Annaka Harris is a writer who’s best known for her book, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019), which discusses issues such as free will, panpsychism and the hard problem of consciousness. In this interview with Alex O’Connor, she defends the idea that consciousness goes “all the way down” to the level of fundamental particles – although she takes pains to emphasize that this consciousness is pretty minimal: it’s a fleeting, evanescent consciousness without a self, memories or thoughts. She also defends the idea that the entire universe is one vast collection of conscious experiences, and she maintains that the self is an illusion. Viewers are invited to watch the interview and leave their comments on the thread. Enjoy!
My own comments are below:
1. Annaka Harris contends that the belief that consciousness emerges at some level of complexity is tantamount to dualism. I don’t think this follows. The claim that a critical level of complexity is required for consciousness to emerge is no more dualistic than the claim that a critical mass of uranium-235 is required for a chain reaction to occur.
2. Harris claims that “consciousness is what matter is, at bottom” (53:59). At the same times, she insists that for subatomic particles having conscious experiences, there is “no sense of memory, or self, or thoughts” (59:10), and that their consciousness is “extraordinarily minimal” (59:37). I have to ask: what remains of her claim that matter is conscious, if it has no memory? Practically speaking, is there any difference between an experience at instant t that is completely forgotten one trillionth of a second later, and no experience at all? It appears to me that in the end, Harris’s bold claim that “consciousness is what matter is” dies the death of a thousand qualifications, as the philosopher Anthony Flew would put it.
3. Harris makes no effort to address scientific findings that seem to run contrary to her claim that all matter is conscious. How, for instance, would she respond to the discovery that we are completely unaware of much of the activity occurring even in our own brains? Dr. James Rose sums up the neurological evidence admirably in his essay, “The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes” (Reviews in Fisheries Science, 10:1, 1—38 (2002)) [bolding is mine – VJT]:
A critical point in this analysis is the fact that a large part of the activity occurring in our brain is unavailable to our conscious awareness (Dolan, 2000; Edelman and Tononi, 2000; Koch and Crick, 2000; Libet, 1999; Merikel and Daneman, 2000). This is true of some types of cortical activity and is true for all brainstem and spinal cord activity. We are unaware of activity confined to primary sensory cortex (Koch and Crick, 2000; Lamme and Roelfsma, 2000; Laureys et al., 2000c; Libet, 1999; Rees et al., 2000). We also have no conscious contact with the massive numbers of neurons in our cerebellum, despite the fact that these neurons are intensely active, controlling many aspects of movement and posture. Likewise, we are unaware of the activity of neurons in our hypothalamus, whose firing regulates our heart rate, blood pressure, and neuroendocrine function. (2002, 15)
What’s more, when we examine the cortical activity that is amenable to consciousness, we find that it exhibits a high degree of co-ordination and complexity:
It is becoming clear that the existence of consciousness requires widely distributed brain activity that is simultaneously diverse, temporally coordinated, and of high informational complexity (Edelman and Tononi, 1999; Iacoboni, 2000; Koch and Crick, 1999; 2000; Libet, 1999). Human neocortex satisfies these functional criteria because of its unique structural features: (1) exceptionally high interconnectivity within the neocortex and between the cortex and thalamus and (2) enough mass and local functional diversification to permit regionally specialized, differentiated activity patterns (Edelman and Tononi, 1999). These structural and functional features are not present in subcortical regions of the brain, which is probably the main reason that activity confined to subcortical brain systems can’t support consciousness. (2002, 7)
I am of course well aware that in the 23 years since Dr. Rose composed his essay, there have been numerous claims in the scientific literature (notably by Jaak Panksepp, Alan Shewmon, Bjorn Merker and Mark Solms) that humans and other animals possess a rudimentary affective consciousness, which is capable of occurring even in the subcortical regions of the brain – in particular, the limbic system and the periaqueductal gray (PAG). Nevertheless, when we examine the regions of the brain that are said to be associated with affective consciousness, we find that these, too, exhibit a high degree of complexity (see also here), albeit of a much lower degree than that typically found in the neocortex. In short: the attempt to divorce consciousness from complexity is fruitless. The discussion taking place among neuroscientists today is hard-nosed and practical: what degree of complexity is required for what kind of consciousness, and where in the brain is it located?
4. Harris denies the existence of a self, holding that the human experience of a “self” merely reflects the continuity of our memories, and that it ultimately boils down to “one conscious experience coming after another” (1:11:05). More boldly, she contends that “all the universe is, is conscious experiences coming into and out of being, one after the other” (1:10:53). That leaves us with the puzzle of why most of these streams of experience that are said to occur in nature are not accompanied by a feeling of there being a self. A tree, for instance, has no ego. Harris herself suggests (1:16:00) that all consciousness has a structure, and that there is a certain structure of consciousness that can generate a sense of self. She acknowledges that the structure which generates the illusion of a self would have to be extraordinarily rich and complex, as well as being able to stretch across time so as to give rise to what we call memories. Nevertheless, she denies the existence of what she calls “a receiver or a generator of thoughts” (1:22:59), maintaining that there’s no “you” giving rise to these thoughts. What I would suggest is that her notion of the self is defective. More than seventy years ago, the Scottish existentialist philosopher John Macmurray argued in his 1953-1954 Gifford Lectures (delivered at the University of Glasgow) that the Cartesian notion of the self as a thinker of thoughts is a radically mistaken one, and that the self is primarily an agent engaging in practical activities directed at other personal agents, rather than an isolated subject theorizing about what it perceives in the world “out there.” In other words, I would suggest that Harris is attacking a straw man. What is more, there is no reason to suppose that if there is a self, it has to be unchanging. For one of the most fundamental features of our experience is the fact that we undergo moral development as human beings. Selves change over time: if they didn’t, we could not grow as persons.
5. At 1:13:00, Harris proposes an interesting thought experiment. It seems possible in principle (and may well be feasible in the future) that I could somehow have access to the experiences that I had when I was a two-year-old child, even though the child who had these experiences is very different from the “me” I am today. It is even possible that a stream of someone else’s memories could be implanted in my brain, enabling me to remember being someone else! Harris contends that this demonstrates the incoherence of the notion of a self. To my mind, however, what it demonstrates is that merely having access to certain experiences is not the same as remembering them. There has to be the right kind of chain of causality, for something to qualify as a memory. (Similar problems arise when philosophers try to specify what kind of justified belief counts as knowledge, in the proper sense of the word, as anyone who is familiar with the Gettier problem will be aware.) Even today, we are familiar with the phenomenon of “false memory,” which can be implanted in people’s minds by certain mentalist techniques. If neurologists of the future succeed in implanting someone else’s memories in my brain, we should be equally dismissive of these “memories.” The fact that people may at times be unable to distinguish true from false memories does not establish that the notion of the self is a myth, but rather, that the self is not the actual memories we have, but what organizes these memories into a coherent autobiographical narrative. The ability to organize memories does not entail being infallible right about their content. As far as we know, autobiographical memory (unlike episodic memory, which is found in many animals) is a uniquely human trait – a point which was not discussed in the interview.
I thought I’d heard of her. She has collaborated on a book with her husband, Sam Harris, whose name has cropped up here before, I think.
Watching the video piecemeal as time permits.
I’m currently around 18:00, where Harris talks about the difficulty of ascertaining whether other systems (living or otherwise) are conscious if they can’t communicate that to us. I would add that even if they can communicate with us, and even if they do report having conscious experiences, we can’t take for granted that they’re conscious, particularly if they’re constructed quite differently from us.
It’s conceivable for a system to report conscious experiences even when they’re absent — even if “no one is home”, to put it colloquially. For that matter, each of us cannot be sure that other people are conscious, despite the fact that they report having conscious experiences. It’s conceivable that the reports are false, and that no one is home. We don’t believe that intuitively, of course, and though we can’t be sure, I think we have solid reasons for believing that other people are conscious. We’re constructed in a particular way, and we’re conscious. They’re constructed in a similar way, and so it seems reasonable (but not airtight) to infer that they are conscious too. It would be weird for us to be constructed so similarly yet not share the characteristic of being conscious.
As systems become more different from us, it becomes harder to decide whether they are conscious. How will we decide whether sufficiently advanced AIs are conscious? It’s easy to imagine them reporting conscious experience while not actually having it. Or what about intelligent aliens who have evolved quite differently from humans? What about octopuses, who have strange (to us) nervous systems where the majority of the neurons are in the arms, not in the head, and the arms can operate independently?
keiths,
I would have asked Vincent at some point, but as you bring it up, what do you mean by “consciousness” in the context of your comment? Is it synonymous with “awareness”? Awareness can be assessed objectively ( heh) across species, to an extent, quantitatively, as a property of living (heh²) organisms. I object to those who want to give consciousness independence.
Cephalopods are strange? How do cephalopods view us? With deep suspicion and mistrust, justifiably.
Is being alive a universal, definable state?
Am I asking if the following two statements are exclusive, inclusive, contradictory, other:
1. Consciousness exists absent life.
2. Life exists absent consciousness.
Anyone can answer. 😉
Alan:
Conscious experience. Thomas Nagel famously asked, in the title of a paper, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” I would say that if it is like something to be a bat, then bats are conscious. Being a bat is an experience, not just a phenomenon.
The word ‘consciousness’ has multiple senses, but that’s the way I’m using it in my comment above.
Are we conscious when we dream?
Why is this not a commonly asked question?
One thing we have learned from AI is the closer we come to passing the Turing test, the more unreliable the output. To human is err.
Hi everyone. I’ve finally attached my comments to the OP. I’ll be happy to respond to your queries later.
Vincent,
I haven’t watched any further, but I do have thoughts on some of your comments.
You wrote:
I agree that emergentism doesn’t imply dualism, but there is an important difference between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of the fission chain reaction. The latter is predictable from the known characteristics of neutrons and U-235 atoms, and indeed that’s what motivated Fermi’s experiments and the Manhattan Project. The emergence of consciousness is different. No one (in my opinion, anyway) has shown why subjective experience should emerge from certain complicated arrangements of atoms.
Complicated information processing, yes. Subjective experience, no.
Suppose that no one had ever looked inside a skull and that the default belief was that our consciousness was the product of an immaterial soul. Would anyone predict, even from a sophisticated understanding of physical systems, that consciousness would emerge if the parts were arranged in a particular, complicated way?
It isn’t just that we can’t predict the emergence of consciousness from our present knowledge of physical systems (including the brain.) It’s that it’s hard to see how consciousness could emerge at all, in any physical system, since consciousness seems qualititatively different from physical interactions. This is what David Chalmers christened the “Hard Problem” of consciousness, and it’s what motivates his property dualism.
I don’t think that property dualism is necessary to explain consciousness, but I acknowledge that this is more of an intuition than an inference. In any case, it’s clear to me that substance dualism isn’t required and isn’t even defensible. Did Harris distinguish between property dualism and substance dualism in the video? I’d guess that she was referring to property dualism when she made her claim. God knows (so to speak) that most people studying consciousness are not substance dualists, and for good reason.
That strikes me as somewhat similar to Berkeley’s idealism, where matter is really just an idea in God’s mind. Matter as consciousness is similar, though I know Harris is an atheist and therefore wouldn’t suggest God as a seat of universal consciousness, or even suggest such a seat at all. Presumably the universal consciousness is just there, detached from any particular experiencer. Her denial of the self, which you mention in a later comment, fits with this.
What’s the cutoff for significance? If one trillionth of a second isn’t enough, then what about one millionth? One millisecond? Ten seconds? 24 hours? A finite lifetime?
The real question is whether experience is significant even if the span of memory is precisely zero — not even one trillionth of a second. I think it still is. Experience would be vastly different in the absence of any memory, even short-term memory, but it would still be experience, distinguishable from non-experience.
All of this reminds me of something that creeps me out about surgery. In addition to general anesthetics, amnestics are often administered — substances that prevent memory formation. The idea is that if you accidentally wake up during surgery, you won’t remember it afterwards. There are horrifying incidents where people are anesthetized enough to be paralyzed, but they wake up during surgery and experience excruciating pain. Because they’re paralyzed, they’re unable to communicate that to the surgeon or the anesthesiologist. They’re forced to suffer helplessly, in silence.
Amnestics prevent you from remembering this if it happens to you, and that’s a motivation for their use. You suffer in the moment, but the lack of traumatic memories protects you from post-op effects. But if the agony isn’t remembered, does it count? I say yes, and I think most people would agree. The medical community certainly does. If they didn’t, then it would be OK to perform surgery without anesthetics at all, provided that you administered sufficient amnestics to prevent traumatic memories from forming.
All of this to reinforce my point that the limited duration of memory doesn’t erase the significance of experience, even when memory is fleeting or doesn’t exist at all.
petrushka:
Yes. Dreaming is an experience, and it’s distinct from unconsciousness. We have perceptions while dreaming, though they’re decoupled from objective reality. We have emotions. We have thoughts. What does dreaming lack that would disqualify it from being classified as consciousness?
I think it’s because most people think the answer is obvious, for reasons similar to the ones I offer in this comment.
Keiths:
In what way? I had the most vivid dream this morning which was rich in detail and, when I woke and realised I had just been dreaming, I was able to reflect how it connected in interesting ways to current events in my real life. There hasn’t been an attempt yet to try and explain or define what “consciousness” is or isn’t. I cite my dream as evidence that dreaming and being unaware of your surrounding reality and being awake and aware of your real surroundings are both brain activity. Curious to hear counter-arguments.
keiths:
Alan:
We experience thoughts, emotions, and perceptions while dreaming, just as we do when we’re awake and conscious. Contrast that with unconsciousness.
It all fits. You describe the dream as vivid and rich in detail. Those are descriptions of what the experience of dreaming was like for you. You were having an experience. You weren’t unconscious.
Sure there has. Earlier in the thread, you asked:
I replied:
Alan:
I agree. If you’re looking for counterarguments, you’ll most likely need to find someone who believes in an immaterial soul that carries out the functions of dreaming and being aware of one’s surroundings. (That’s not a defensible belief, but a lot of people hold it.) People like me who don’t believe in a soul ascribe those functions to the brain, and thus we agree with you.
Common speech equates consciousness with awareness of surroundings. I have a vivid memory of a dream during surgery, 70 years ago. I can see it as clearly as if I had just awakened moments ago. I’m not sure why this persists, when most dreams evaporate rather quickly. Perhaps this is another reason why surgeons use drugs to suppress memory formation.
The paradox arises when we dream is, we are aware of our confabulated surroundings.
I don’t keep a dream diary, but I believe I have resumed dream situations, as if my dream world has its own semi-permanent memory.
This is scary. 🙂
My last experience of unconsciousness was a couple of months ago (French preventative health checks, endoscopy both ends, don’t ask) and being put under sedation, not so deep as to need intubation, last memory was of counting to 7 (the anaesthetist said nobody gets to 10) and, next thing, I’m waking in the recovery ward with no sense of time passing, a complete blank. I even wondered if the procedure had been delayed and was still to come. (9 out of 9 for those who know).
I think Frans der Waal had a better approach than Nagel, with various species of animal and the mirror and mark experiments.
Still enjoying recalling this morning’s dream. It involved insects, holiday accomodation arrangements, and not talking over women. The insect aspect triggered by me looking for something in the sous-sol and being rained on by some peculiar dust. On closer inspection, this turned out to be some species of wood-ant mining the polystyrene under-floor insulation, and by then a fair number had landed on me. After dusting off and looking more closely, I could see a column of ants exporting crumbs of polystyrene guarded by soldiers adopting a typical raised abdomen pose. Around the same time, Mrs F is explaining travel arrangements for our daughter who is giving a talk on ocean sustainability at a UNESCO conference in Nice and will be staying with us a few days on her way there. Then I was reminded of my habit of blurting out opinions and not allowing people space to respond. Also biting flies have just come out for the warmer weather.
So, in my dream, I’m in some poorly equipped cheap digs, no wife, trying to clear away all the creepers blocking the patio when I notice insects covering my hands, wrists, arms. I look closely and there is a mixture of flies and hornets, all adopting a raised body stance. I gingerly brush them off and notice there are insects everywhere, the ones that really caught my eye were bugs, bodies disguised as leaves, the most beautiful green, all with the same raised-abdomen stance. So I go off to check the rest of the place and find another family who have much better accomodation including a bath/laundry room that they refuse to share. I object to this and begin complaining to an athletic young woman who tells me to allow her the space to explain why my entitlement is misplaced
It felt so real. Then I woke up
Here is Larry Arnhart on a debate between Der Waal and Michael Tomasello which I found enlightening.
If I were attempting to build a machine (AI) that is conscious, I would start by imbuing it with simple tropisms, attraction and avoidance. These would presumably be linked to feeding and reproduction.
Assuming it could evolve, and assuming the environment is complex and changing, I would expect it to evolve systems that enhance its response to stimuli.
At some point those systems might begin to resemble instincts, and further down the road, memory.
I am probably wrong, but I think consciousness can only arise by evolving.
I’d quibble on the use of “arise”. I strongly agree that complex behaviour emerged by evolutionary processes. And selection was the driving force.
Hi everyone. Got to head off to work in a sec, but on the subject of whether we’re conscious while we’re dreaming, most neuroscientists would say that we are, despite our inability to give an accurate report of our surroundings. This is largely because of the strong phenomenological and neurological affinities between dream sleep and brain wakefulness. Here are some links to online articles that will help bring you up to speed, as well as an interesting recent article on lucid dreaming:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0074774210920096
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dream-states/
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00637/full
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a64563688/lucid-dreaming-consciousness/
Got to run. Have a good day!
petrushka:
I don’t see that as a paradox. Consciousness requires awareness of something, but that something doesn’t have to be part of our actual surroundings. It can also be thoughts, emotions, and non-veridical perceptions. A person can be awake and hallucinating — a vivid, fully immersive hallucination, completely unrelated to their actual surroundings — but I wouldn’t characterize them as being unconscious.
Some of my favorite dreams are about flying unaided. In those dreams I’m aware of the desire to fly, the sensations of flying, and the exhilaration. I’m aware of the thoughts I’m having. It’s like something to have those dreams. It’s an experience, and I form memories of it, which is why I’m able to describe it to you now. To say that all of those things were happening, yet I wasn’t conscious, seems odd to me.
If you’re having an experience, you’re conscious — of that experience, if nothing else.
The Hard Problem isn’t the problem of explaining how we become aware of our surroundings — it’s the problem of explaining how we become aware at all, and how that awareness arises from certain configurations of matter and energy.
I should add that there’s a widely-held view that waking consciousness is actually a kind of dream, but a dream that is constrained by sensory input. In other words, whether dreaming or not, our brains maintain a model of reality. When sensory data is mostly shut off, as it is during dreams, that model can drift, unconstrained, into all kinds of weird places that are unrelated to our surroundings. When we’re awake, though, sensory data updates the model when it drifts away from reality.
The philosopher Andy Clark is a prominent proponent of the idea that the brain is a prediction machine. It models reality and “runs” the model as a kind of simulation. What the model does amounts to a prediction of what reality will do, and sensory data is used to either confirm the correctness of the prediction or to update the model if the prediction is incorrect.
Neil, if he’s reading, will disagree with all of this. He’s a proponent of direct perception, which is the idea that we directly perceive our surroundings with no intermediate modeling involved, but I don’t think that view is tenable. Certain perceptual illusions, in particular, strongly point to the existence of a model.
Dreams themselves also point to the existence of a model. What are we perceiving during a dream, if not a model of reality? There’s no sensory data for us to perceive.
Alan:
Their goals were entirely different. Nagel argued against reductive materialism as an explanation of consciousness. De Waal’s focus was on cognition and social behavior in animals.
Yes, I’m reading. No, I don’t disagree with ALL of that. I do disagree with some of it.
Yes, I’m a proponent of direct perception, in the sense that we are perceiving the world rather than perceiving a retinal image. But that’s not what you describe. You seem to describing (and disagreeing with) something closer to John Searle’s version of direct perception. In Searle’s version, we see the world as it is. However, I disagree that there such a thing as a way that the world is. We see the world as we see the world, and there’s no way that I can tell whether you see the world in the same way as I see the world.
My view is that we categorize the world, and then we perceive the categories. Maybe you would consider that to be modeling.
Neil:
That rings a bell. I know we discussed this, and I remember arguing that there has to be a way the world is unless you deny that objective reality exists, or deny that it has characteristics — in other words, deny that it is a certain way — and that those characteristics feed into the perceptual process and influence what we perceive. Anyway, no need to rehash that discussion unless you have novel arguments to present.
I’d say that modeling goes far beyond categorization and the perception of categories. I vaguely remember presenting you with a thought experiment that involved a bowling ball and some kind of ramp contraption. It was a scenario in which we could predict what would happen when the ball was released, and I contended that we had to mentally model the physics in order to make that prediction. Categorization wouldn’t have been sufficient.
Anyway, back to the topic of dreams. What do you think about my earlier statement?
I think analog is orders of magnitude faster than digital emulations of analog, and chemistry seems to be similarly faster than emulations of chemistry.
At the moment, it seems that AI architecture cannot evolve the way chemistry evolves. The particular course of evolution that resulted in consciousness seems to elude attempts at reverse engineering. That could change, but I don’t expect it to happen in my lifetime.
There are at least two intertwined questions: one is, what is this “we” or “I” thing that perceives. The second question — and one that is potentially solvable— is, what are the requisite physical structures.
I am astonished that LLMs are so competent, but I see no evidence that they have the right architecture to be conscious. Whereas my cat, who in in most ways, dumb as a brick, seems to have a fairly rich consciousness.
I don’t know if Harris addresses this in the video, but I think that she and other panpsychists face one particularly daunting challenge: namely, the challenge of explaining how the mini-consciousnesses of individual subatomic particles combine to form unified higher consciousnesses, up to and including human consciousness.
If a particle has its own separate mini-consciousness, why doesn’t it continue to have that separate mini-consciousness when it becomes part of a brain? What causes it to combine? Why isn’t a brain just a collection of particles, each with its own separate consciousness? If a particle’s consciousness does combine with that of others, how does it know when to combine and when not to? Why do some complex arrangements of particles lead to human consciousness while others do not?
Take a conscious human brain and rearrange all of the particles in some equally complex but quite different way. Would the new aggregate be conscious? I see no reason to think so. The consciousness of a brain seems to depend on something very different from the fact that it’s an aggregate, or even an aggregate with a complexity on par with the brain. It isn’t aggregation or complexity per se that give rise to consciousness, but rather particular kinds of complex structures.
I think there’s some sleight of hand going on here. Panpsychism doesn’t really solve the problem of emergence, because without a solid explanation of how particle consciousnesses combine to produce higher consciousnesses, it explains nothing.
It’s really the fallacy of composition. That a brain is conscious doesn’t require that its individual particles be conscious, nor would the consciousness of the individual particles explain the consciousness of the entire brain.
To use the classic analogy, the wetness of a drop of water does not require that its constituent particles be wet, nor would the wetness of the individual particles be expected to produce wetness at the drop level. I think it’s similarly goofy to claim that the brain’s consciousness derives from the consciousness of its constituent particles.
Put another way, I think panpsychists have just substituted one Hard Problem for another. The alchemy that would transform individual particle consciousnesses into a unified brain-based consciousness under panpsychism is just as mysterious as the alchemy that transforms unconscious matter into conscious brains under non-panpsychism. It’s emergence either way, in my opinion.
I am not persuaded.
That assumes a lot. What I do know is that his essay was not Nagel’s finest hour.
keiths:
Neil:
If there’s no model, what are we perceiving while dreaming? If perception is merely categorization, what is being categorized? How does categorization lead to a sequence of events unfolding in a dream?
Alan:
keiths:
Alan:
It assumes nothing more than the ability of two articulate men to express themselves. Judging by what they wrote, they clearly had different goals.
Nagel is concerned with how consciousness arises, and argues that it cannot be explained by reductive physicalism. De Waal doesn’t address that question. He takes consciousness for granted and concerns himself with the cognitive, emotional and social abilities of a range of animals.
Don’t be fooled by the title of Nagel’s paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. It’s a rhetorical question that he doesn’t attempt to answer. He argues instead that we can’t know what it’s like to be a bat because that is a subjective question that cannot be answered by third-person scientific investigation. Hence his rejection of reductive physicalism.
Also, don’t be misled by de Waal’s mirror experiments. Those test for self-awareness, not for consciousness. Even if they did test for consciousness, they wouldn’t be attempts at explaining how it arises — just tests for whether it is present or absent in various species. Not at all what Nagel is doing.
We are not perceiving. We are dreaming, which is not at all the same as perceiving.
That’s probably the wrong question. Can you explain why having an internal model would lead to a sequence of events?
With older analog radios, a technician would use a signal generator to consistently tune the various circuits. My current suspicion is that the brain is generating signals to consistently tune the categorization in different parts of the brain, and that this is why we dream.
vjtorley:
I’ve watched the rest of the video, and I see Harris saying that if the self is an illusion, the problem I described in this comment (aka “the combination problem”) vanishes. However, I’ve watched that part of the video twice and I still can’t see why that should be the case.
On one hand, she seems to be saying that if the self is an illusion, there is no place where the primitive consciousnesses of individual particles combine to form the higher form of consciousness we associate with a self (or with the brain belonging to that self). No combination means no combination problem. But if there’s no combination, what accounts for the qualitatively different character of human consciousness?
She acknowledges the vast differences between human consciousness and the more primitive consciousnesses she attributes to particles. If the higher consciousness exists and has these special attributes, but isn’t some sort of combination of the lower consciousnesses, then it must exist in parallel with them. In that case, how does the higher consciousness become associated with the particular set of particles that make up a brain?
Also (and Vincent seems to agree), I don’t think the fact that we change over time gives us reason to doubt the existence of the self. Regardless of whether the folk notion of a self is correct, there is a locus of experience and memory that can be regarded as a self. My memories belong to me; petrushka’s are petrushka’s. Separate loci of memory. I feel thirsty right now, but I’m unaware of Vincent’s itching left arm. Separate loci of sensation. I’m distinctly and directly aware of my own thoughts, but not of J-Mac’s, thank God. Separate loci of cognition. My various senses are bound together in a unified experience, but my unified experience differs from Neil’s. Separate loci of binding.
If Harris wants to argue that these loci don’t constitute a self, fine, but that doesn’t mean the loci don’t exist. And the existence of the loci means that the combination problem is still a problem.
Harris mentions that she’s written a paper on the combination problem. When I have time, I’ll take a look at it to see if it clears up any of the issues I’ve mentioned here.
keiths:
Neil:
I chose the word ‘perceiving’ because what we do in dreams really is a kind of perception, though it isn’t based on sensory input. The things we’re perceiving in dreams aren’t really there, but we’re perceiving them nonetheless, and the experience is much the same as waking perception.
I perceived a giant blimp floating over my house in a recent dream. That blimp doesn’t exist in reality, but I perceived it in my dream. I saw its shape, its color, its motion through the sky, and I heard the noise of its propellers. The experience was very much like it would have been in real life. I couldn’t tell the difference.
It isn’t just dreams. Joseph Smith (if his account is to be believed) perceived the angel Moroni talking to him and telling him about the gold plates, even though Moroni doesn’t actually exist (sorry, Mormons). We also perceive things when viewing optical illusions that aren’t there in reality.
Interestingly, our visual cortex lights up during dreams, and so does the auditory cortex. Wernicke’s area, too, for processing speech. These are the same areas that light up in real life when we are seeing, hearing, and being spoken to.
I’m hearing REM’s “South Central Rain” in my head right now, though it isn’t playing in reality. However, if you looked at my auditory cortex, you’d see activity similar to what you’d see if I were actually hearing the music.
So whether or not you’re willing to apply the word ‘perception’ to it, something very similar to perception is happening in dreams and in other situations where what we’re experiencing isn’t based on sensory input. I don’t see how categorization can explain it.
keiths:
Neil:
It’s the one I was intending to ask. I’m trying to think of what I would be categorizing during my blimp dream and why the categorization would generate the sensation of seeing the blimp noisily cross the sky.
Yes. Models can be dynamic and evolve over time. For instance, I found the bowling ball example I referred to above:
The reason you’re able to predict the final state of the eggs is that you’ve modeled the scenario in your head and run the model forward in time. It’s a simulation. I contend that the same thing happens in dreams, though the simulation can be a bit wonky because there’s no sensory data to constrain it and the frontal lobes are suppressed.
Why would that sort of tuning lead to the kinds of dreams we experience? And again, what is being categorized and how does the categorization lead to an unfolding sequence of events in our dreams?
If it isn’t based on sensory input, then it isn’t perception.
Where would the category of “blimp” come from, if you are not categorizing?
I emphasize categorization, because it is prerequisite to having information. All information is information about categories. In order to observe that the cat is on the mat, you had to first categorize something as a cat, categorize something as a mat and categorize the relation between them as “on”. In order to read a book, I have to categorize those ink marks on paper as letters of the alphabet.
Perception is not input. Perception is impression. When you feel, you perceive, be it somebody/something else doing the input or not. And dreams are an excellent example of self-made perception. In dreams you absolutely perceive. It may be very illusory and deluded perception, but this does not make it a lack of perception.
Neil:
I think your definition is needlessly narrow. I’m sure you’d agree that seeing is a form of perception. Would you then object if someone said “What you see in your dreams isn’t there in reality”?
In any case, the choice of word is tangential to my main point, which is that categorization is insufficient to explain what happens while we are dreaming.
It isn’t that categorization is absent in dreams. It’s just not their driver. I categorized the object as a blimp after it appeared in my dream, but categorization isn’t what caused it to appear in the first place, and categorization doesn’t explain why I
perceivedsawseemed to see the blimp moving across the sky above my house. Modeling does.For most of my life here has been an assumption that if a machine could converse like a human, it would be conscious.
Now we have machines that can at least converse like autistic savants, or high functioning Asperger’s people. It has reached the point where teachers tried to detect AI generated term papers by searching for em dashes, and AI builders have responded by teaching AI not to use hypercorrect typography.
I had a friend in college who said, when I made a pun, “I recognize jokes intellectually, but I do not experience humor. I really don’t understand why people like it.”
I would like to think that consciousness is grounded in emotion, which is grounded in survival mechanisms that have evolved from reflexive behavior in single celled animals.
But I chat with people who do not seem to experience emotion the same way I do.
Edit: The superfluous apostrophe proves I’m human.
Only if you believe that the Turing test is almighty. Those who know what philosophical zombies are never had such an assumption.
petrushka:
Not so fast. I’m on to you. You’re an AI pretending to be human by sprinkling mistakes into your comments.
What have you done with petrushka???
EDIT: That explains the personality change we’ve noticed lately in ‘petrushka’. No one can play the curmudgeon the way the real petrushka does. 😛
petrushka:
Erik:
GPT 4.5 is already passing the Turing test, but I don’t see many people arguing that it’s conscious. This guy might be an exception.
When it was assumed the Turing test was a distant goal, it was taken seriously.
Now we can see it was a baby step.
Speaking of which, what is it with childhood/infantile amnesia?
I have at best, one memory prior to age four, and very sketchy memories prior to age five.
I currently have a 2 1/2 year old grandson who seems like a fully functioning person. It is shocking to think he will remember nothing of this year.
VJ,
Thanks for this article.
Do you realize there are people who have half of the brain mass removed or 90% disabled and yet they remain their consciousness?
There are plenty of people who remember at least something of the year when they were two years old. I remember it myself.
Hi keiths,
You write:
Nowhere in the video does Harris distinguish between property dualism and substance dualism. I agree that her claim makes a lot more sense if she is referring to property dualism, but most individuals (including myself) tend to think of substance dualism when they hear the word “dualism.” I might also add that even in chemistry, scientists’ success in deriving the properties of substances such as water from those of their atomic constituents has been very modest indeed.
In any case, I have to ask: what’s the philosophical advantage in positing that elementary particles are conscious, as opposed to the position that certain complex structures composed of these particles are conscious? Even at the particle level, we still have this property (consciousness) which is not like the other properties (e.g. a particle’s rest mass and charge), and that still strikes me as odd. The only philosophical explanation which eliminates this oddity is idealism, which reduces all material properties to mental properties, but that’s not really an option that’s open to Harris, who is a materialist and a naturalist.
Later, you write:
I agree with you that Harris’s explanation amounts to a philosophical sleight of hand. In any case, leaving talk of a “self” aside, the binding problem of consciousness, which relates to how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience, is widely acknowledged in the scientific literature. Here’s how researcher Anne Treisman defines it an her article, “Feature binding, attention and object perception” (Phil. Trans R. Soc London B, 353, 1295–1306):
Nothing that I’ve seen in the video sheds any real light on this question.
For my own part, I’m sympathetic to the claims of the new mysterians such as Colin McGinn, who insist that human consciousness will always remain an inexplicable mystery to us. We simply lack the conceptual wherewithal to dissolve the mystery. Cheers.
Hi J-Mac,
You wrote:
I have read of such cases. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the “Irish Times” (“Remarkable story of maths genius who had almost no brain,” Thursday, November 9, 2006):
Pretty spooky story, isn’t it? It’s amazing that the student was bright and functional, yet his cerebral tissue was only 2% as deep as a normal person’s.
Lorber’s own explanation is that “[t]here must be a tremendous amount of spare capacity in the brain, just as there is with liver and kidney.”
I might also point out that a raven, whose cognitive abilities compare favorably with those of a chimpanzee, has a brain of just 15 cubic centimeters in volume, compared to 384 cubic centimeters for a chimp. Make of that what you will.
My parents moved from a subdivision house to a log house in the wood before my third birthday. I think I remember seeing it for the first time. That’s it, until four something.