A little intro into The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Annaka starts with addressing two questions:
- Is there conclusive evidence we can find for consciousness outside a system?
- probably no… you can try to study behavior and make probable conclusions, but doesn’t seem to be an objective way to confirm conscious experience (subjective) without being that person/thing
- Is consciousness causal?
- A lot of neuroscience disproves this… our conscious feeling of making a decision is untrue
- we are not the ultimate agents of our actions
- the studies that can predict their decision before their conscious awareness of their choice
- Libet experiments which perhaps have not been replicated?
- https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2019/03/our-brains-reveal-our-choices-before-were-even-aware-of-them—st
- https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2021/01/watching-decision-making-brain
- https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/new-insights-into-the-neuroscience-behind-conscious-awareness-of-choice
If consciousness is fundamental, what does it mean to be unconscious under anesthesia? What does it mean to be a human mind and have a self? How much does memory come into play?
Is our brain made of different streams of consciousnesses, only one of which we have memory/awareness? What does this even mean?
- ex. split brain patients
- is this related to multiple personality disorder?
Am I a concrete entity that moves through time? This new conscious experience is being generated a new now. It’s being affected by the memory of previous experience. This conscious experience in this moment is being affected by the one when you were 4. Memory allows for continuity through time, a self.
You are your memory. Your brain is more than a single system. There could be hundreds of individual conscious experiences in your brain that your memory does not have access to, so you’re not calling that me.
The case of Clive Wearing, who has the shortest recorded working memory, sometimes as low as 7 seconds. He could be speaking a sentence and then not know what he said moments later.
- Constantly waking up over and over again (diary entry)
- Reminds me of the movies Mickey 17, Memento
Your current conscious experience is affected by conscious experiences in space (other’s experiences) and time.
Combination problem: if consciousness goes deeper, how do physical structures with the “lights on” come together to make a hierarchical, more complex conscious experience?
In dialogue with David Eagleman, who has done work on the temporal binding problem, which is how the brain figures out what signals belong with what in time. You can manipulate the delay between an act and the response (ex. clicking a button and seeing a flash) by a small amount, like 200 ms, to manipulate your brain’s perception into thinking the response occurred before the act, creating an illusory reversal of cause and effect.
- seems related to the Libet experiments
- https://eagleman.com/time-and-the-brain-or-what-s-happening-in-the-eagleman-lab/
Flash-lag phenomenon: perception of flash was dependent on what happens to the ring after the flash
- what you believe you see in a moment in time, depends on what happens in a window of time after the effect
- it takes time for your brain to put together a story of what happened, and the event is influenced by things that happen after the event == postdiction
- https://www.salk.edu/news-release/we-live-in-the-past-salk-scientists-discover/
We now know things about the brain that should have shifted the way we think about our minds and consciousness, but there are these barriers, these strong illusions, that prevent us from this shift.
None of us remember learning how to “use our ears”. You learned to figure out the spikes to the brain by hitting blocks together, hear your mother’s mouth move, etc.
- Eagleman’s suspicion is that the only way we can learn anything else is by linking it to a sense that we already have
- How come this one is first?
If an infant is born with only vision, no motor outputs etc., Eagleman says that everything that comes in through the eyes would just be a mirage of signals, not even colors, etc. aka no conscious experience
- like his wristband without any correlation to words
- conscious experience only arises from things that are useful to you
Eagleman says that consciousness is a cognitive development, which is to say that you are not conscious as a super baby infant, a diverging from Annaka. For Annaka, there is no obvious reason in which the “information processing” needs to be felt.