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larity here that cannot be escaped but i won t go into it here i talk about it in this post 2 comments filed under consciousness philosophy of science psychology uncategorized tagged as behaviorism clinical neurology consciousness diagnosis locked in syndrome philosophy philosophy of mind vegetative state july 30 2014 11 09 am is consciousness required for discrimination in their book a universe of consciousness edelman and tononi use the example of a photodiode discriminating light to illustrate the problem of consciousness consider a simple physical device such as a photodiode that can differentiate between light and dark and provide an audible output let us then consider a conscious human being performing the same task and then giving a verbal report the problem of consciousness can now be posed in elementary terms why should the simple differentiation between light and dark performed by the human being be associated with and indeed require conscious experience while that performed by the photodiode presumably does not p 17 does discrimination of a stimulus from a background require conscious experience i don t see why it would this seems like something the unconscious mind could do all on its own and indeed is doing all the time but it comes down to how we are defining consciousness if we are talking about consciousness as subjective experience the question is does discrimination require there be something it is like for the brain to perform that discrimination perhaps but i also don t know how to answer that question empirically given the subjective nature of experience and the sheer difficulty of building an objective consciousness meter on the other hand assume by consciousness we mean something like system ii style cognition i e slow deliberate conscious introspective thinking on this view of consciousness consciousness is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cognitive processing so it would be absurd to say that the 99 unconscious mind is incapable of doing discrimination this is the lesson of oswald külpe and the würzburg school of imageless thought they asked trained introspectors from the wundtian tradition to make a discrimination between two weights with their hands to see if one weight is heavier than the other then the subjects were asked to introspect and see if they were aware of the process of discrimination to their surprise there were no conscious images associated with the weight discrimination they simply held the weights in their hand consciously made an intention to discriminate the discrimination happened unconsciously and then they were aware of the results of the unconscious judgment hence külpe and the würzburg school discovered a whole class of imageless thought i e thought that happens beneath the level of conscious awareness of course the würzburg school wasn t talking about consciousness in terms of subjective qualia they were talking about consciousness in terms of what s introspectable if you can t introspect a thought process in your mind then it s unconscious on this view and in conjunction with evolutionary models of introspection it seems clear that a great deal of discriminations are happening beneath the surface of conscious awareness this is how i prefer to talk about consciousness in terms of system ii style introspection where consciousness is but the tip of a great cognitive iceberg on edelman and tononi s view consciousness occurs anytime there is information integration on my view information integration can occur unconsciously and indeed most if not all non human animal life is unconscious human style slow deliberate introspective conscious reflection is rare in the animal kingdom even if during the normal human waking life it is constantly running overlapping and integrating with the iceberg of unconsciousness so as to give an illusion of cognitive unity it seems as if consciousness is everywhere all the time and that there is very little unconscious activity but as julian jaynes once said we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of and so consciousness seems pervasive in our mental life when in fact it is not 2 comments filed under consciousness tagged as consciousness giulio tononi integrated information julian jaynes philosophy philosophy of mind unconscious unconscious thought july 29 2014 5 48 pm some comments on edelman and tononi s book a universe of consciousness i started reading edelman and tononi s book a universe of consciousness and i wanted to offer some skeptical comments i m generally skeptical about any theorizing of consciousness these days not because i m against theorizing in science but because i have been leaning more mysterian in my epistemology towards consciousness where consciousness refers to subjective experience i think any fundamental theory of consciousness is doomed to fail because it will run into vicious circularity as i will explain below take this seemingly innocuous statement offered at the beginning of chapter 1 everyone knows what consciousness is it is what abandons you every evening when you fall asleep and reappears the next morning when you wake up already e t are helping themselves to some heavy duty theoretically loaded assumptions e t are talking about consciousness as subjectivity so why assume subjectivity goes away completely during dreamless sleep how do we know there isn t something it is like to be asleep and we just don t remember what it s like if subjectivity is at 100 during wakefulness why not think it goes down to 1 or 05 while sleeping instead of 0 perhaps what it is like for humans to be asleep is analogous in subjective intensity to what it is like to be bee or lizard when awake by helping themselves to the assumption that consciousness goes away completely during asleep e t allow themselves a starting point or fixed point from which to begin their theorizing it becomes their rock solid assumption against which they can begin doing experimental work but from a fundamental point of view it is an unargued for assumption where s the evidence for it introspective evidence is not enough because introspection is turned off during asleep and empirical evidence how are you going to measure it with a consciousness meter well how are you going to validate that it s calibrated properly say you build one and point it at a sleeping brain at it registers 0 how do you know the measurement is correct what s the calibration method they also assume that consciousness is an relatively recent development evolutionarily speaking if we are talking about self consciousness this makes sense but they are not they are talking about subjectivity the having of a point of view but why not think a bee has a point of view on the world or why assume you need a brain or nervous system at all for all we know there is something it is like to be an amoeba e t want this to be another fixed point because if you assume that subjectivity requires a brain or nervous system it gives you a starting place scientifically it tells you where to look but again it s never argued for simply assumed but it s not logically incoherent to think a creature without a nervous system has a dim phenomenology suppose you assumed that only brained creatures have consciousness and you devise a theory accordingly having made your theory you devise a series of experimental techniques and measurements and then apply them to brained creatures you confirm that yes indeed brained creatures are conscious all right what happens when you apply the same technique to a non brained creature like an amoeba testing for whether the amoeba has consciousness surprise surprise your technique fails to register any consciousness in the amoeba but there is a blatant epistemic circularity here because you designed your measurement technique according to certain theoretical assumptions starting with the fixed point that consciousness requires a nervous system but why make that assumption why not assume instead that subjectivity starts with life itself and is progressively modified as nervous systems are introduced moreover they assume that conscious experience is integrated conscious states cannot be subdivided into independent components and at the same time is highly differentiated one can experience billions of different conscious states why can t conscious states be subdivided why assume that what does that even mean divided from what into what take the sleeping at 01 consciousness example why not think wakeful unified consciousness at 100 is the result of 1000 tiny microconsciousness singing side by side such that the total choir of microconsciousness gives rise to an illusion of a single large singer when e t say one can experience billions of states who is this one why one and not many their assumption of conscious unity is another fixed point but it s just an assumption granted it s an assumption that stems from introspective experience but why trust introspection here introspection also says consciousness completely goes away during asleep but as we ve seen it might be wrong about that 3 comments filed under consciousness tagged as animal minds cognitive science consciousness giulio tononi phenomenology philosophy of mind subjectivity july 19 2014 10 54 am should we ask minimally conscious patients if they want to live mo constandi tackles this question in an excellent post reviewing the work of adrian owen which i have been writing about myself owen and laureys have found a way to communicate with some of these patients by posing questions to them as they lie inside a brain scanner they ask patients to envision one of two scenarios one if they mean to say yes and one for no this raises the possibility of enabling these patients to make their own end of life decisions but it also raises more ethical dilemmas a big one should we even ask these patients if they wish to remain alive or die that s the question on everybody s mind says owen but it s probably not appropriate to ask until we know what we will do with the answer if a patient answers yes i want to die we still don t have a procedure for allowing that to happen most countries lack euthanasia laws in those that do have them such as belgium and switzerland the vast majority of requests for euthanasia come from cancer patients the laws are rarely if ever used in the context of patients with consciousness disorders owen is collaborating with neuroethicist judy illes of the university of british columbia to address these issues with funding from the canadian institutes of health research they are focusing on how these new technologies can provide information about such patients how the tools could be incorporated into healthcare systems and what they mean for patients their families and society the question is how we can use this technology most beneficially says illes also a member of the dana alliance for brain initiatives it s tempting to ask about end of life decisions but that s probably inappropriate i think one of the best questions to ask is are you in pain because that s something we could respond to immediately patients could she adds also be asked about how their daily lives might be made more comfortable and enjoyable we might ask about their preferences for food or entertainment something that seems trivial to you and i may be super important to somebody who is unable to do anything except lie in their bed see more at http dana org news details aspx id 43226 sthash 2tpwlztr dpuf leave a comment filed under neuroethics tagged as bioethics disorders of consciousness minimally conscious state neuroethics vegetative state july 19 2014 9 42 am more evidence for vestigial bicamerality acclaimed cultural anthropologist tanya luhrmann has a new paper out in the british journal of psychiatry differences in voice hearing experiences of people with psychosis in the usa india and ghana interview based study the paper further corroborates the theoretical framework of julian jaynes and his idea of bicamerality the bicameral paradigm is quintessentially a hallucinatory voice guiding or command you to do everyday tasks consider this summary of the interviews from patients in chennai india these voices behaved as relatives do they gave guidance but they also scolded they often gave commands to do domestic tasks although people did not always like them they spoke about them as relationships one man explained they talk as if elder people advising younger people a woman heard seven or eight of her female relatives scold her constantly they told her that she should die but they also told her to bathe to shop and to go into the kitchen and prepare food now consider jaynes hypothetical description of the egyptian concept of ka or spirit double it is obvious from the preceding chapters that the ka requires a reinterpretation as a bicameral voice it is i believe what the ili or personal god was in mesopotamia a man s ka was his articulate directing voice which he heard inwardly perhaps in a parental or authoritative accents but which when heard by his friends or relatives even after his own death was of course hallucinated as his own voice the ka of the god king is of particular interest it was heard i suggest by the king in the accents of his own father in early civilizations each person had a part of his nervous system which was divine by which he was ordered about like any slave a voice or voices which indeed were what we call volition and empowered what they commanded and were related to the hallucinated voices of others in a carefully established hierarchy going back to the luhrmann interviews we can see the essential social hierarchical component of bicamerality still at work today in voice hearers they made comments that suggested that these voices were both social relationships and entertainment i like my mother s voice later this woman added i have a companion to talk to laughs i need not go out to speak i can talk within myself jaynes other suggestion about bicamerality is that the voices served a behavioral function they weren t just echoes of a broken nervous system but were a way for the human nervous system to guide itself adaptively they are a channel for what jaynes called stored up admonitory wisdom luhrmann cites one man as saying the voices just tell me to do the right thing if i hadn t had these voices i would have been dead long ago now imagine an entire city where the majority of people are voice hearers and there is an elaborate cultural mythology for interpreting the voices as personal gods where hearing divine or special voices talk to you is perfectly normal in every way can you imagine it jaynes could but it stretches the imagination but that s no reason to think it wasn t the case just because modern people with modern minds not hearing voices find that situation psychotic or crazy doesn t mean that bicamerality has always been limited to 1 2 of the population it was likely spread throughout ...