Ask HN: Where does consciousness come from?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombies.html seems a little relevant.

This is one of the central questions of cognitive neuroscience today, and scientists aren't even close to a convincing answer. It is exactly the wrong question for an ask HN post -- it's like a bunch of sailors speculating about quantum mechanics. Please read the papers. Here's a great introductory video for a lay audience -- Dan Dennett's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consci...

I do sympathize with your point that the abstract scientific jargon seems to leave one wanting for a "real" answer, but since the science itself is way incomplete at this point, any attempt to pare it down will result in something that's no better than random guessing.

I'm sure everyone who studies the brain wonders very much how neuron firings correlate with these thoughts or any others. I'm equally sure everyone who studies the brain would be surprised if they weren't "based on nothing more than electrical signals firing off."

Another interesting author to read is Brian Fay. He argues that the conscious 'self' does not exist as a concrete thing, but rather, it is dynamically created through interaction. He gives a very interesting analogy of an eye traveling through space, and can only become aware of itself by seeing its reflection. He then explains that we see our reflection in others, and eventually that becomes internalised.

The reality is that the brain is the most complex structure we have yet encountered, and it will be a very long time before we fully understand how it works and how the mind is thus constructed within it.

Now, I simply don't bother.

Is there some test to prove if something has "consciousness"? Without such a test I don't think we can know what it really is. You might propose having the thing explain the feeling to you, but I could just program a computer to do the same thing (theoretically).

I have no way of knowing whether or not anyone else besides myself experiences this thing called consciousness.

You all could be perfectly designed robots that are tricking me into believing you're also humans who experience consciousness.

My view of things was shaped a lot by some sections of Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. If you allow that symbols (think of a bunch of object properties + some methods) can be represented in the brain and operate on each other. (There's a good description in GEB which suggests we use a javascript-like prototype object-based system. Briefly, if someone starts talking about an individual they know called Joe, who's a football player, you basically mint a fresh new symbol which carries some of it's own data (name => Joe) but also inherits from your default 'football player' symbol. As you find out more about Joe, you add more specific data on Joe's symbol, which shadows the football player one. That, to me, explains a lot about prejudice (some people's heads overly-favour the inherited attributes. But I digress...)

Your brain models the world by creating symbols which reflect the world (evolution helps for that). An important (the biggest/most complex?) symbol in your head is the one which represents yourself.

Consciousness is then that symbol operating on itself.

All this is of course happening in a physical substrate which has it's own methods of affecting things (psychoactive substances washing through your brain etc).

I think one book you may benefit from reading is http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent.... It's a wonderful and short book with some subtle humor and amazing powers of explanation. After reading it you may very well have a better understanding of how it's possible (and how many different ways it might be possible) for what we see as complex behaviors to emerge.

I've had dozens of friends read this short book, and they've all thanked me for the recommendation and ended up buying a copy for themselves.

It is both scary and amusing to me that there are entire (expensive) conferences dedicated to something the participants can't even give a definition for.

Saying that chemical activity "causes" us to feel certain emotions is not correct. A little thinking could show you how absurd this is. "Causing" would mean that there is some sort of cause and effect here, some event X that causes event Y. Like when you turn on the kettle and the water boils. So this would mean that when a chemical event X is happenning in a brain, it will cause the person to feel an emotional event Y. This is an absurd hypothesis. Where is event Y? It's actually hard for me to explain why I find that hypothesis so absurd. Maybe someone here can help.

Anyway, my opinion is that THERE IS a correspondece between chemical events and emotional events, but it's not causality. I can't lay down all of my theory here, but I would say that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the "inside" world and the "outside" world. (Like a 1-1 correspondence between sets.) And those X and Y are paired together in that correspondence.

I remember when I was in elementary school I wanted to make a conscious computer program. I was programming in Basic at the time. I thought, "Okay, the program should be able to feel pain. So I should make a variable PAIN, and when certain events happen it will cause PAIN to be equal to 1 or 0 or -1 or whatever." But I kind of got stuck there, because what do you do after you set a value to the PAIN variable? The best you can do is to have the PAIN variable determine the behavior of the creature, for example to make it scream "ouch". I believe that when it comes to emotions of creatures other than ourselves, behavior is all there is to their emotions. When it comes to our own emotions, it's more complicated and independent of our brains.

it can boil down as far as gauging the responses of one neuron, but the "environment" of that neuron is its connectivity to others, so it's far more comprehensive to total consciousness up as the whole collective.

ideally, you'd be able to single out a singular and distinct "thought" and trace the workings of all your cognitive elements involved. the result of this thought then loops back through the system and re-patterns it with a "conclusion".

the chemical nature of one's neurons is the important part whether malleable or incorrigible, allowing us to exhibit unique traits and personality.

Also, you might find the brain science podcast ( http://brainsciencpodcast.wordpress.com ) interesting. She tackles some of these questions also, summarizes current research and interviews other people in the field.

your question is great, the motivation is wonderful, and may your search be fruitful .. it is the reason for birth, to come to understand this ...

enjoy

The brain starts well before birth. Humans don't have a single on switch so much as a long bootstrap process that starts when the first few neurons start to link up and ends at death. Although most positive changes happen by ~25 years old.

What we think of as consciousness is basically the neuron's that stop focusing on what is going on and start considering options that we don't directly carry out. AKA when you actually catch a ball you don't really think about it but when you consider how you might do a better job in the future well that's consciousness. The brain is not a fixed entity but a constantly adapting system and consciousness is really best thought of as part of that adaptive process.

The physical universe doesn't actually exist, any more than a dream world does. There are probably trillions of universes in existence-- maybe infinitely many. They can't be counted, and they don't much matter because they're physically inaccessible to us. We're lucky, though, to be in an exceedingly successful universe whose laws are set ("fine tuned") to allow for complex life. The universes that don't support complex life to observe them might be "out there", but they effectively don't exist.

Mind is eternal, but the processes it can support depend on the physical system (body/brain) to which it binds, and of course that physical system evolves and, sadly, collapses. We're extremely lucky to have our minds bound to such beautiful, powerful creatures as humans. We could've just as easily been bound to cockroaches or tapeworms (and it can happen after death in a negative rebirth, but karma's another subject entirely).

The transmigration of consciousness is taken as self-evident by Eastern religions, and there's actually a fair bit of evidence for reincarnation (refer to the work of Ian Stevenson). What's controversial is whether or not a mind-- or, at least, an unenlightened mind-- can exist independent of a physical body at all. The Theravadan perspective tends to be that it cannot, whereas Tibetan Buddhists believe in an intermediate experiential state called the bardo.

Am I butterfly dreaming I'm a man? Or a bowling ball dreaming I'm a plate of sashimi? Never assume what you see and feel is real! -- Doreen, Chrono Trigger.

Unfortunately, while this does form a powerful basis for truth in the empirically observable, it completely shatters and is horribly faulted when one tries to explain the unempirical and unobservable with only what you have. It is an extremely powerful assumption (based on faith in a worldview) that the domain of the metaphysical is purely explained by the physical (the laws of physics and the material)... In your case, where does this concept of mind, self, and consciousness come from? It's clearly powered by a physical entity (the brain), but the "self" is also clearly not a physical entity.

There is absolutely no proof that the system of material thinking holds water in other domains such as the metaphysical, so most of what scientists think about the mind and self come out of some seriously convincing bullshitting. They really have no clue how it arises, and it will never be explained unless we manage to re-create a conscious entity ourselves.

With that in mind (pun not intended), take anything you read about how the "self" comes about with a serious dose of common sense. This is where it's up to you to make a decision, because the scientists (while sounding smart), really have no more clue than you do =)