TomN - Aug 12, 2012, 12:03a

If you haven't read "Second Person, Present Tense" by Daryl Gregory, I highly recommend this SF short story.

You can find a copy via the Internet Archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100114004527/http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0702/Secondperson.shtml

The author's notes are an interesting post-read:
http://www.darylgregory.com/stories/SecondPersonPresentTense.aspx

It is just Science Fiction and it's a few years old now, but you might enjoy it.



nikhil - Aug 12, 2012, 10:49a
That's a neat story Tom. Thanks for that.

Another way to think of the 3 facets of consciousness is:
* Step 1 = Perception : "Stuff is happening."
* Step 2 = Self : "Some of the stuff that is happening is happening to me."
* Step 3 = Free will : "I have control over the some of the stuff that is happening to me."


Raja - Aug 13, 2012, 12:14p
"If we seek to understand ourselves, we must first understand the physical basis of consciousness."

Is this true? Might it be enough to have a working, descriptive understanding of how consciousness manifests itself, i.e. how we humans tend to interpret and relate to our notion of consciousness? Is it necessary to get answers to its physical underpinnings in order to live a meaningful life?

Put another way, how would having answers to the questions you are posing change the way you live or interpret your existence? It's fine if you just happen to be interested in thinking about and trying to find answers to those questions, but it's a much stronger claim to say that getting answers to these questions is somehow "important."

Somewhat related question (via the late philosopher Richard Rorty): Can you hypothesize a potential answer to the questions you've posed that would be satisfying and coherent? For most questions we ask about the world, it's usually pretty easy to give an example of a coherent answer even before doing any investigation. It's then possible to do research and test hypotheses that are based on our a priori "guesses".

It's not entirely clear what those testable hypotheses would even look like with respect to the most difficult questions surrounding consciousness (e.g. free will), but I am curious to hear what you think and what the current take on that problem is within the neuroscience community.


nikhil - Aug 14, 2012, 6:56a
Good to hear from you Raja!

Alright, let's start at the beginning. In general, I think either I haven't been clear or you've misunderstood me. My quote:

"If we seek to understand ourselves, we must first understand the physical basis of consciousness."

I am definitely no trying to imply that it is necessary to answer the question of consciousness to live a meaningful life. Clearly no one has a satisfactory answer to this question but clearly loads of people live meaningful lives (or have meaningful aspects to the lives they live). I think we're debating 2 kinds of "understanding" - the first one (which I think you're talking about) is at the descriptive level. Take another phenomenon, let's say flying. When humans wanted to understand flying, it was totally reasonable to begin by surveying birds and floaters in the wind and other things that naturally flew. Describe them, describe their body plan and anatomy, their colors, and any other descriptive attribute - when they flew, for how long, from where to where, etc. With this compendium of knowledge, it's possible to predict whether new objects would fly or not (inference), and also to build something that flew (perhaps some of those fast-flapping lightweight bird-looking toys fall into this category). But I would say that this level of understanding remained superficial, even though the total bulk of knowledge was huge. To really understand flight more generally, I think you had to understand certain concepts, such as lift and how differential air pressure supports flight in the shape of wings. This second kind of understanding follows from the first, but the first alone is not satisfactory in my opinion, though necessary for getting to the second. This analogy can also be applied to the field of medicine and how a molecular understanding of diseases is a much less superficial understanding than a symptom-level kind of understanding. This is the epistemology of reductionism.

This quote is definitely not meant to have much existential power - think of it more as "if I want to get past the superficial and really get a better flavor of consciousness, I've got to start thinking about the mechanisms that underly it. I have to physically dissect it." As far as we can tell consciousness should have a physical basis, so other kinds of dissections (e.g. psychological, metaphysical, behavioral) may be interesting and helpful, but they won't get at the heart of the matter, so to speak.

This is not meant to be depressing or have any emotional content. It's just meant to be a statement of fact.

I only think the basis of consciousness is "important" if you care about consciousness - most people I talk to don't think about it at all. So for them it isn't important. But if you happen to be one of the few who are interested, I think it's important in the sense that if you want to be a good doctor, understanding the molecular basis of your patients' ailments is important. It's not the whole story and many other pieces also need to be there, but without it there's a huge gap in the work.

On to your "what would a potential answer even look like?" question. Again I guess I wasn't clear enough in my writing. For the question, "How does certain parts of the brain create consciousness", I don't think there is a possible answer, and I agree with you. I likened that to asking "How do positive and negative charges attract?" or "How does mass generate gravity?" These are questions about the properties of objects, properties which ultimately form a sort of ground truth. Even if I answer those questions I could always ask how the answers exist and just move the question one level down, forever. At some point I just have to accept that there are objects with specific properties, and go from there.

So the motivating question is clearly "How does the brain create consciousness?" but I'm willing to accept that consciousness is just a property of the brain. It's like saying that objects which have the properties X, Y and Z will also have the property of consciousness. What I'm now interested in, and what I think is scientifically tractable, is to figure out what the properties X, Y and Z are. Ideally, these properties would be both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. We know that some parts of the brain clearly play more important roles in consciousness than other parts, and I will write about one example in a later post. Why does part A of the brain have a role in consciousness while part does not? What makes these 2 parts, though sitting right next to each other, different in relation to consciousness? Is it what other parts they're functionally connected to? The way in which they're connected? Posed this way, the question becomes one of comparison, and comparing things is what science is all about (experiment vs. control).

I hope this long-ish comment clarifies. I'm also primarily focused on the question of perception, not of self or free will, so my comments above are directed at that aspect of consciousness.

The goal now is to find those neural differences that make the difference between conscious experiences and unconscious ones.


Andy L - Aug 30, 2012, 11:45a
Great post! Looking forward to see where you are taking this!


Gokul - Oct 14, 2012, 11:05a
Another wonderful post! Looking forward for the rest in the consciousness series!

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