Consciousness is the ‘hard problem’. Has a new theory cracked it?

[flamingdem]

http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/how-consciousness-works/

Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the ‘easy’ problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the ‘hard’ problem.

I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain’s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.

In a period of rapid evolutionary expansion called the Cambrian Explosion, animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the most urgent incoming signals. Too much information comes in from the outside world to process it all equally, and it is useful to select the most salient data for deeper processing. Even insects and crustaceans have a basic version of this ability to focus on certain signals. Over time, though, it came under a more sophisticated kind of control — what is now called attention. Attention is a data-handling method, the brain’s way of rationing its processing resources. It has been found and studied in a lot of different animals. Mammals and birds both have it, and they diverged from a common ancestor about 350 million years ago, so attention is probably at least that old.

Attention requires control. In the modern study of robotics there is something called control theory, and it teaches us that, if a machine such as a brain is to control something, it helps to have an internal model of that thing. Think of a military general with his model armies arrayed on a map: they provide a simple but useful representation — not always perfectly accurate, but close enough to help formulate strategy. Likewise, to control its own state of attention, the brain needs a constantly updated simulation or model of that state. Like the general’s toy armies, the model will be schematic and short on detail. The brain will attribute a property to itself and that property will be a simplified proxy for attention. It won’t be precisely accurate, but it will convey useful information. What exactly is that property? When it is paying attention to thing X, we know that the brain usually attributes an experience of X to itself — the property of being conscious, or aware, of something. Why? Because that attribution helps to keep track of the ever-changing focus of attention.

The most basic, measurable, quantifiable truth about consciousness is simply this: we humans can say that we have it

I call this the ‘attention schema theory’. It has a very simple idea at its heart: that consciousness is a schematic model of one’s state of attention. Early in evolution, perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, brains evolved a specific set of computations to construct that model. At that point, ‘I am aware of X’ entered their repertoire of possible computations.

[bvar22]

1. That is certainly a very interesting theory on the development of awareness,

....but even THAT could have been generated by The Matrix!


This matrix is connected to the individual minds of the human race via a hardwire interface to the brain on the back of the head. The brain is fed a continuous feed of stimulation's through this interface. Touch, taste, hearing, smell and sight are all simulated by the matrix while the physical bodies of the human race remain sleeping within incubators. Life is nothing but a dream now.

[cpwm17]

2. I think it will always be impossible to know how the matter in our brains creates consciousness

Even if scientists determine the exact brain computations that create consciousness, they will still not know where consciousness comes from.

Michael Graziano, the author, seems to be tackling the more obtainable problem of why we are conscious - how does it benefit us and other conscious critters.

I think Michael Graziano is on the right track here:

In a period of rapid evolutionary expansion called the Cambrian Explosion, animal nervous systems acquired the ability to boost the most urgent incoming signals. Too much information comes in from the outside world to process it all equally, and it is useful to select the most salient data for deeper processing. Even insects and crustaceans have a basic version of this ability to focus on certain signals. Over time, though, it came under a more sophisticated kind of control — what is now called attention. Attention is a data-handling method, the brain’s way of rationing its processing resources.

Good and bad feelings such as pain, pleasure, and the feelings associated with hunger and especially our emotions I believe are the key to consciousness. Our feelings are what force our consciousness to give attention to the most important issue of the moment. Not only that, our feelings also force our consciousness to do something about what is on our minds at the moment. Feelings are our motivational force, without which we couldn't think, move, or do anything what-so-ever.

The Star Trek character Spock couldn't function in real life.

Also the strength of our feelings is what determines what we learn, which allows us to be flexible and also allows our brains to have far more information than what's contained in our genes.

Without consciousness there are no feelings. Without feelings we have no focus or motivation to do anything, and no ability to learn. Feelings kill multiple birds with one stone. I don't think evolution could have ever created complex critters without discovering consciousness its feelings.

[bananas]

3. Not even close to cracking it.

He doesn't seem to understand what the hard problem actually is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

[bemildred]

4. +1. nt

[cpwm17]

5. I had to read the beginning a couple of times to see if I missed something

No I didn't, the author was talking about something completely different than the alleged "hard problem" which is really the impossible problem.

We just have to accept it as a brute fact of nature that a particular process in the brain can create consciousness. We'll never really know how it does it.