Some problems of the very intuitive evolutionary emergentist paradigm trying to explain consciousness from neurons

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Some problems of the very intuitive evolutionary emergentist paradigm trying to explain consciousness from neurons, thanks to Andrés Gómez Emilsson and Chris Percy at Qualia Research Institute:

The “Slicing Problem” is a thought experiment that raises questions for substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, particularly, in functionalist approaches.

The thought experiment uses water-based logic gates to construct a computer in a way that permits cleanly slicing each gate and connection in half, creating two identical computers each instantiating the same computation. The slicing can be reversed and repeated via an on/off switch, without changing the amount of matter in the system.

The question is what do different computational theories of consciousness believe is happening to the number and nature of individual conscious units as this switch is toggled. Under a token interpretation, there are now two discrete conscious entities; under a type interpretation, there may remain only one.

Both interpretations lead to different implications depending on the adopted theoretical stance. Any route taken either allows mechanisms for “consciousness-multiplying exploits” or requires ambiguous boundaries between conscious entities, raising philosophical and ethical questions for theorists to consider.

Source:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365706040_The_Slicing_Problem_for_Computational_Theories_of_Consciousness

More info:

https://qri.org/

Only mammals and birds are sentient, according to Nick Humphrey

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Only mammals and birds are sentient, according to neuroscientist Nick Humphrey’s theory of consciousness, recently explained in “Sentience: The invention of consciousness”.

In 2023, Nick Humphrey published his book Sentience: The invention of consciousness (S:TIOC). In this book he proposed a theory of consciousness that implies, he says, that only mammals and birds have any kind of internal awareness.

His theory of consciousness has a lot in common with the picture of consciousness is described in recent books by two other authors, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and consciousness researcher Anil Seth. All three agree on the importance of feelings, or proprioception, as the evolutionary and experiential base of sentience. Damasio and Seth, if I recall correctly, each put a lot of emphasis on homeostasis as a driving evolutionary force. All three agree sentience evolved as an extension of our senses–touch, sight, hearing, and so on. But S:TIOC is a bolder book which not only describes what we know about the evolutionary base of consciousness but proposes a plausible theory coming as close as can be to describing what it is short of actually solving Chalmers’ Hard Problem.

Read more:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AvubGwD2xkCD4tGtd/only-mammals-and-birds-are-sentient-according-to

 

Consciousness baffles me, but not the Hard Problem

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Simply put, the Hard Problem asks the following question: how can the machinery of the brain (the neurons and synapses) produce consciousness — the colours that we see, for example, or the sounds that we hear?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/david-chalmers-and-the-puzzle-of-consciousness/8679884

“Consciousness baffles me, but not the Hard Problem. The Hard Problem arises only if one makes a metaphysical assumption, namely that the intrinsic nature of the world’s quantum fields – the essence of the physical – is non-experiential.”
— David Pearce

https://www.facebook.com/tyler.s.anderson.54/posts/pfbid02VaMvEC4E6H7ip4k2diwnkvpLEDnkDdteesjnSvsJs9qZ1tfEGudjAUSfJfyMbjskl

Does every experience have some negative valence?

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Roger Thisdell holds that every experience has some negative valence and that there are no experiences with a positive hedonic level.

There is a point where you deconstruct perception to basic experiences by not feeding certain mental processes with your attention, they fade out. If I’m not paying attention to thought, the experience and comprehension of concepts and language fade out of experience. You can get to states of mind where there is no high-level conceptual thinking going on. It’s just vague pressures, releases, and contortions. You can have experiences of just vast airy space. For instance, the sense of the body schema, that you have a unified body, can vanish when you haven’t been paying attention to it for a long time and you’ve kept your eyes closed, so you are not updating the perception of the body with new visual stimuli. The body schema as a model falls out of the mind. But you still have awareness of gaseous somatic sensations and in all that there is a subtle contraction. Yeah, I’m saying that. It comes with a disturbance from an ultimate peace of that which is before/beyond concept and phenomenological representation.

…

Some would say: “Of course, there are pleasant experiences. There can be more intense pleasures. And you can go upwards on the hedonic scale. You can feel better and better. And below all that, you can feel neutral: neither pain nor pleasure; neither unpleasantness nor pleasantness. Below that, you can feel bad, feel minor disturbances, feel horrible, and so on.” So if we have different degrees of disturbances and suffering, then my question is whether there are experiences that are above undisturbedness; the absence of negative valence. I guess, based on your videos and writings, that you would say no; that there are no such experiences.

Yeah. I think “no”. I think there is a way in which suffering and pleasure don’t exist at the same level of abstraction. Pleasure is at a more abstract layer. The label “pleasure” comes from an assessment after the fact of an experience. Once there was a build-up of pressure and then a release, there is a judgment “I am glad for the release”, but it was just the contractive pressure that you wanted to go away. Now it’s gone so you make the comparative judgment after the fact: “That was a good thing that happened”. But had the pressure never built up, had the contraction never been binding and causing you suffering, then you can’t even begin to make that assessment that it was something good to do.

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Proto-Intelligence in Qualia: a Simple Case

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>>
Do qualia like love, fear, pain, and pleasure causally influence us? I think that the evolutionary argument that qualia must influence us is sufficiently clear and easy to understand that there should be very little room for disagreement on the matter. Evolution wouldn’t have built phenomenal world-simulations composed of qualia unless they increased our inclusive fitness in some way, because an increase in fitness is a logically necessary condition for evolution to select traits of any kind.

>> … Why does pain repel? Not for any mechanical reason, but instead because the raw feel of pain is intrinsically and irreducibly negative, and we (as receptive qualia systems) thus seek to avoid it.

>> …
Consider the phenomenon of intense love. It’s a trope that love changes the raw qualitative feel of the world, oneself, music, one’s beloved, and a broad range of other things. Love is very selective in the things that it preserves and in the things that it changes. It wouldn’t change the physical orientation of buildings, their color, or their form, because all of these things have survival utility, and the utility function of love doesn’t seek its own extinction. Instead, love acts selectively on the aesthetic qualities that interpenetrate gestalts, such as cities, one’s self-model, one’s beloved, and music

Read more:
https://autonoetic.blogspot.com/2022/12/proto-intelligence-in-qualia-simple-case.html

How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility: An approach to exploring what reality can be like

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>> The goal of constructor theory is to rewrite the laws of physics in terms of general principles that take the form of counterfactuals — statements, that is, about what’s possible and what’s impossible. It is the approach that led Albert Einstein to his theories of relativity. He too started with counterfactual principles: It’s impossible to exceed the speed of light; it’s impossible to tell the difference between gravity and acceleration.

>> The physics of life would be considered a subpart of this more general theory of the universal constructor. And you could imagine how a better understanding of the constructor-theoretic foundations of the laws of physics could give you ways of programming the universal constructor to perform tasks that are relevant to that field.

Read more:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-constructor-theory-chiara-marletto-invokes-the-impossible-20210429/

Consciousness as something fundamental, that pre-exists in our Universe

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Consciousness is fundamental, pre-exists our Universe and manifests in everything that we think of as real. A brain, as important as it seems, is nothing more than the way that non-local consciousness operates at an “avatar” level during a lifetime. The evidence that all of this is true is consistent and overwhelming. But mainstream science is still bound by the centuries-old “materialist dogma” and stuck with the “hard problem” of consciousness. ​If we assume that consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain activity, as some neuroscientists still presume to be true, where does it come from?

Read more:

Consciousness: Redefining the Mind-Body Problem by Alex Vikoulov

Integrating information in the brain’s EM field: the cemi field theory of consciousness

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A key aspect of consciousness is that it represents bound or integrated information, prompting an increasing conviction that the physical substrate of consciousness must be capable of encoding integrated information in the brain. However, as Ralph Landauer insisted, ‘information is physical’ so integrated information must be physically integrated. I argue here that nearly all examples of so-called ‘integrated information’, including neuronal information processing and conventional computing, are only temporally integrated in the sense that outputs are correlated with multiple inputs: the information integration is implemented in time, rather than space, and thereby cannot correspond to physically integrated information. I point out that only energy fields are capable of integrating information in space. I describe the conscious electromagnetic information (cemi) field theory which has proposed that consciousness is physically integrated, and causally active, information encoded in the brain’s global electromagnetic (EM) field. I here extend the theory to argue that consciousness implements algorithms in space, rather than time, within the brain’s EM field. I describe how the cemi field theory accounts for most observed features of consciousness and describe recent experimental support for the theory. I also describe several untested predictions of the theory and discuss its implications for the design of artificial consciousness. The cemi field theory proposes a scientific dualism that is rooted in the difference between matter and energy, rather than matter and spirit.

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Kolmogorov theory of consciousness. An algorithmic model of consciousness

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Characterizing consciousness is a profound scientific problem with pressing clinical and practical implications. Examples include disorders of consciousness, locked-in syndrome, conscious state in utero, in sleep and other states of consciousness, in non-human animals, and perhaps soon in exobiology [astrobiology] or in machines. Here, we address the phenomenon of structured experience from an information-theoretic perspective.

…

We start from the subjective view (“my brain and my conscious experience”):

1 “There is information and I am conscious.”

2 “Reality, as it relates to experience and phenomenal structure, is a model my brain has built and continues to develop based on input–output information.”

Source:

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2017/1/nix019/4470874

The search for invertebrate consciousness

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There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory‐heavy, theory‐neutral and theory‐light. Theory‐heavy and theory‐neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory‐light approach. At the core of the theory‐light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness‐linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking.

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