emotional" thinking that informs him. if anybody has ever played an fps they can describe that feeling where you suddenly "feel" like you are in a really bad position and have to get in cover - thats a subconscious routine reminding you that you are out of cover and using emotional tools to get you to move.
it is a troubleshooter. it is the supra-algorithm editor. but it is not necessary or needed for most things. but it still gets involved in stuff in a non-trivial way, and i am almost certain that you can force yourself to run through things analytically using it if you choose to; but its not necessary in most cases.
Something to keep in mind, though, is that a lot of the time the subconscious responses people learn to something are just plain wrong. That is, because the conscious premise for what needs to be optimized was incorrect the resulting algorithms do not achieve what actually needs to be done. You can see this when people 'unlearn' bad habits - it is most often a conscious act wherein they reconsider the premise.
Thus, if we continue with analogies from the computer world, you could consider the conscious mind as a programmer programming in a high level language, where the subconsciousness optimizes what is needed and translates it to machine code; kind of like a compiler/assembler. The programmer examines the result, compares it to what it intended, and if need be rewrites the premise. This process repeats itself.
I kinda prefer to think about it by contrasting the kernel mode and user mode of an OS. You have lowish level code being used to directly manipulate hardware, and onto this is strapped the user mode which is where presentation happens and higher level code is used. Think about the rather segmented physical formation of the brain, the specialization with happens in certain areas, the inability of high level code to directly effect low level functions, and this is kinda consistent. By having the functions separate , it makes it safe for designers to add in new features and functions without having to completely overhaul all the underlying code.
The operator interacts only with the top most user layer, which has to trust the lower level systems to provide it with accurate information about what is happening. It's also going to be the last place to get updated about what is going on at the lower levels, so some delay between when a decision is determined and when it is updated to the user level is likely. When something breaks at a low level, and starts providing inaccurate information, unless it is specifically checking their work or the lower level returns an error state, the high level stuff is not going to notice a problem at the lower levels.
Much of what is being processed at the lower levels has ultimately been requested by the user (it is not all in this case since it is not the user who actually turned the machine on, so to speak - essential functions are running all the time), so it is quite close to a fetch cycle.
I think it's a little dicey the way you use 'you' and related person-designating-terms in these descriptions, given that what you're claiming might undermine those terms in a significant way.
I'm also, actually, pretty interested about the details of the zombie stuff. There are a lot of questions I would have about such a case, and pretty big potential philosophical payoffs (philosophers have debated at length the metaphysical possibility of similar-ish 'zombies' in a way that seems might be informed by such results).
I think it might be nice to know a little more about this term 'deficit of consciousness'. I've been prescribed xanax, and when I drink, even a little, while on it I pretty much always black out. I act like a slightly more outgoing version of myself, but I'm not aware of any of it after.
That I suppose is consciousness with the absence of memory, but if we are now defining consciousness as the Narrator processing internal and external stimulus into a story, and then retaining the story in long/short term memory, and updating whatever reads the narrative.
'Deficit of consciousness', at least from my googling, does not seem to be a well defined term of art. Could someone in such a state respond to a simple command? Could they respond to a question that requires accessing short term memory? Long term memory? Something that applies even simple recursive logic like counting to 70 by 7s?
When someone has a deficit of consciousness, what is breaking? It's about as helpful as someone calling up saying they have a "deficit of internet", when it could be any on piece of a pretty long chain that is failing.
I can't find a quote for the story about the guy who boarded the train, I realize, because it was an anecdote my professor told me in class. I can try to see if I can't look it up anyway. The phenomenon is referred to as automatism. I imagine it is probably almost exactly similar to sleep walking.