re consciousness part ii kev strikes back kevin anthoney kax cs nott ac uk wrote about my reply diplomatic it a society that is constantly on the verge of flaming usenet diplomacy is the best way to ensure the voice of reason gets through isn t it i realize i m fighting occam s razor in this argument so i ll try to explain why i feel a mind is necessary kevin unfortunately you are now delving into field i know too little about algorithms your reasoning as i see it is very much along the lines of roger penrose who claimed that mathematical insight cannot be algorithmic in his book the emperor s new mind concerning computers minds and the laws of physics however penrose s claim that he has mathematical insight or your similar claim that wavefunctions collapse only when we consciously take a look could be just illusions we are obviouslu taking very different viewpoints i try to ponder on the problem of consciousness from an evolutionary perspective realising that it might not be anything special but certainly useful thinking back of what i wrote do you think worms have minds or not they are able to experience pain at least they behave just like that yet it is conceivable that we might some day in the future perform a total synthesis of c elegans from the elements would such a worm have a mind firstly i m not impressed with the ability of algorithms they re great at solving problems once the method has been worked out but not at working out the method itself this is true to some extent however i do not think that our brains work like computers at all in fact there is substantial evidence skarda skarda freeman that brains work more or less chaotically generating enough randomness for mental states to evolve our brains work much like genetic algorithm generators i suppose the trick still has to be there in some form to be discovered does this mean that all the ideas we will ever have are already pre programmed into our brains this is somewhat unlikely given that our brains ultimately are encoded in chromosomes worth of genetic material much of which isn t used indeed this is extremely unlikely given the vast impact of nurture on our mind and brain i suggest however that before trying to understand our consciousness as a collection of algorithms kevin take a look at the references i mentioned and think again i still think the best experts on the nature of a conscious mind are neurologists neuropsychologists and biologists but do not flame me for my opinions since they study beings that are conscious the reason i am repeating my advice is that this discussion cannot lead to anywhere if our backgrounds are too different and please do not bring qm into this discussion at all not all physicists are happy with the claim that our consciousness plays some special role in physics i would say it doesn t the other problem with algorithms is their instability not many algorithms survive if you take out a large portion of their code yet people survive strokes without going completely haywire there are side effects but patients still seem remarkably stable also neurons in perfectly healthy people are dying at an alarming rate can an algorithm survive if i randomly corrupt various bits of it s code again brains are not computers don t forget this this does not mean they need something else to work they just work differently their primary purpose is perception and guidance of action self awareness and high intelligence are later appearances the next problem is the sticky question of what is colour replace colour with the sensation of your choice presumably the materialist viewpoint is that it s the product of some kind of chemical reaction the usual products of such a reaction are energy different chemicals is colour a mixture of these you are still expecting that we could find the idea of green in our brains somewhere perhaps in the form of some chemical this is not how i see it the sensation green is a certain time dependent pattern in the area v of our visual cortex and it is distributed with the help of areas v and v to the rest of the brain indeed a firing pattern i have sometimes thought of our consciousness as a global free induction pattern of these local firing patterns but this is just idle speculation scientific american s september issue was a special issue on mind and brain have you already read it from cover to cover there are two articles on visual perception so you might be interested but again please note that subjective experiences cannot be observed from a third person perspective if we see nothing but neuronal activity we cannot go on to conclude that this is not the mind kalat writes about numerous examples where electric stimulation of different areas of brain have led to various changes in the patients state of mind for instance a patient whose septal area was stimulated without his knowledge by remote control during a psychiatric interview was quickly cured of his depression and started discussing a plan to seduce his girlfriend stimulations in the temporal lobe have sometimes led to embarrassing situations when the patients have started flirting with the therapist in conclusion there is evidence that brains are essentially necessary for subjective experiences brain damage is usually equivalent to some sort of mind damage conscious processes involve substantial brain activity in various areas of brain when we think of colours our visual cortex is activated etc consciousness is an afterthought we become conscious of our actions with a half a second delay and our brains are ahead of our conscious will by at least ms thus i think it is fruitful to turn the question why do i see colours around and ask what is this i that seems to be observing since it seems that our conscious mind is not the king of our brains if this is so a computer won t see colour because the chemistry is different does an algorithm that sees colour have a selective advantage over an equivalent that doesn t it shouldn t because the outputs of each algorithm ought to be the same in equivalent circumstances so why do we see colour this depends on what is meant by seeing colours does a neural network that is capable of recognising handwritten numbers from to see the numbers if it is capable of sorting them if you are asking why does an animal who is conscious of itself as an observer have an evolutionary advantage over an animal who doesn t i have a good answer read my previous posting where i wrote why a sense of identity helps social animals to swap roles and act more morally so that they don t unconsciously kill each other with newly discovered weapons a bit extreme but this is the basic idea when early homo became more and more efficient in using tools a sense of identity and the concept of self had to evolve in line with this development indeed respect for others and conscious altruistic behaviour might be evolutionary advantages for social animals such as early humans if i remember correctly quantum mechanics consists of a wavefunction with two processes acting on it the first process has been called unitary evolution or u is governed by schroedinger s equation and is well known the second process called various things such as collapse of the wavefunction or state vector reduction or r and is more mysterious it is usually said to occur when a measurement takes place although nobody seems to know precisely when that occurs when it does occur the effect of r is to abruptly change the wavefunction if minds are required for this does this mean that until human minds came to the scene wavefunctions never collapsed but remained in the superpositions for aeons my how powerful we are this has been discussed before and i think this topic is irrelevant since we do not agree that minds are necessary and neither do physicists anyway i m speculating that minds would be in part x there seems to be some link between consciousness and r in that we never see linear superpositions of anything although there are alternative explainations for this i ve no idea how a brain is supposed to access part x but since this is only speculation that won t matter too much my main point is that there might be a place for minds in physics i agree but not in the sense you apparently mean above physics needs sharp minds to solve many real problems i ll go back to my nice padded cell now if that s ok with you it s ok if you don t forget to take with you the references i wrote about in my previous posting plus the following kalat james w biological psychology rd ed wadsworth publishing company belmont ca skarda c explaining behavior bringing the brain back in inquiry skarda c freeman w how brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world behavioral and brain sciences petri petri pihko kem pmp mathematics is the truth pihatie c finou oulu fi physics is the rule of sf oulu kempmp the game finland phoenix oulu fi chemistry is the game
