Scientists still do not know what Consciousness is

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The topic of consciousness, on the one hand, is interesting, but on the other, it disappoints and leaves with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction. Where does this duality come from? It is connected with the fact that there are many approaches and theories of consciousness, which are superimposed on a personal idea of one's own consciousness. When a person hears this word, he always has certain expectations, which, as a rule, are not met.

However, the assumptions of the majority of scientists are equally not justified. Here's an abridged translation of an essay by science journalist Michael Hanlon, in which he tries to see if science can ever solve the riddle of consciousness.

Here is a silhouette of a bird standing on the chimney of the house opposite. Evening, the sun went down about an hour ago, and now the sky is angry, pink-gray; torrential rain, which has recently ended, threatens to return. The bird is proud of itself - it looks self-confident, scanning the world around and turning its head back and forth. […] But what exactly is going on here? How does it feel to be this bird? Why look back and forth? Why be proud? How can a few grams of protein, fat, bones and feathers be so confident and not just exist - after all, this is what most matter does?

The questions are as old as the world, but definitely good. The rocks are not proud of themselves, and the stars are not nervous. Look beyond the sight of this bird and you will see a universe of stones and gas, ice and vacuum. Perhaps even a multiverse, overwhelming in its possibilities. However, from the point of our microcosm, you could hardly see anything at all with the help of only one human gaze - except perhaps a gray spot of a distant galaxy in the void of black ink.

We live in a strange place and in a strange time, among things that know that they exist, and which can reflect on it even in the most vague and subtle, most birdlike way. And this awareness requires a deeper explanation than we can and are ready to give at the present time. How the brain produces the sensation of subjective experience is such an intractable mystery that one scientist I know refuses to even discuss it at the dinner table. […] For a long time, science seemed to avoid this topic, but now the difficult problem of consciousness is back on the front pages, and a growing number of scientists believe that they have finally managed to fix it in their field of vision.

It seems that the triple strike of neurobiological, computational and evolutionary artillery really promises to solve a difficult problem. Today's consciousness researchers talk about the "philosophical zombie" and global workspace theory, mirror neurons, ego tunnels and attentional circuits, and they bow to the deus ex machina of brain science - functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Often their work is very impressive and explains a lot, nevertheless there is every reason to doubt that we will one day be able to deliver the final, crushing blow to the complex problem of "consciousness awareness."

For example, fMRI scanners have shown how people's brains “light up” when they read certain words or see certain images. Scientists in California and elsewhere have used ingenious algorithms to interpret these brain patterns and recover information from the original stimulus, to the point where they were able to reconstruct the pictures the subject was looking at. Such "electronic telepathy" has even been proclaimed the final death of privacy (which may be) and a window into consciousness (but this is not so).

The problem is that even though we know what someone is thinking or what they can do, we still don’t know what it’s like to be that person.

The hemodynamic changes in your prefrontal cortex might tell me that you are looking at a picture of sunflowers, but if I hit you in the shin with a hammer, your screams would tell me in the same way that you are in pain. However, neither one nor the other helps me know how much pain you are experiencing or how these sunflowers make you feel. In fact, it doesn't even tell me if you really have feelings.

Imagine a creature that behaves in exactly the same way as a person: walks, talks, runs away from danger, copulates and tells jokes, but has absolutely no inner mental life. And on a philosophical, theoretical level, this is quite possible: we are talking about those very "philosophical zombies."

But why could an animal initially require an experience (“qualia,” as some call it), and not just a reaction? American psychologist David Barash has summarized some of the current theories, and one possibility, he says, is that consciousness has evolved to allow us to overcome the "tyranny of pain." Primitive organisms may be slaves to their immediate needs, but humans have the ability to reflect on the meaning of their sensations and therefore make decisions with a certain degree of caution.

This is all very good, except that in the unconscious world, pain simply does not exist, so it is difficult to understand how the need to avoid it could lead to the emergence of consciousness.

Nevertheless, despite such obstacles, the idea is taking root more and more that consciousness is far from so mysterious: it is complex, yes, and not fully understood, but in the end it is just another biological process, which, if you study it a little more, will soon follow the path that DNA, evolution, blood circulation and the biochemistry of photosynthesis have already gone through.

Daniel Bohr, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, speaks of the "global neural workspace" and claims that consciousness arises in the "prefrontal and parietal cortex." His work is a kind of refinement of the theory of the global workspace, developed by the Dutch neuroscientist Bernard Baars. In both schemes of both researchers, the idea is to combine conscious experiences with neural events and report on the place that consciousness occupies in the work of the brain.

According to Baars, what we call consciousness is a kind of "center of attention" on the map of how our memory works, the inner area in which we collect the narrative of our entire life. In the same vein, Michael Graziano of Princeton University argues, who suggests that consciousness has evolved as a way for the brain to track its own state of attention, thereby allowing it to understand both itself and the brain of other people.

IT specialists are also getting into the matter: American futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that in about 20 years or even a little less computers will become conscious and take over the world. And in Lausanne, Switzerland, neuroscientist Henry Markram was given several hundred million euros to reconstruct the first rat and then the human brain to the molecular level and duplicate the activity of neurons in a computer - the so-called Blue Brain project.

When I visited Markram's lab a couple of years ago, he was convinced that modeling something as complex as the human mind is just a matter of having the best computers in the world and more money.

This is probably the case, however, even if the Markram project manages to reproduce fleeting moments of rat consciousness (which, I admit, perhaps), we still won't know how it works.

First, as the philosopher John Searle said, conscious experience is non-negotiable: “If you consciously think you are conscious, then you are conscious,” and this is hard to argue with. Moreover, the experience of consciousness can be extreme. When asked to list the most violent natural phenomena, you can point to cosmological cataclysms like supernova or gamma-ray bursts. And yet none of this matters, just as it doesn't matter a boulder rolling down a hill until it hits someone.

Compare a supernova, say, with the mind of a woman about to give birth, or a father who has just lost a child, or a captured spy undergoing torture. These subjective experiences are off the charts in importance. "Yes," you say, "but these kinds of things only matter from a human point of view." To which I will answer: in a universe where there are no witnesses, what other point of view can exist in principle?

The world was immaterial until someone saw it. And morality without consciousness is meaningless both literally and figuratively: as long as we do not have a perceiving mind, we do not have suffering to be alleviated, and there is no happiness to be maximized.

While we look at things from this lofty philosophical point of view, it is worth noting that there seems to be a rather limited range of basic variations on the nature of consciousness. You can, for example, consider that this is a kind of magical field, a soul that comes as an addition to the body, like a satellite navigation system in a car - this is the traditional idea of a "spirit in a car" of Cartesian dualism.

I guess this is exactly how most people thought about consciousness for centuries - many still think the same way. However, in academia, dualism has become extremely unpopular. The problem is that no one has ever seen this field - how does it work and, more importantly, how does it interact with the "thinking meat" of the brain? We do not see the transfer of energy. We cannot find the soul.

If you do not believe in magical fields, you are not a dualist in the traditional sense of the word and there is a good chance that you are some kind of materialist. […] Convinced materialists believe that consciousness arises as a result of purely physical processes - the work of neurons, synapses, and so on. But there are other divisions in this camp.

Some people embrace materialism, but they think there is something in biological nerve cells that gives them an edge over, say, silicon chips. Others suspect that the sheer strangeness of the quantum world must have something to do with solving the complex problem of consciousness. The obvious and eerie "observer effect" kind of hints at the fact that a fundamental but hidden reality lies at the heart of our entire world … Who knows?

Maybe this is really so, and it is in her that consciousness lives. Finally, Roger Penrose, a physicist at Oxford University, believes that consciousness arises from mysterious quantum effects in brain tissue. In other words, he does not believe in magic fields, but in magic "meat". However, it seems that so far all the evidence is playing against him.

The philosopher John Searle does not believe in magic meat, but assumes that it is important. He is a naturalist biologist who believes that consciousness arises from complex neural processes that (currently) cannot be modeled with a machine. Then there are researchers like the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who says that the mind-body problem is essentially a semantic error. Finally, there are arch-eliminativists who seem to completely deny the existence of the mental world. Their looks are helpful but insane.

So, many smart people believe in all of the above, but all theories cannot be right at the same time (although they can all be wrong)

[…] If we do not believe in magic fields and magic "meat", we must take a functionalist approach. This, on some plausible assumption, means that we can create a machine out of just about anything that thinks, feels, and enjoys things. […] If the brain is a classical computer - a universal Turing machine, to use the jargon - we could create consciousness simply by running the required program on Charles Babbage's analytical machine, created in the 19th century.

And even if the brain is not a classic computer, we still have options. As complex as it is, the brain is supposedly just a physical object, and according to the Church-Turing-Deutsch thesis of 1985, a quantum computer should be able to simulate any physical process with any degree of detail. So it turns out that all we need to model the brain is a quantum computer.

But then what? Then the fun begins. After all, if a trillion gears can be folded into a machine that can induce and experience, say, the sensation of eating a pear, should all of its cogs rotate at a certain speed? Should they be in the same place at the same time? Can we replace one screw? Are the cogs themselves or their actions conscious? Can action be conscious? German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz asked most of these questions 300 years ago, and we still have not answered any of them.

Nevertheless, it seems that everyone agrees that we should avoid using too much of the "magic" component in the matter of consciousness.

[…] Almost a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote: "Human consciousness is almost the last remaining secret." A few years later, Chalmers added: "[This] may prove to be the biggest obstacle to a scientific understanding of the universe." They were both right then, and despite the tremendous scientific progress that has taken place since then, they are right today.

I do not think that the evolutionary explanations of consciousness, which are currently going in circles, will lead us anywhere, because all these explanations do not concern the most difficult problem, but the "light" problems that revolve around it like a swarm of planets around a star. The charm of the difficult problem is that it has completely and definitively defeated science today. We know how genes work, we (probably) found the Higgs boson, and we understand Jupiter's weather better than what's going on in our heads.

In fact, consciousness is so strange and poorly understood that we can afford wild speculation that would be ridiculous in other areas. We may ask, for example, whether our increasingly mysterious inability to detect intelligent alien life has anything to do with this question. We can also assume that it is consciousness that gives rise to the physical world, and not vice versa: as early as the British physicist of the 20th century James Hopwood Jeans suggested that the universe may be "more like a great thought than a great machine." Idealistic notions continue to permeate modern physics, proposing the idea that the mind of the observer is somehow fundamental in the quantum dimension and strange in the seemingly subjective nature of time itself, as British physicist Julian Barbour speculated.

Once you accept the fact that feelings and experiences can be completely independent of time and space, you can look at your assumptions about who you are, where, and when, with a vague sense of uneasiness. I do not know the answer to the complex question of consciousness. Nobody knows. […] But until we master our own minds, we can suspect anything - it is difficult, but we must not stop trying.

The head of that bird on the roof holds more mysteries than our largest telescopes will ever reveal.