Quantum Consciousness?

The demarcation problem in science meets New Age tech talk.

What is science and what is not science? The difference is not terribly clear, an issue called the demarcation problem. Is theology a science of the supernatural realm? Is psi research on extrasensory perception science, as it uses scientific methods? Is string theory in physics science, even though its chances of empirical validation seem rather slim?

It isn't very clear. Science tends to be whatever scientists do and view as valid in their expert communities. Whacky ideas may migrate in from fringe areas, (atoms, endosymbiosis, plate tectonics, ulcer-causing bacteria), turning from non-science into science once evidence appears. Conversely, long-hallowed ideas within science may turn out to be complete rubbish, like space-ethers, geocentrism, and the medical humors. There is fringe - mainstream traffic, though it tends to be rather light these days, since mainstream scientists generally know what they are doing.

Unfortunately the fringe areas are enormous, populated by people highly motivated to push pet theories that tend to have some psychological motivator. Psi research is a good example, which responds to our hopeful magical thinking that somehow, some way, even though those darn materialists don't have a drop of imagination in their brains, humans can indeed sense the emotions of others far away, levitate objects, detect water through dousing rods, and see behind playing cards. At least a little, right?

The scientific fringe is part of a broader cultural miasma of misinformation, from Fox news to Herbalife to Koch political subversion to mundane political campaigns and commercial advertisements. We live in a flurry of BS coming at us from all directions, and typically, following the motivation and the funding source is a critical tool to gauge the truthiness of claims. Russia's shameless campaign of lying about Ukraine is perhaps the moment's most egregious and deadly example. So science is far from alone in living in a perilous epistemological swamp. It just tries to do a better job by way of disinterested institutions, public practices, empirical adjudication, and all the other standards that come under the so-called scientific method. Can we deploy such methods on interesting topics, or are they intrinsically confined to uninteresting ones?

The mother of all demarcation nightmares has been creationism. Otherwise known as creation science, or intelligent design. The motivation is obvious: support traditional intuitions (and some scriptural readings) to deny that humans are animals. Credentialed scientists have been deployed, glossy textbooks written, museums established, articles and books written, evidence cherry-picked, school boards subverted, all to push a theory that the scientific community dimissed many decades ago. But given enough science-y paraphernalia, they could make a decent case, at least in the popular media, that they were engaging in science. A spineless political system was reduced to mouthing the mantra that schools should "teach the controversy".

Thankfully that controversy has died down in recent years, and the professional community feels less threatened by cultural bulldozing. Nevertheless, the needle has hardly budged in the population at large, of which 42% believe in creationism outright, and 31% more believe that evolution was guided by god, which is pretty much the opposite of the whole point of evolutionary theory as currently understood. And abroad, the Islamic world is almost uniformly creationist. It is a testament to the strength of psychological intuitions and archetypes, as well as media echo chambers.

Some recent discussions have gotten me interested in another area of motivated science, which is quantum consciousness. Here, it is obvious that our intuition (and a great deal of theology) militates against a materialist view of the brain and mind. The mind-body "problem" has been perennial fodder for philosophy. Could our minds be the subjective product of nerve firings in our brains? No way! Despite the rather obvious empirical parameters that show just that, intuitionally-driven models have always looked elsewhere, invoking souls of various sorts, which typically have the added bonus of immortality, another intuited archetype. The latest version of this is the movement among philosophers to posit a cosmic consciousness (Nagel, Chalmers), which in hand-waving fashion hypothesizes that somehow, consciousness is a basic property of the cosmos, with Jain-ist particles of consciousness in every object, implying that such things as plants, and even rocks, may be conscious. It seems like a total surrender to obfuscation and mysticism, descending from the grandiose premise that, because they have been unable to figure out how it all works, no one else can either. Einstein may be able to get away with such foundational cosmic speculations, but even for him, it took more than handwaving about how no one could explain the speed of light.

One science-y form of this is quantum consciousness, where the mystery of consciousness is creatively linked to the very hard-science-y paradoxes of quantum mechanics to come up with .. something again quite vague, but the idea is that since quantum entanglement can allow instant communication of a sort at great distances, and perform outrageous computations, that this resolves those amazing capacities of our minds. Quantum mechanics has been drafted into numerous pseudoscience fields of this sort, actually.

The specific example of this field that is most advanced, in its quotient of science-y tech-talk and academic paraphernalia, is the Orch-OR theories propounded by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Penrose is a Sir, and an eminent physicist and mathematician. Hameroff is a professor of anesthesiology and psychology at the University of Arizona. Their output of papers has been prodigious, and they host an annual conference on the topic, funded by Deepak Chopra's foundations among other interested parties. They are not charlatans, really, but I think they have totally lost the thread in this case. They present a magisterial review of their own theory in 2014.

Penrose starts off by laying the premise of their case- that due to Kurt Gödels' work, the human ability to be certain about things is mathematically impossible, which necessitates a non-conventional solution to consciousness.

"Critical of the viewpoint of ‘strong artificial intelligence’ (‘strong AI’), according to which all mental processes are entirely computational, both books [by Penrose] argued, by appealing to Gödel's theorem and other considerations, that certain aspects of human consciousness, such as understanding, must be beyond the scope of any computational system, i.e. ‘non-computable’. ...  The non-computable ingredient required for human consciousness and understanding, Penrose suggested, would have to lie in an area where our current physical theories are fundamentally incomplete, though of important relevance to the scales that are pertinent to the operation of our brains." 

"As shown by Gödel's theorem, Penrose described how the mental quality of ‘understanding’ cannot be encapsulated by any computational system and must derive from some ‘non-computable’ effect. Moreover, the neurocomputational approach to volition, where algorithmic computation completely determines all thought processes, appears to preclude any possibility for independent causal agency, or free will. Something else is needed. What non-computable factor may occur in the brain?"

Well, the fact is that humans are not that certain about things. Religions may be, but that is an emotional, not a formal, issue. We operate by Bayesian statistics, where new evidence alters our beliefs, which are always tentative and evolving as we gain experience, at least for those who are empirically engaged at all. We are not operating from a tight set of axioms, per the Gödellian system, which we transcend to understand novel or paradoxical truths in some inexplicable way (it only seems that way on LSD!). So this premise seems rather nonsensical, and the whole project starts off on a very sour note. Not only that, but the authors then go on to propose a solution (with quantum qubits migrating in microtubules) that, first, is physically impossible in the brain, and second, doesn't evade Gödel's theory anyhow, being just another form of computation. In Gödel's terms, we are very incomplete systems, whether quantum or not, but seem to get by despite that.

Hameroff's part is to focus on microtubules, which he has identified as the locus of consciousness by way of his studies of anesthesia. In mainstream science, microtubules are cytoskeletal structures, play a central role in orchestrating mitosis and cell shape, and serve as roads for the transport of cargo, which is particularly relevant in neurons, where the distance between the cell nucleus / body and its far projections can be measured in feet. These cells need constant traffic of cargoes over the microtubule network to maintain function.

His proposal is that general anesthetics work by destabilizing microtubules in the brain, or at least their quantum computations. This is itself, apart from its implications in quantum consciousness, a fringe hypothesis. Current thinking in the field is very focused on ion channels and neurotransmitter receptors as the targets, though it has been difficult to pin down the specifics. General anesthetics tend to be membrane-soluble, which leads to hypotheses about their having very broad effects on membranes (not a strong theory on its own anymore) or on proteins embedded in membranes which would naturally bind to hydrophobic chemicals as they do to membrane lipids. It doesn't help one fringe hypothesis to be dependent another one like this, for even if consciousness is not solved soon, the target of anesthesia is likely to be, by normal progress in the mainstream of neuroscience / molecular biology.

One mainstream review states:

"Anesthetics are pharmacological agents that target specific central nervous system receptors. Once they bind to their brain receptors, anesthetics modulate remote brain areas and end up interfering with global neuronal networks, leading to a controlled and reversible loss of consciousness."

It is worth noting that Penrose and Hameroff's review is extensively referenced, with citations to some work that shows, for instance, that microtubules can bind anesthetics. But this was done at such high concentrations, and found among so many other proteins that also bind, that it looks like clutching at straws. They even resort to a little bit of lying, towards the end where they enumerate predictions of their theory:

"Actions of psychoactive drugs, including antidepressants, involve neuronal microtubules. This [prediction] indeed appears to be the case. Fluoxitene (Prozac) acts through microtubules [167]; anesthetics also act through MTs [86]."

The anesthetic cited here is anthracene, which is more a poison and general chemical than an anesthetic. It is not used in medicine at all. There are plenty of chemicals that will knock out frogs (which were the subject here) without telling us much about anesthetics as a specific class. The Prozac reference is highly problematic as well, since Prozac is called an SSRI for a reason. It binds to and inhibits serotonin uptake pumps, and that is thought to be its primary mode of action. If it binds (at again, very high concentrations) to microtubules as cited, that would be a side-effect, not the primary mode of action. Additionally, if microtubule dynamics are altered to some degree by this drug, why do all the other SSRIs with different structures work? The only thing they have in common is their binding and inhibition of the serotonin transporter. This kind of highly selective, indeed misleading, citing is a big red flag, to add to the red flag of psychological motivation.

At the core of the vast enterprise is the propostion that somehow, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and microtubules hosting qubits impinge somehow on their host neurons help their computations escape the Gödellian trap ... and simultaneously constitute atoms of consciousness:

"The Orch-OR [orchestrated objective reduction] scheme adopts DP [Diósi–Penrose objective reduction, which is a version of a quantum gravity theory] as a physical proposal, but it goes further than this by attempting to relate this particular version of OR to the phenomenon of consciousness. Accordingly, the ‘choice’ involved in any quantum state-reduction process would be accompanied by a (miniscule) proto-element of experience, which we refer to as a moment of proto-consciousness, but we do not necessarily refer to this as actual consciousness for reasons to be described."

So a choice made by qubits in this scheme is instantaneous, solving the timing issues that makes free will impossible in a normal materialist theory. It also reflects the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics where an observer must be invoked to collapse (reduce) the wave function of quantum entities like electrons. The tiny observers apparently add up, in the end, to what we experience as consciousness.

"Consciousness results from discrete physical events; such events have always existed in the universe as non-cognitive, proto-conscious events, these acting as part of precise physical laws not yet fully understood. Biology evolved a mechanism to orchestrate such events and to couple them to neuronal activity, resulting in meaningful, cognitive, conscious moments and thence also to causal control of behavior. These events are proposed specifically to be moments of quantum state reduction (intrinsic quantum “self-measurement”)."

One problem, among very many, is that this sets up another mind-body conundrum. In the religious soul theories, the soul is immaterial, so it is hard to explain how it receives perceptions from the brain and injects its decisions back into that brain, which is at least acknowledged as the conduit for human behavior and sensation, if not its computational processor. Some interface is required, like the pineal gland in the system of Descarte. But in such an interface, how are physical atoms moved by immaterial, supernatural entities? There is no easy way to deal with this, other than waving it away with assertions of pan-soul-ism, where there is no localized interface, and the soul pervades everthing in some magical way.

With the microtubules, the authors claim that they might communicate with each other across the brain via gap junctions, which are small portals leading directly from one cell to another. But not only does normal nerve conduction show little effect from these junctions, indicating that they are typically not highly connected with other cells, but microtubules from one cell do not enter other cells through such junctions, (they stop at the border), so there really can't be a direct network. So the authors back up and say that the microtubules might affect their host nerve function, which then makes the whole theory nearly pointless, since a mere potentiation of normal nerve function gets us back into normal neurobiology and whatever that can accomplish in generating consciousness.

"The most logical strategic site for coherent microtubule Orch OR and consciousness is in post-synaptic dendrites and soma (in which microtubules are uniquely arrayed and stabilized) during integration phases in integrate-and-fire brain neurons. Synaptic inputs could ‘orchestrate’ tubulin states governed by quantum dipoles, leading to tubulin superposition in vast numbers of microtubules all involved quantum-coherently together in a large-scale quantum state, where entanglement and quantum computation takes place during integration. The termination, by OR, of this orchestrated quantum computation at the end of integration phases would select microtubule states which could then influence and regulate axonal firings, thus controlling conscious behavior."

One might also note in passing that the superposition of vast numbers of coherent entangled quantum entities in the brain is judged impossible by experts in the relevant fields. They have been laboring mightily to set up qubit computers in vacuums near absolute zero with handfuls of electrons. The idea that this could be done easily on a massive scale in the liquid, warm brain would cause some surprise and shock.

In the end, despite the intense New Age interest in this kind of speculation, and its extensive scholarly apparatus, it is at the far-out fringe of brain studies. At a regular neuroscience conference, Hameroff attends, but the issue of quantum consciousness is nowhere else in sight. A physicist comes with a stray poster that also invokes quantum computation, but the session devoted to mechanisms of consciousness is cleanly and clearly mainstream. They are not interested. In demarcation terms, Hameroff and colleagues have academic positions and publish their thoughts, but these are not fruitful thoughts, as they use heavily cherry-picked data for support, and sponsor no evident empirical progress in their program, which thus remains an edifice of rather wild speculation.

I am knowledgeable, but not an expert, and to me, it looks like a big snow job more than a serious scientific theory, from premises through the elaborate contents, to the conclusions. At its heart, there is a -magic happens here- kind of quality to the invocations of quantum effects that are supposed to solve non-problems like free will, or significant problems like subjective consciousness that are best left as single problems rather than compounded with significant mysteries from radically separate fields like quantum gravity.

There is also an unwillingness to recognize the great deal of mainstream work that undermines the theory. For instance, consciousness is quite well timed in its occurrence relative to other brain events like perception and willed action. There is no reason to demand instantaneous action / computation when it is well known that consciousness trails perceptions by hundreds of milliseconds, and also trails various types of reflex actions and even the opening phenomena of willed actions by similar amounts. It has a function of global integration and monitoring, rest assured. But intuition is, as usual, a poor guide to what is really going on.

Another issue is the localization of consciousness. Is your liver conscious? Are your toe nails? I don't think so, which speaks to the plausibility of cosmic consciousness theories implying the consciousness of rocks, plants, etc. Indeed, most processes in the brain are unconscious. Yet all neurons have microtubules in profusion, indeed all cells do, so theories connecting their cosmic capabilities with consciousness turn on their specific arrangement or augmentation, which ends up little better, indeed far worse, than mainstream theories about the arrangement, connectivity, and other properties of nerve cells whose relationship to thought is rather more plausible.

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The Naked One: Jainism

The sramana movements of ancient India- Buddhism, Yoga, and Jainism.

What is the best religion? One's own, doubtless. But supposing that you had to choose a different one or had none to start with, which ones do the best job of promoting human flourishing and peace, in some general and long-term sense? Most of the prime candidates (i.e. the least blood-soaked, the most philosophical) come from the East. Which is sort of a bitter pill for a Westerner to swallow. But perhaps our tendency to crazy religion bred its opposite as well- the desire to throw its chains off entirely. Be that as it may, it seems fairly obvious that peacefulness and calm are particular specialties of Eastern practices like Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. And the philosophical cores of some of these are even non-theistic, which is remarkable in a culturally durable religion, considering the popularity of gods in all times. Indeed, theistic elements have crept back into most of these religions, sometimes floridly so, as has polytheism in the West.

The Axial age was a time of great religious innovation, when history starts in earnest across multiple cultures, and religious thought and doubt is first extensively recorded. Greece transitioned from Homer to Pericles, Persia adopted Zoroastrianism, China brought forth Confucious and Lao Tzu, and Buddhism was born in India, along with the Upanishads. It was perhaps humanity's first brush with broad cosmopolitanism, which brought new questions and perspectives. A new focus on the individual and the pursuit of spirituality for its own sake rather than as a quid-pro-quo for some harsh and demanding god made room for true philosophy and philosophically driven life styles. Perhaps the most peaceful of all these movements were the Jains of India, also first recorded during this time.

Jainism, Buddhism, Yoga, as well as the Ajivika and atheistic Carvaka movements, were part of a broad reaction to Brahmanic Hinduism, called the Sramana movements (from sram, or making effort, such as the various austerities that typify its practices, maybe at an asram). Its wellsprings may go back to before the Aryan invasion that generated the Brahmanic / Vedic system, but at any rate, it constituted a sort of dramatic reformation / alternative to the dominant system. It renounced caste entirely, refused to recognize the higher status of the Brahmins or their sacrificial rituals, and set up what one might term a merit-based system of spiritual attainment, typically characterized by austerities like celibacy, begging for sustenance, minimal clothing, lack of possessions ... the opportunities are endless. It also generated the idea of life as a problematic cycle of suffering, karma and rebirth, with the goal of release from rebirth.

Jina, 11th century, unspecified, Gujarat.

The origins of Jainism are rather obscure, but the story is that there were twenty-four Jinas, who are the Jains of highest merit, having achieved liberation (from rebirth, from ignorance, etc.) through their meditative and mortifying efforts. They are typically portrayed in utterly peaceful sitting or standing meditation, clothed or naked according either of two Jain branches (Svetambara and Digambara, respectively). The last Jina, Mahavira (540-468 BCE), is most historically attested, and was a contemporary of Siddhartha Gautama. He was not the Jain founder, however, so the religion had a long and hazy history prior, of which he was a reformer and proselytizer. Indeed, Siddhartha Gautama seems to have a student of the Jains in his formative period, prior to breaking with all the strenuous penance and founding his own philosophical school / religion. Which may indeed just have been a variant of Jainism at the time. Yoga is similarly an ascetic strain of non-Brahmanic practices, even more inwardly focussed than Jainism.

The first of the twenty four Jinas, Rishaba, is of particular iconographic interest, as he is the only one with long flowing hair, which Jain monks pluck out when joining, and keep short generally. But Rishaba tends to get the aboriginal / Rastafari treatment, which to me is a striking tie to the deep history of humanity.

Jina Rishaba in standing meditation, ~3rd century, Bihar.

The philosophical focus of Jains is on a sober life and strict morality towards all living beings. The jewels are non-harming, asceticism, and non-absolutism. They theorize that bad actions (even inadvertant ones) harm the person in a physical way, accumulating karma-icules which are tiny bits of physical matter that stick to one's soul, bind one to the cycle of rebirth, and induce spiritual blindness. Their aversion to harming all life forms extends to complete vegetarianism for all practitioners, lay and monk, and even an avoidance of root crops whose harvesting (at least traditionally) involved more disruption of the ground & animals than other crops. One couldn't imagine a stronger repudiation of the classic Vedic rituals of animal sacrifice.

One wonders what Jains make of modern microbiology, not to mention their entrapment in a modern world where any participation in normal life implicates one in vast slaughter and mass extinction. They rate self-starvation to death a highly meritorious act, which goes somewhat against the human flourishing part of my criteria above, even while general abstemiousness and consciousness of ecological harm is in the long run a very positive ethic. One can tell that these philosophies had a revolutionary effects on Indian history & philosophy, for example on Mahatma Gandhi.

Jains originated in the Kshatriya caste, of warriors and administrators, one step below the Brahmins. Being a warrior is obviously not consistent with their philosophy, and Jains have gravitated toward commerce, where they have been very successful. Through history, they also have benefitted from strong alliances with some rulers, who often had political and cultural conflicts with the Brahmanic system. They have built extensive temple complexes at sites reputed to be where various Jinas attained enlightenment, and which serve as pilgrimage sites for all Jains.

Example of a pilgrimage site painting, which is displayed once a year for lay Jains who may not have a chance to go on an actual pilgrimage, and can attain some merit by viewing this portrayal of the site, full of pilgrims. No date or origin given. The location is Shatrunjaya, in Gujarat.

Their doctrine of non-absolutism deserves special comment, as it is a very mature philosophical approach completely unlike the bombastic Ja-way-or-the-highway approach one finds in typical, and especially Western, religions. It proclaims un-certainty. That any truth is provisional and different from different perspectives. Some truths may be partial rather than universal. For example, the Buddhist proposition that change-is-the-only-eternal, and the contrasting permanence of the Brahman in Hinduism each have some merits, depending on what one is talking about, from the Indian / Jain perspective. And that is surely an appropriate way to deal constructively with complex ideas with a great deal of imaginative content. It also leads to a distinct lack of a missionary impulse, one reason why Jainism remains small in number (maybe ~5 million adherents).

Over time, as is natural, Jains have made up stories about their Jina's pre-existing divinity and virgin births from which they arrived to the acclamation of various Hindu gods, etc. and so forth. It is par for the course, and has led to some remarkable art. But the basic philosophy is far less complicated, and well-versed practitioners do not expect anyone to listen to their devotions and prayers- they are understood to be meditational acts of self-improvement, not transactions with beings occupying the void. The Jinas have disappeared completely.

Many religions, indeed all social systems, harness guilt to promote good behavior, conformity, and a stable hierarchy. Jainism does take this aspect to extremes, though in light of our current planetary woes, it does so in a relatively constructive way, in a program of reducing its adherent's footprint of social violence and ecological harm. It easily ranks as the outstanding religion, if one must have one, for the present and future.

Jina, ~900, unspecified, from Karnataka or Tamilnadu.

• Same as it ever was... Chesterton was "disappointed" with the atheists of his day! "They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. ... Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce... Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith."
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"A March Gallup poll finding that most Americans worry about climate change "a little" or "not at all" is consistent with other surveys showing that the issue is not even close to being a top priority for U.S. voters." ... But when 67% want wealth in the US more equally distributed, then the majority is perhaps not always right after all.

Watching the Watchers

Signs and theories of consciousness; review of Consciousness in the Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene.

We love it, can't do without it, and wouldn't be without it. We worship it, and warp it with drugs and crazy religion. But what is it? Consciousness is rather hard to describe. Stanislas Dehaene does an excellent job, however, in a status report on what is known about the physical correlates of consciousness, showing that consciousness can indeed be studied and conforms to the "workspace" theory elegantly elaborated by Bernard Baars almost 30 years ago.

Most of what our brain does is unconscious. When we lay eyes on something, imagery just happens. We have no introspective knowledge of the enormous processing that goes into rendering a visual scene. It was only with the invention of computers and the pursuit of artificial intelligence (and of modern animation with its farms of rendering computers) that its scale could be properly appreciated. The refined end-product just pops into consciousness, making it seem oh so easy. What is important to realize, however, is that vast and various processes are taking place in the background, all the time, whether we attend to them or not. Writing in 1988, Bernard Baars paints it as follows:

"A fourth popular metaphor may be called the "search light" or Theater Hypothesis. This idea is sometimes called "the screen of consciousness." An early version may be found in Plato's classic Allegory of the Cave. Plato compared ordinary perception to the plight of bound prisoners in a cave, who can see only the cave wall with the shadows projected on it of people moving about in front of a fire. The people projecting the shadows are themselves invisible; they cannot be seen directly. We humans, according to Plato, are like those prisoners -- we only see the shadows of reality. Modern versions of the Theater Hypothesis may be found in Lindsay & Norman, Jung, Crick, -- and throughout this book. It has been beautifully articulated by the French historian and philosopher Hyppolite Taine (1828-1893): "One can therefore compare the mind of a man to a theatre of indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron there is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on ... Among the scenery and on the far-off stage or even before the lights of the apron, unknown evolutions take place incessantly among this crowd of actors of every kind, to furnish the stars who pass before our eyes one by one, as in a magic lantern." Taine managed to combine several significant features in his theater image. First, he includes the observation that we are conscious of only one "thing" at a time, as if different mental contents drive each other from consciousness. Second, he incorporates the Tip-of-the-Iceberg Hypothesis, the idea that at any moment much more is going on than we can know. And third, his metaphor includes the rather ominous feeling that unknown events going on behind the scenes are in control of whatever happens on our subjective stage (cf. Chapters 4 and 5)."

 ...

"Thus consciousness involves a kind of a filter -- not an input filter, but a distribution filter. The nervous system seems to work like a society equipped with a television broadcasting station. The station takes in information from all the wire services, from foreign newspapers, radio, and from its own correspondents. It will analyze all this information quite completely, but does not broadcast it to the society as a whole. Therefore all the various resources of the society cannot be focused on all the incoming information, but just on whatever is broadcast through the television station. From inside the society it seems as if external information is totally filtered out, although in fact it was analyzed quite thoroughly by automatic systems. Consciousness thus gives access to internal unconscious resources."

Putting it in my own words, what is the point of consciousness? It seems to be the caboose on the train of thought, seeing things well after they occur, getting highly summarized and schematized reports, whether of perceptions, or even of actions we are doing. The key function seems to be its role of integration, memory, and broadcast. Subliminal (unconscious) data that don't get into consciousness seem to die forthwith. The parallel processing capacity of the brain seems to send the vast majority of what it does into the circular file, never to enter memory, never to be weighed and considered, never to be transformed into language, the coin of much internal thinking as well as social community and extended consciousness. Consciousness seems be the narrow, single-lane road that imposes a top-level, purpose-driven time-sequencing on our brain, so that the most important thing at any given time can be attended to in isolation and with all needed resources, from the large variety available.

The core of the book reports from Dehaene's own work, which uses the visual system to demonstrate a dramatic phase transition between unconscious and conscious mental events. His group, and many others, use a rapidly presented image, which is quickly followed by some other "masking" image, which is is a noisy kind of background that doesn't trip the same kind of consciousness (i.e. subjective recognition) that the discrete test image, of, say, a face, presents. The subject reports whether the first image was seen or not, and can be subjected to various brain imaging tests, bias tests, etc. Typically, if the first image was presented for 60 milliseconds before being superceded by something else, it is consciously perceived and reported. If it is presented for less than 40 milliseconds, subjects never report it, if it is subsequently masked. But brain scans, and other subtle responses, indicate that their visual systems did process that brief image to an extensive degree. It just didn't make it into consciousness.

Experimental method. Top shows locations of surface EEG electrodes. Bottom shows the image presentation sequence, with consciousness-tripping words shown briefly between neutral "masking" symbols. 29 milliseconds is typically too brief to register consciously, if replaced with a subsequent masking image.

When an image does make it into consciousness, the researchers see a diagnostic EEG wave from a high-density array of electrodes on the subject's head, a strong "P3" wave of electrical voltage over the parietal lobe about 300 to 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. This is proposed as a signature of consciousness, which can be studied, manipulated with TMS, and even used diagnostically to evaluate patients in comas or other vegetative states for "locked-in" consciousness. It tracks with high fidelity the subjective state of the observer, rather than their objective inputs. Likewise, when epilepsy patients getting electrodes provide access directly to their brains, the same things are observed at the cellular level. Individual cells can be recorded, generally in the frontal areas, that only fire when, say, a picture of Bill Clinton is subjectively observed, and not when it is presented and ignored, or not recognized. There is much more to be said on the topic, but it is clear that we have some very definite, if rough, physical correlates of consciousness in hand.

From his most recent paper, Dehaene reports more of the same, using EEG electrodes all over the subject's head, which produce event-related potentials, and, after computation, event-related spectral perturbations. Phase coherence also gains significantly when the perceived word comes into consciousness. In the figure below, the beta-band brain waves are tracked, about 400 ms after image presentation, and the Granger correlation presented between discrete brain areas. An enormous leap in activity and coherence happens in the experimental condition, on right.

Point-to-point Granger correlation of beta brain waves, compared between masked (left) and unmasked (right) procedures, of which the latter is subjectively conscious, and shows here dramatically increased phase coherence.

It is very heartening to see the field of consciousness studies take off and make concrete findings, even to the point of saving locked-in patients from gruesome fates. But I was expecting another chapter in the book, where Dehaene would explain how consciousness actually works! Some parts of his model are not problematic. There seem to be many processes, from all the senses, from our memory, and elsewhere, that all get computed and prepared for conscious presentation. There is a continual competition for getting onto that "stage" by way of complicated salience calculations, always weighing the importance of each stream of input. I experience this one-at-a-time limitation all the time when I try to read something at the same time I listen to a podcast or a phone meeting.. it simply can't be done. I can attend to only one language-related task at a time, period.

And, reading a bit between the lines, it is also quite reasonable to posit that our ability to think about something, such as keeping an image in mind, involves recurrent loops of data going between the executive areas (frontal and parietal) to the input module involved, such as the visual areas. It is reasonably well-understood that the lower-level processing areas get very active connections back from the frontal areas both for attention focussing, and for re-generating their inputs for continued keeping-in-mind. Thus the information is not just tranferred from A to B, and deposited. Rather, the content is always re-presented by the originating system, though it can then be remembered, dissected mentally, rotated, expressd in language, etc. This implies a strong neural activity signature in the source areas of sensation as well as frontal areas of the brain when consciousness is active, which is indeed seen, as global connectivity and correlated waves/ firing, vs fragmented, localized patterns of activition under anaesthesia. It also implies some kind of code or lingua franca going back and forth that we really have very little idea of at this point.

I would go farther to propose that autism may be a defect in this one-at-a-time system, where the subject is inundated with excess stimulation, and perhaps unregulated stimulation. In cases where some particularly ornate unconscious calculation is mistakenly injected directly, rather than summarized as is usual, one may see the savant syndromes that are so amazing and correlated with autism. (I'll note that Dehaene posits a simlar theory for schizophrenia, as a fragmented consciousness, with insufficient filtering of images, voices, etc.) To extend the study of consciousness to a serious explanation of its defects and syndromes would be extremely rewarding.

I also agree with Dehaene when he dismisses the philosophical "free will" problems of agency for a putative artificial consciousness with a page or two of rather sharp argument. On the other hand, he waves away the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness with a paragraph of his faith that it will be dissolved in further data. But it is worth grappling with more explicitly. How exactly does a stab of pain affect us subjectively when a robot would not be so affected, as it is not conscious? How do we differ from machines, or if we don't, how can machines be made conscious?

Both Dehaene and Baars have a conviction that if the phenomenon of consciousness is described in ever more detail, at some point an understanding of this issue will naturally emerge. That may be so, but it would be highly beneficial if some theoretical insight could be developed beforehand. That is the position, incidentally, of Giulio Tononi and colleagues, whose recent paper offers a blizzard of obscure theorization about information density and consciousness, which I can't begin to interpret. They offer one interesting observation, however:

"Under special circumstances, such as after split brain surgery, the main complex may split into two main complexes, both having high ΦMax. There is solid evidence that in such cases consciousness itself splits in two individual consciousnesses that are unaware of each other."

Unfortunately, neither approach seems to have really pulled into the station yet, so we can only continue to make up metaphors for what is going on, based on ever more detailed observations of the phenomenon. I would propose something like an engine turning over, based on a basic awake + conscious cortical-thalamic loop of activity, which then pulls in (with brain wave synchrony) perceptual and other loops reverberating to all the other parts of the brain whose processing is available. Dehaene does offer one vision, speaking of the workspace model of consciousness:

"The entire machine is only partially affected by external inputs. Autonomy is its motto. It generates its own goals, thanks to spontaneous activity, and these patterns in turn shape the rest of the brain's activity in a top-down manner. They induce other areas to retrieve long-term memories, genrate a mental image, and transform it according to linguistic or logical rules. A constant flux of neuronal activation circulates within the internal workspace, carefully sifting through millions of parallel processors. Each coherent result moves us one step forward in a mental algorithm thta never stops- the flux of conscious thought. Simulating such a massively parallel statistical machine, based on realistic neuronal principles, would be fascinating...."

But how is that going to work, and are there current systems that provide a kernel for such a dream? I think there are, in the form of the UNIX operating system. It runs countless parallel or near-parallel processes, with its capability of sending jobs to multiple processors and splitting processor time in very fine slices among many users and sub-processes. It can even share results between processes, though they have to be carefully structured. What is needed is a separate computer of a substantially different stucture that interacts with such a unix-type machine, picking off its most significant results to a single constantly running thread of very general rumination on its own conditions, and the most significant happenings internally and externally. It would transmute this into language when possible, internally, if not to external listeners.

Now, one has to realize that all of our mental experiences are the firings of neurons. This is equally true for the plainest visual scene as for the sharpest bite of pain or sweetest apple. Nothing is direct. Yet it feels like there is a watcher inside- a soul, or homunculus, which is the "real" perceiver and target of all the complex data processing. From all we now know, this can not possibly be true. And it would make little sense anyhow, since that homunculus would have to have some mechanism of its own to feel qualia, plus mechanisms to communicate out and back to the rest of the brain system which we know with certainty does at least part of the data processing.

No, the perceiver is part of the system itself, somehow, transmuting all those qualia from electrical buzz into poetry. This is the hard problem- how some portion of the brain system, i.e. consciousness, is the perceiver while most of the rest of our brain and body goes about its business in the dark. And this perceiver is also a powerful director of other activities and agent, interacting with the unconscious systems, getting data, setting alarms, applying focus and attention, getting inundated with streams while trying desperately, during meditation, to get nothing at all.

One gets the distinct sense that is one of the brain's great illusions, like making a pain in the toe feel like it really is in the toe, not in the brain. Or like re-setting time so that we don't notice the ~400 milliseconds it takes for any perception to come into consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is the master illusion, enabling all the others. But how does the magic work? It remains a work in progress.

• "We find that completely closing the HS to fishing would simultaneously give rise to large gains in fisheries profit (>100%), fisheries yields (>30%), and fish stock conservation (>150%)"
• Even more lame than the creationists hating on Cosmos: the recent film God's not dead, about a totally realistic philosophy class.
• But sectarian prayer.. now OK in government, for those grievously oppressed Christians.
• Speaking of oppressed, some billboards.
• That is some kind of god they've got...
• Pakistan, as usual, is a threat to the entire world.
• Which computer languages are hot, which not?
• Yes, Virginia, there really is junk DNA.
• "Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world."
• Is Obama for real on climate heating? I hope so.
• Stanford divests from coal.
• New England is being set up for an Enron-tastrophe.
•  Some technical notes on savings gluts. And stagnation.
• Martin Wolf is turning against capitalism. Maybe the shareholders are not the be-all and end-all. Who really bears the risk of corporate idiocy? The employees do, in very large part. "All those who have stakes in the company that they are unable to hedge bear risks. The most obvious such risk-bearers are employees with firm-specific skills. Human capital is perhaps the least diversifiable and insurable of all our valuable assets. Among all forms of human capital, the least hedgeable are firm-specific skills."
• A little honesty on the right: The plutocrats are in charge, and thank god!
• Quote of the week, from Answers in Genesis:

"This episode of “Cosmos” offers a lot of beautiful graphics and special effects, but in the end it should be lumped with fairy tales like Tinker Bell or Shrek. Yet Bible-believing creation scientists who are willing to look at the world through the history provided in God’s Word without the prejudice and blind ignorance can “read” in earth’s geology a true and exciting account of our history. And biblical truth is a much better account than fiction."

There is no disembodied computation

A review of John Searle's Mind.

Douglas Hofstadter had a few tart words about John Searle in his book "I am a strange loop", which was odd, since Searle seems to have a rather congenial position on the philosophy of mind, on the whole. This motivated me to read a book I happened across recently, John Searle's 2002 "Mind". This appears to be his final summation on the subject of the mind, and does turn out to have some very odd positions, which I will ignore for lack of space (free will and quantum mechanics, especially).

He pulls the common philosopher's trick of defining all other positions in very unflattering ways, and then charges in with his own position, which in comparison seems reasonable and correct. Which on the whole, I think it is, actually. He claims that dualism and materialsm are both wrong. Well, what other positions are there?

The philosophy of mind has indeed been a mess, due to intuitions so overwhelmingly strong that they swamp reason. And also due to the unique ontological status of subjectivity, which makes many thinkers despair of our ever being able to "explain" it from the customary third-person scientific perspective.

The most popular position, by far, historically, has been dualism- the idea that while our brains may be necessary for thinking, as perhaps a radio is necessary to hear radio transmissions, the real thinking and perhaps feeing goes on somewhere else, in a "soul", which with any luck will go marching on when we die. It is the natural position of any thinking person, since thinking seems effortless, immaterial, abstract, and entirely ungrounded in any mundane matter, much less something as gross as the brain. Remember that the Egyptians regarded the brain as just so much snot, to be drained and discarded asap while they preserved all the other really important parts of the body for its rich afterlife.

In the other corner is materialism, which follows the overall trend of scientific observations in the many relevant fields to the conclusion that our minds are entirely a product of our brains, that brains operate within the known parameters of chemistry, and that there is nothing "supernatural" or otherwise shifty going on in there. The universe causally closed, everything happens for mechanistic reasons, and that applies to the brain/mind as well. How exactly the sensations of consciousness arise from these substrates is not yet known, but can be (and is being) studied with the standard toolchest of science. Which will (by this theory) eventually give us a thorough theory of consciousness that at least lays out all the neural correlates of mental activity and a full theory of how they function dynamically... even if it does not allow observers to experience someone else's consciousness, which seems a rather high bar, really.

Searle makes what seems to be an extreme attribution, which is that materialists do not think that consciousness exists (the eliminativists, for instance). This applies to some, surely, but can hardly apply to all those materialists who are studying consciousness in the lab. So on the face of it, this move seems specifically designed to give Searle a provocative statement to make, to whit that all materialists are wrong. Then he swoops in with his own formulation, which is "biological naturalism". And you could be forgiven for thinking that this is identical with a materialism that does not think that consciousness is a bunch of hooey.

He does have various useful ideas, one of which is about reductionism. His position assumes (as do all materialist positions) complete reductionism, in that brain processes are composed of (can be fully reduced to), biological phenomena like neuron firings, channel openings, population rhythms, etc., and that each of these phenomena are composed of chemistry in action, which in turn *is physics and quantum mechanics in action, etc., down the rabbit hole. Higher levels of explanation have their own synthetic properties and logic, but do not rely on novel properties of the universe unavailable to the lower levels.

But all this does not amount, in Searle's view, to something he terms ontological reductionism. Just because something is caused entirely by a level we regard as lower or more fundamental doesn't mean that it is only and "nothing but" that other level. The first-person, interior experience is in some clear and axiomatic way intrinsically different from the third-person view of the same processes (by way of a brain scan, perhaps). This is a form of perspectivism, and puts a stop to conceptual reduction, in some respect. When consciousness, whatever substrate it is based on, looks inward, it sees nothing, and indeed knows nothing, of any substrate. When it is impaired, such as in dementia, it winks out and disappears, without having been, to its own perspective, been "explained" by any simpler principle or level of reality.

"The real problem with all forms of reductionism, as we will see, is that they are confronted with the question, Are there two phenomena or only one? In the case of water, there is really only one phenomenon. Water consists entirely of H2O molecules. Ther are not two different things, water and H2O molecules. But when it comes to identifying features of the mind, such as consciousness and intentionality, with features of the brain, such as computational states or neurobiological states, it looks like there have to be two features, because the mental phenomena have a first-person ontology, in the sense that they exist only insofar as they are experienced by some human or animal subject, some "I" that has the experience. And this makes them irreducible to any third-person ontology, any mode of existence that is independent of any experiencing agent. Calling attention to the difference between the first-person ontology and the third person is really the point of all these argument against this sort of reductionism."

It is like saying the ecology is reducible to chemistry, with the caveat that ecology has its own ontological rules and existence.

I am not sure that I have portrayed Searle's view justly. But it seems reasonable enough as an attempt to dissolve the assumption that he points out has been rampant in philosophy as it has been in lay thought about the mind- that the mind and body are two different things in some fundamental way, rather than in a perspectival way that is so easily consonant with materialism and everything else we know about the world.

I would add another comment to this, which is that all computation appears to be embodied. That realm of abstractions, whether one takes it as real in a Platonic sense and something we discover, or as a synthetic exercise of human creativity making its best simplifications out of material reality, it does not compute on its own. Only in computational devices, like our minds or computers, or in material reality itself, do such rules, whatever their intrinsic nature, manifest on any active level. What is being learned about our brains at many levels reveals the mechanics of our various sensory and cognitive pathways in ever-increasing detail, making of the soul something much like god- a fugitive concept that exists only in the narrowing gaps of what we do not yet know; denizens of the inner or outer worlds, respectively.

• Koch on consciousness.
• Are we going to tax carbon, or just give up?
• And about that J P Morgan deal... we are giving up there too.
• What it takes to make the rich seem deserving of their riches.
• George Washington, our wealthiest president.
• A few more tidbits on JFK, and a reason why.
• Bubbles are not the way to reflate the economy.
• Note to Zimmerman jurors...
• Should we all just have accounts at the Fed?
• Economic quotes of the week, Krugman on our stagnation:

"Assuring people that they can get a positive rate of return on safe assets means promising them something the market doesn’t want to deliver – it’s like farm price supports, except for rentiers."

• Or a Republican pollster, courtesy of Bill Black:

"David Winston, a Republican pollster close to House leaders, said that especially in a slow-growing economy, lawmakers have a hard time selling voters on proposals like fixing Social Security to avoid shortfalls in the 2030s.
‘That pressure isn’t there,’ he said. ‘People are more like, ‘I’m in a job where I’m clearly underemployed. How did this happen? How do we resolve underemployment as a problem, as opposed to dealing with Social Security in 2033?’" 

• Or Bill Mitchell:

"Conclusion: The NAIRU as estimated is a very dangerous concept for the well-being of ordinary people."

• Or Paul Krugman, again:

"... it’s clear that the shift to 401(k)s was a gigantic failure."

• Or Dan Kervick:

"For one thing, there is a complete absence of thoughtfulness in Summers’s talk about what could account for the fact that the financial sector needs to loan households vast amounts of money just so that they can afford to buy all of the output they produce. That reality seems passing strange, doesn’t it? Why rising household debt instead of rising household income?"

• Economic graph of the week: a discussion of the relationship of governmental debt to economic growth, across many countries. Not much of a relationship, really. And the curves only really start heading down about 5X GDP, which is far, far beyond where we are now. Up to about 3X GDP, the effects are uniformly positive- i.e., not a "burden".

A strange loop it is to write about one's I so much

Review of Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel Escher Bach" and "I Am a Strange Loop", thus saving the reader roughly 1000 pages of helpless digression.

Douglas Hofstsadter laments in his preface to his sequel ("I am a strange loop"; ISL, 2007) to his much  more famous "Gödel Escher Bach" (GEB, 1979) that for all its fame and prizes, including the Pulitzer prize, most people he meets didn't get the point of GEB. And no wonder, as those points flit by with great rapidity amidst a welter of puns, word games, abstruse code exercises, maddening repetition, dilatory dialogs, and wayward tangents.

But here they are (apologies for my lack of expertise ... please comment on any inaccuracies):

" The possibility of constructing, in a given system, an undecideable string via Gödel's self-reference method, depends on three basic conditions:  

1. That the system should be rich enough so that all desired statements about numbers, whether true or false, can be expressed in it. ...
2. That all general recursive relations should be represented by formulas in the system. ...
3. That the axioms and typographical patterns defined byitsrules be recognizable bysome terminating decision procedure. ... 

Satisfaction of these three conditions guarantees that any consistent system will be incomplete, because Gödel's construction is applicable.
The fascinating thing is that any such system [human thought and language are the obvious references] digs its own hole; the system's own richness brings about its own downfall. … [analogy to critical mass in physics and bomb-making] ... But beyond the critical mass, such a lump will undergo a chain reaction, and blow up. It seems that with formal systems there is an analogous critical point. Below that point, a system is 'harmless' and does not even approach defining arithmetical truth formally; but beyond the critical point, the system suddenly attains the capacity for self-reference, and thereby dooms itself to incompleteness."

All the references to Bach and Escher in GEB are really tangential examples of self-reference. It is Kurt Gödel's work that is the core of the book, as it is of ISL. Gödel made a critique of the Principia Mathematica (PM), by Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, which attempted to build a tightly closed system of axioms and logic that was both incapable of rendering false statements, and also comprehensive in its ability to found all relevant aspects of mathematics and logic. But Gödel showed that it was incomplete, which means that it could represent paradoxical statements that could not be either true or false. It did indeed found all mathematical logic on very uncontroversial axioms, but it developed (painfully) a language for all this that was so rich that it was impossible to keep within the bounds of truth alone.

Gödel's paradigmatic statement, constructed out of unspeakably complicated machinations of the PM tools (and which Russell never accepted were proper machinations) essentially created the statement "This statement is false". But Hofstadter admits that self-referencing paradox is not the only possible type of ambiguous, unresolvable statement Gödel created or suggested- there is an infinite zoo of them.

The point is that truly intelligent systems are open. They are not cognitively or computationally bound by their programming to tread around some threshing track time, and time, and time, again. They not only are responsive parts of their environment, but more importantly have the symbolic capacity to represent imagined realities, real realities, (and the self!), in such recursive, endlessly complicated ways that no theorem-bound system of cognitive computation can account for it. In this way we are endless, multilevel, strange, loops.

But there is one aspect of all this that is most odd, which is Hofstadter's focus on the self, which is prominent in both books, and especially, even gratingly, so, in the second. Much of his conceptual play concerns self-reference, which is enjoyably loopy. Many philosophers and thinkers generally seem to think self-consciousness the very height of consciousness itself. Perhaps even its definition. As Hofstadter says, "Just as we need out eyes in order to see, we need our 'I''s in order to be!". But I don't think that is the case, at least not consciously. Self consciousness certainly comes along in the package of cognitive complexity, once one is making models of everything conceivable about the world. But to me, the core of consciousness is far more basic- the sense of being, not of self. And the core of the sense of being is made up of the flow of sensations, especially pain and pleasure.

I frequently see squirrels from my window, playing, chasing, eating, hiding, calling, etc. They are especially interested in the bird feeder and have tried no end of strategems to get into it. They are clearly highly conscious beings, driven by pleasures and pains, just as we are. They wouldn't know what to do with a mirror, but nevertheless we immediately empathize with their desires and fears, clearly communicated and experienced by themselves. Their consciousness is not infinitely expansive by way of symbolic representation, as ours is, but nor is it negligible.

Hofstadter makes a special project of declaring that mosquitos have zero consciousness, thus sanctioning his frequent bloodthirsty murders, when he is otherwise a principled vegetarian. Why be a vegetarian if you are interested only in symbolically self-referential and unbounded forms of consciousness? Obviously something else is going on, which he jokingly names "hunekers"- small sub-units of consciousness, of which he assigns various amounts to animals and humans of various grades and states.

"Mosquitos, because of the initial impoverishment and the fixed non-extensibility of their symbol systems, are doomed to soullessness (oh, all right- maybe 0.00000001 huneker's worth of consciousness- just a hair above the level of a thermostat)."

But don't mosquitos experience pain and pleasure? Their behavior clearly shows avoidance of danger, and eager seeking of sustenance and reproduction. We know that the biology of animals with nervous systems (not bacteria) organizes these motivations in an internal experience of pain and pleasure. Would Hofstadter compacently sit down to a session of pulling the legs and wings off of mosquitoes he has caught? I think not, because though we certainly don't know what is going on in those very tiny heads, if anything it is the integration of perception, pain, and pleasure in ways that must earn our empathy, and which amount to a level of consciousness radically beyond that of a thermostat.

Hofstadter adds in the analogy of a human knee reflex, saying that perhaps a mosquito's mind is at that level, which no one would claim is conscious. But the integrative work being done, and the whole point of the integration, is quite different in these cases, making it seem much more likely, to me at least, that the mosquito is working with a very tiny, but intensely felt, bit of consciousness. Indeed one might posit that there need not be any particular relation between the cognitive complexity of an animal's consciousness and the degree of its feelings. We know from human infants that feelings can be monumental, and consciousness of hurt (and pleasure) be extremely acute, with precious little cognition behind them. Do we therefore empathize with them less?

This leads to the more general issue of the relation between consciousness and its physical substrate. Despite the talk of "souls", Hofstadter is a thorough naturalist, steeped in the academic field of artificial intelligence. While he has shown much greater proclivities towards philosophy than programming, the basic stance is unchanged- consciousness is a case of enormously complicated computation with (in the human case) the infinitely rich symbol sets of language and whatever is knocking around internally in our mental apparatus. All of which all could conceivably happen on a silicon substrate, or one of orchestral instruments, or other forms, as long as they have the necessary properties of internal communication, logical inference, memory, etc.

For Hofstadter, consciousness is necessarily a high-level phenomenon. It depends on, but is not best characterized by, particular neurons, and certainly is not specifically associated with quantum phenomena, microtubules, or any of the other bizarre theories of mind / soul that various pseudo-theorists have come up with to bridge the so-called mind-body divide. Indeed he spends a great deal of time (in ISL) on consoling himself that his wife, who died unexpectedly and young, lives on precisely because some part of her high-level programming continues to function inside Hofstadter, insofar as he learned to see the world through her eyes, and through other remaining reflections of her consciousness. Nothing physical remains, but if the programming still happens, then the consciousness does as well.

I have my doubts about that proposition, again drawing on my preference for characterizing consciousness in terms of experience, feeling, and emotion, not symbology. But if one has been trained by one's wife, say, to thrill to certain types of music one hadn't appreciated before, then one could make the case in those terms as well.

The question is made more interesting in a long section (in ISL) where Hofstadter discusses a thought experiment of Daniel Dennett, as written about at great length by Derek Parfit. Suppose the Star Trek transporter really worked, and could de-materialize a person and send them via a (sparkling) light stream to be re-assembled on another location, say Mars. Suppose next that an improved version of this transporter were later devised that didn't have to destroy the originating person. A copy is faithfully made on Mars, but the Earth copy remains alive. Who would be the "real" person / soul? Imagine further that the transporter could send multiple copies anywhere it chose, perhaps depositing one copy on Mars, and another on the Moon, etc... What & who then?

Parfit reportedly mulls this over for a hundred pages and agonizes that there is no way to decide which is the "real" person. Hofstadter also makes remarkably heavy weather of the question, finally hinting that a reasonable way to regard it may be as a faithful doubling, where none of the clones have any priority, all are equivalent, and each goes on to an independent existence built on the structure and history of the original person. Well of course! In programming, this is called a "fork" where a program is replicated and both copies keep running in perpetuity, doing their own thing. No need to fret over soul-division or irreducible essences- if the physical brains and bodies are faithfully reproduced in all detail, then so are the minds in all respects. Each will carry on the prior consciousness and other internal processes, differing only by the occurrence of, and interaction with, subsequent events.

And one can extend this to other substrates, supposing that some means has been devised to replicate all the activity of a human brain from neurons into, say, silicon. Just making such an assumption assumes the answer, of course. But the real question is- at what level would the modelling have to be faithful in order to generate a replicated consciousness? Do all the atoms have to be modelled? Clearly not. The model Hofstadter and I share here is that the overall activity of the brain in its electrical activity and structure-to-structure communication constitutes consciousness. So it is the neurons the need to be modelled, and that perhaps only roughly, to recreate their communication flow and data storage. Generate enough of those elements that perceive, that condense and flag significant information, that tag everything inside and out with emotional valences, that remember all sorts of languages, and world events, and experiences, at explicit and implicit levels, that coordinate countless senses and processes, and we might just have some thing that has experiences.

• And dogs- are they conscious?
• J P Morgan, et al. Their practices were not just "shady", they were criminal fraud; signing false affidavits, scamming loan customers and investors alike, corrupting appraisers, LIBOR fixing, etc.
• Should atheists take an economic position?
• And do they have better morals?
• Another way the health-related free markets don't work. Big data is fundamentally incompatible with broad-based insurance.
• Two can play that game... "Last month, the U.S. raided an Afghan convoy carrying a Pakistani Taliban militant, Latif Mehusd, who the Afghan government was using to cultivate an alliance with the Pakistani Taliban."
• The Koch folks- apparently too embarrassed to stand up for their own beliefs.
• Unwritten institutions are often the most important- the long shadow of slavery & oppression.
• Cuddly capitalism- yes, it really works.
• Our infrastructure is unsightly and unsafe as well as decrepit. And underfunded.
• Bill Mitchell on why full employment shouldn't just happen for the sake of killing people.
• Quote of the week, from Paul Krugman:

"A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn’t have to be that way."

• And, on rentiers and interest rates:

"But right now we’re awash in excess savings with nowhere to go, and the marginal social value of a dollar of savings is negative. So real interest rates should be negative too, if they’re supposed to reflect social payoffs."

Scanning for consciousness

Can technology tell us whether someone is conscious or not? Just barely.

How does the brain work? What causes or is that most basic phenomenon- consciousness? Many theists and philosophers dispair of ever finding an answer, or indeed of being able to properly pose the question, calling it the "hard" problem. Our intuitions are perhaps too strong to overcome this sense of magical awe, yet materialists plug along, going with the logical indications from evolution and biology that something very physical is going on in there to mount the drama that flits across our inner stage.

Functional MRI is regular MRI abetted by analysis of blood flow, which responds on a few-second time scale to changes in local brain activity, the brain being a big gas hog, as it were. One would think that with such technology in hand, it would a snap to detect the physical correlates of consciousness and describe all the patterns surrounding it. But no- the brain runs all the time, and the differences in blood flow under activity are very small. Also, the time scale of the key brain activities, like most brain waves, are far faster and spatially far smaller than what fMRI can detect, so it remains, sadly, an extremely blunt instrument.

A recent study looked at twelve volunteers as they went under with the anaesthetic propofol, of Michael Jackson fame. I doubt that propofol-induced unconsciousness resembles sleep very much, so while it may knock you out, it can hardly be the way to a refreshing wake-up the next day. Another study in 2011 , incidentally, did very similar work and came to the same conclusions, and also provides the rationale for using propofol in particular: "The reason why propofol was chosen for this study is that this particular anesthetic has been shown not to interfere with regional cerebral blood flow response at sedative concentrations, and does not modify flow-metabolism coupling in humans".

The researchers tried to measure brain activity in the broadest possible way, tracking correlations among far-flung areas. The upshot is that as sedation becomes deeper, even though over-all blood flow does not change as noted above, correlations among brain activities become increasingly local, losing their long-range character. Which is certainly in line with the general ideas in the scientific community about what consciousness is in physical term: large, wide-ranging, and constantly varying coalitions or patterns of neuronal activity, which are coherent in some sense. This coherence would represent thought to the experiencer, and detectable statistical correlations to the onlooker (inlooker?).

A map of the parcels used by the experimenters to divide up the brains of their subjects into regions of interest (ROI), in order to draw inter-regional activity correlations.

How can these correlations be drawn? "In our analysis the connection is the Pearson correlation  statistic between each pair of nodes." So, despite the crude time scale, they assumed that time-coincident activitions in different locations of the brain reflect functional connection, i.e. communication. They parcelled their brains out into 194 small regions, (using someone else's scheme from prior work), and then computed the average time course of activity within each parcel. Then using statistical methods, one can make a matrix of the correlations among all these time courses and parcels, into the figure below:

Region-to-region matrix of correlations under various conditions: W, waking; S, sedated; LOC, loss of consciousness, and R, recovery of consciousness (to Ramsay level 2).

Clearly, the condition of complete anesthesia (LOC) can be picked out as having sharply reduced connections between different regions, while even just after recovery, connections remain significantly impaired. "As expected, we found a significant effect of condition (... ), indicating that correlation strength systematically varied across conditions. Specifically, W consistently exhibited the strongest average correlation level, across all bins, followed by S and R, while LOC consistently exhibited the weakest average correlation across all bins." 

This result is stated more simply in a graph of correlation to distance apart:

The conclusion they  draw from this is that  the correlation at long distances are not specially impaired relative to that at medium distances. Connections at most distances are impaired, which would, however, naturally decimate long-range communication.

Meanwhile, within the individual regions, some showed increased activity (yellow) and some decreased (blue), consistent with the idea that the long-range effects are dominant overall.

Activity within nodes (also called regions, or regions of interest, ROI) at different levels of anesthesia. Yellow denotes higher activity in the sedated or unconscious states, while blue denotes higher activity in waking or recovery.

Let me wrap up with a couple more quotes from the paper:

"... we find that loss of consciousness is marked by an increase in normalized clustering (), which measures the ‘cliquishness’ of brain regions, potentially indicating an increase in localized processing and thus a decrease of information integration across the brain." 

"... our graph theoretic analysis further indicates that, in terms of network information processing, propofol-induced loss of consciousness is marked by a specific change in the quality of information exchange (i.e., decreased efficiency) ..."

So it remains extremely difficult to differentiate consciousness from living unconsciousness. This is very early days in the  decipherment of brain patterns, and we are far from having tricorders. But there really is something in there to peek at, and one gets the sense that yet more philosophical conundra will eventually be dissolving in this pool of data. Next week, another post on brain science, from a far loftier perspective- that of Douglas Hofstadter.

• More over-theorizing, characteristic of religion and right-wingery.
• How about watching TV intentionally?
• Who among us ... is trained to lie? To be lied to?
• Pakistani ambassador: Yes, we are totally nuts.
• Who would Jesus shoot?
• And how would Jesus treat the kids?
• Do you have any privacy on the interwebs? No.
• Criminals at Diebold corp? No problem. 
• Krugman on the dollar's vaunted international role ... not a big deal.
• ..and on the curious case of Japan- the debt that is not a problem.
• What should the top tax rate be?
• The future of work: good if we care about each other.
• The financial industry is uniquely suited to predation, corruption, and general asymmetry.
• Economic quote of the week, from Bill Black. He also speaks comprehensively about the criminality of our bankers in this podcast.

"The inconvenient facts that the senior officers of JPMorgan, Bear Stearns (Bear), and Washington Mutual’s (WaMu) grew wealthy through the frauds that drove the financial crisis and that JPMorgan’s senior officers will not be prosecuted and will not even have to repay the proceeds of their crimes never appear in the article."
...
"The CEOs’ paramount strategic objective is to prevent real investigations staffed by vigorous financial regulators working with FBI agents that lead to hundreds of grand jury investigations of elite bankers and civil suits, enforcement actions, and prosecutions that make public the facts about the elite frauds that drove the crisis. ... Fraud is criminal even if Holder is too spineless to prosecute it."