http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/01/index25article8.html

Rob and I were talking last night, and I was looking at his face in the light of a small electric candle that sits on the bedside table. It was almost as if I saw his face come swimming out of darkness into our reality, so full of life and expression, the most fantastic miracle of consciousness—a self forming itself from the universe, alive with brilliant focus—yet bound to vanish as mysteriously as it came. Like us all, I thought. For we’re caught between the triumph of our existence, and the anguish of our ignorance about what comes before or after. And if we exist forever in any moment, then why can’t we realize it?

Yet even then I realized that our determined clear physical focus is, to some extent at least, dependent upon our forgetting. How can we experience the dear privacy of the moment if we’re aware of all those other equally valid moments? And would we savor our hours in the same way or become glutted with them, drunken with excess?

And I was led to think: How valuable the physical senses are! They create the theater of perception through which we experience reality. They organize, categorize and pin down vast fields of raw data to form a three-dimensional living picture in which we are so intimately involved that we are in the picture we see, even without recognizing ourselves within it.

Our beingness is directed constantly by the senses: That much is clear. What isn’t so apparent is the fact that we experience physical reality from within (within the body, which is itself within the picture), though reality appears to be “out there” beyond the skin. We even form what reality is, even while we perceive it as something that happens outside.

The senses cleverly and beautifully create physical reality and our most meaningful experience of it, yet it seems as if reality has always been there, exteriorized, regardless of our perception of it. Sounds certainly make it seem that there are noises out there to be heard. My eyes make me certain that there is a world of objects out there to be seen.

But our being-in-the-world and our feeling of being rooted in it, secure and alive in it—all of these are dependent upon the senses within the body itself (within the body which is itself within the picture). We aren’t consciously aware of this inner relation upon which our whole experience with the world rests.

For example, our aliveness and responsiveness to the world are dependent upon feelings of inner balance that align us with “exterior” conditions, but actually this inner sensing creates those conditions. We say that a day is warm or cold, according to how the air feels as it hits our skin. But the air is neither warm nor cold on its own. Only our inner thermal senses create the sensations.

Objects seem to be all around us in the same way, because our physical perceptions organize data in certain patterns, and then we respond to the apparent reality. The body is a unique reality-forming organism; one that not only projects a three-dimensional picture outward, but is itself within the living picture of reality that it is constantly creating. The feedback is so flashing, so instantaneous that this escapes us.

The body continually creates itself from within this system of interrelatedness, throwing out from itself physical representations in three-dimensional fact which it then experiences—creating, for example, the space through which it moves, the time through which it grows and ages, and all of those exterior conditions to which it then responds.

Its corporal aliveness, of course, arises from layers beneath usual consciousness. On those layers we are constantly responding to qualities of temperature, air pressure, cosmic rays and tidal motions of which are unaware, but upon which our reality depends.

… Enjoyment of physical sensation with its natural being-with-itness is one of our greatest delights and one of the best uniting devices, bringing body and soul firmly into their rightful relatedness. Physical joy and corporal motion set things right, putting the conscious self (the focus personality) in its proper position as it feels its soul alive in flesh, securely anchored in the support of its own creativity. In this relationship, thoughts are as physical as body cells; body cells as mental as thoughts; both uniting to form corporal expression.

The senses within the body create dimensions of space through which the body can then express itself, enjoy, explore; dimensions of agility and motion with limitless possibilities for action, manipulation and performance; an equally limitless and always unique opportunity for tactile experience and expression. Besides this, there is the taken-for-granted corporal triumph of being a body three-dimensionally equipped to act within a system in which it is peculiarly suited to exist.

… This feeling of corporal creativity as happening within the body brings a sense of physical aliveness, or corporal happening and gut-level relatedness that gets lost if we overemphasize the mental aspect of thoughts. At least for now, thoughts rest on the cells’ physical life. That much should be apparent. While we have bodies, thoughts are a physical expression, growing out of our brains as flowers grow out of the earth.

— Jane Roberts,
Adventures in Consciousness:
An Introduction to Aspect Psychology,
Chapter 20 – The Focus Personality and the Senses

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/02/index25article7.html

Suppose you are sitting at a table thinking about the contemporary political situation, about what is going on in Washington, London, and Paris. You turn your attention to this book and you read up to this point. Here I suggest that, to get a real feel for the assumptions, you try pinching your left forearm with your right hand. And suppose you do this intentionally. That is, we will suppose your intention causes the movement of your right hand to pinch your left arm. At this point you will experience a mild pain. This pain has the following more or less obvious features. It exists only insofar as it is consciously experienced, and thus it is in one sense of the words entirely “subjective” and not “objective.” Furthermore, there is a certain qualitative feel to the pain. So, the conscious pain has at least these two features: subjectivity and qualitativeness.

I want all of this to sound rather innocent, even boring. So far you have had three types of conscious experiences: thinking about something, intentionally doing something, and feeling a sensation. What is the problem? Well, now look at the objects around you, the chairs and tables, houses and trees. These objects are not in any sense “subjective.” They exist entirely independent of whether or not they are experienced. Furthermore, we know independently that they are entirely made of the particles described by atomic physics, and that there is no qualitative feel to being a physical particle, or for that matter being a table. They are parts of the world that exist apart from experiences. Now this simple contrast between our experiences and the world that exists independently of our experiences invites a characterization, and in our traditional vocabulary the most natural characterization is to say that there is a distinction between the mental, on the one hand, and the physical or material, on the other. The mental qua mental is not physical. And the physical qua physical is not mental. It is this simple picture that leads to many of the problems, and our three harmless-looking examples exemplify three of the worst problems. How can conscious experiences like your pain exist in a world that is entirely composed of physical particles and how can some physical particles, presumably in your brain, cause the mental experiences? (This is called the “mind-body problem.”) But even if we got a solution to that problem, we still would not be out of the woods because the next obvious question is, How can the subjective, insubstantial, nonphysical mental states of consciousness ever cause anything in the physical world? How can your intention, not a part of the physical world, ever cause the movement of your arm? (This is called the “problem of mental causation.”) Finally your thoughts about politics raise a third intractable problem. How can your thoughts, presumably in your head, refer to or be about distant objects and states of affairs, political events occurring in Washington, London, or Paris, for example? (This is called the “problem of intentionality,” where “intentionality” means the directedness or aboutness of the mind.)

Our innocent experiences invited a description; and our traditional vocabulary of “mental” and “physical” is hard to resist. This traditional vocabulary assumes the mutual exclusion of the mental and physical; and that assumption creates insoluble problems that have launched a thousand books.

… Most of the general introductions to the subject are just about the Big Questions. They concentrate mainly on the mind-body problem with some attention also devoted to the problem of mental causation and a lesser amount to the problem of intentionality. I do not think these are the only interesting questions in the philosophy of mind… [H]ow does it work in detail?

Specifically, it seems to me we need to investigate questions about the detailed structure of consciousness, and the significance of recent neurobiological research on this subject.

— John Searle,
Mind:
A Brief Introduction

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/03/index25article6.html

What is consciousness? And where does it come from? As far as Western science is concerned, consciousness is a great enigma. That we are conscious beings is the most obvious fact of our existence. Yet there is nothing more difficult to explain. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain result in a corresponding experience? There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that predicts any of us should have an interior world. Paradoxically, science would be much happier if there were no such thing as consciousness—yet without consciousness there would be no science.

Today, largely as a result of a growing understanding of the human brain, a number of psychologists and philosophers are investigating the mystery of consciousness. Some believe that a deeper understanding of brain chemistry will explain how consciousness arises. Others look to quantum physics. Some explore cybernetics; others find sources of hope in chaos theory. Yet whatever idea is put forward, one thorny question remains unanswered: How can something as immaterial as consciousness ever arise from something as unconscious as matter?

… [W]e are in a situation similar to that of the medieval astronomers who tried in vain to explain the irregular motion of the planets with a complex system of circles rolling around circles. Copernicus realized that if the Earth were not the center of the universe but a planet orbiting the sun, then the wandering motion of the planets could be easily explained. But the Church did not take kindly to his ideas. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for supporting the Copernican model (and for referring to God as “she”), while Galileo was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

In present times we may be approaching a similar paradigm shift with regard to consciousness. Most scientists assume that consciousness emerges in some way or other from brain activity. But if this approach is getting us nowhere, perhaps we should consider an alternative worldview—one found in many metaphysical and spiritual traditions, where consciousness is held to be an essential quality of the cosmos, as fundamental as space, time, and matter.

Interestingly, expanding our worldview to include consciousness as a fundamental quality does not actually threaten any of the conclusions of modern science. Mathematics remains the same, as do physics, biology, chemistry, and all our other discoveries about the material world. What changes is our understanding of ourselves. If consciousness is indeed fundamental, then the teachings of the great sages and mystics begin to make new sense.

Those who have penetrated to the core of their minds have frequently discovered a profound connection with the ground of all being. The sense of being an individual self—that feeling of I-ness that we all know so well but find so hard to define—turns out to be not so unique after all. They claim repeatedly that the light of consciousness shining in me as my self is the same light that shines in you and in every other sentient being.

Some have expressed this realization in the statement “I am God.” To modern science, such statements are nothing more than self-delusion. Physicists have looked out into deep space to the edges of the universe, back into “deep time” to the beginning of creation, and down into “deep structure” to the fundamental constituents of matter. The majority have found not only no evidence for God, but no need for God. The Universe seems to work perfectly well without any divine assistance.

But when mystics speak of the divine, they are not speaking of some supernatural being who rules the workings of the universe; they are talking of the world within. If we want to find God, we need to look into the realm of “deep mind”—a realm that science has only begun to explore. As we learn more, we may find that we have embarked on a course that will lead not only to a much fuller understanding of ourselves, but also to that long-sought synthesis of science and spirit.

— Peter Russell,
in the introduction to
The Quiet Center,
by John C Lilly

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/04/index25article5.html

What makes you you, and what are your boundaries? Part of the answer seems obvious — you are a centre of consciousness. But what in the world is consciousness? Consciousness is both the most obvious and the most mysterious feature of our minds. On the one hand, what could be more certain or manifest to each of us than that he or she is a subject of experience, an enjoyer of perceptions and sensations, a sufferer of pain, and entertainer of ideas, and a conscious deliberator? On the other hand, what in the world can consciousness be? How can living physical bodies in the physical world produce such a phenomenon? …

Our ordinary concept of consciousness seems to be anchored to two separable sets of considerations that can be captured roughly by the phrases “from the inside” and “from the outside.” From the inside, our own consciousness seems obvious and pervasive, we know that much goes on around us and even inside our bodies of which we are entirely unaware or unconscious, but nothing could be more intimately known to us than those things of which we are, individually, conscious. Those things of which I am conscious, and the ways in which I am conscious of them, determine what it is like to be me. I know in a way no other could know what it is like to be me. From the inside, consciousness seems to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon — an inner light that is either on or off. We grant that we are sometimes drowsy or inattentive, or asleep, and on occasion we even enjoy abnormally heightened consciousness, but when we are conscious, that we are conscious is not a fact that admits of degrees. There is a perspective, then, from which consciousness seems to be a feature that sunders the universe into two strikingly different kinds of things, those that have it and those that don’t. Those that have it are subjects, beings to whom things can be one way or another, beings it is like something to be. It is not like anything at all to be a brick or a pocket calculator or an apple. These things have insides, but not the right sort of insides — no inner life, no point of view. It is certainly like something to be me (Something I know “from the inside”) and almost certainly like something to be you (for you have told me, most convincingly, that it is the same with you), and probably like something to be a dog or a dolphin…

When one considers these others (other folk and other creatures), one considers them perforce from the outside, and then various of their observable features strike us as relevant to the question of their consciousness. Creatures react appropriately to events within the scope of their senses; they recognize things, avoid painful experiences, learn, plan, and solve problems. They exhibit intelligence. But putting matter this way might be held to prejudge the issue. Talking of their “senses” or of “painful” circumstances, for instance suggests that we have already settled the issue of consciousness — for note that had we described a robot in those terms, the polemical intent of the choice of words would have been obvious (and resisted by many). How do creatures differ from robots, real or imagined? By being organically and biologically similar to us — and we are the paradigmatic conscious creatures. This similarity admits of degrees, of course, and one’s intuitions about what sorts of similarity count are probably untrustworthy. Dolphins’ fishiness subtracts from our conviction that they are conscious like us, but no doubt should not. Were chimpanzees as dull as seaslugs, their facial similarity to us would no doubt nevertheless favour their inclusion in the charmed circle. If houseflies were about our size, or warm-blooded, we’d be much more confident that when we plucked off their wings they felt pain (our sort of pain, the kind that matters). What makes us think that some such considerations ought to count and not others?

The obvious answer is that the various “outside” indicators are more or less reliable signs or symptoms of the presence of that whatever-it-is each conscious subject knows from the inside. But how could this be confirmed? This is the notorious “problem of other minds.” In one’s own case, it seems, one can directly observe the coincidence of one’s inner life with one’s outwardly observable behaviour. But if each of us is to advance rigorously beyond solipsism, we must be able to do something apparently impossible: confirm the coincidence of inner and outer in others. Their telling us of the coincidence in their own cases will not do, officially, for that gives us just more coincidence of inner with outer; the demonstrable capacities for perception and intelligent action normally go hand-in-hand with the capacity to talk, and particularly to make “introspective” reports. If a cleverly designed robot could (seem to) tell us of its inner life, (could utter all the appropriate noises in the appropriate contexts), would we be right to admit it to the charmed circle? We might be, but how could we ever tell we were not being fooled? Here the question seems to be: is that special inner light really turned on, or is there nothing but darkness inside? And this question looks unanswerable.

— Daniel C. Dennett
in Douglas R. Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett,
The Mind’s I,
Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/05/index25article4.html

To St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226…) is attributed the remark, “What you are looking for is what is looking.” This is also a succinct statement of the intent of Self-enquiry (capitalized), which means to look for what is looking, or to watch for what is watching.

You will never be satisfied with anything in the world because everything in it changes. The only thing that will ever really satisfy you is your true Self, which transcends all changes.

Whenever you are suffering, focus the attention on what is looking by asking a question something like,

What is aware?

What is it that never changes?

What is it that cannot be affected?

and then look. Don’t conceptualize an answer! By looking, you will become disidentified from any kind of thought or image that you see. If you have the sensation that what is watching is located in the head or chest, remember again that anything that you can watch cannot be what is watching. This applies to any sense of a localized object, even to an observer. You may now have the sensation of receding away from all mental objects towards an inner You, which is prior to, or inward from, all mental objects. Stay in this state until involvement with thoughts recurs, then repeat the question and look again. This state is one of stillness, peace, and fullness in which you are disidentified from everything in manifestation.

If you still have the sense that there is an observer that is looking, ask,

What is it that is aware of this observer?

and then look. This will help you to recede even further.

With practice, you will find that you stay in this state for longer and longer periods before asking again. Eventually, you will be able to omit asking, and simply look at what is looking. You may also begin to feel the pull of the Self itself and, with more practice, the Self may pull you in and hold you with little or no effort from you. And finally, you may realize that the Self is always what you are, and is always what you have been.

Every incident of suffering is another cue to disidentify. Whatever happens or does not happen is never up to you, so the only thing that you can “do” in any situation is to disidentify from it. This will bring an immediate but profound sense of silence and peace which will be irresistible inspiration for continued disidentification.

Enquiry into the Self may be summarized by the reminder,

Go inward.

Go inward past all thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, and perceptions, as far as possible until you can see that none of the mind’s contents are You or Yours. If you are still suffering, you have not gone far enough. Go still further and see that there is nothing there. You will then see that You are not a concept or object because You are what sees them. You Yourself are nothing that You can see or conceptualize. While you are inward, You will be unmoved and untouched by anything that happens in the body-mind or the world because You will see that You are unmovable and untouchable.

Outward is emptiness, frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and boredom, and nothing that you really want. Your security cannot be found in what is ever-changing. It can only be found in what is never-changing. What you are looking for is what is looking. It is the home of peace and fulfillment and everything you really want.

Do not be deceived by the apparent simplicity of this practice! It is far more powerful than the mind can ever imagine because it brings you to the real You, which transcends the mind and therefore cannot be understood by the mind.

While you are inward, the activities of the body-mind and of the rest of the world may continue but they will not affect You. The more time you spend inward, the more you will realize your true nature, and the better you will feel.

… Initially, enquiry is most easily practiced in sitting meditation with a minimum of distractions. However, its real value is realized only when you use it to remain disidentified in all forms of activity. Ultimately, Self-enquiry is transformed from an active practice into the realization that ever-present, pure witnessing is what You are. … [The Sage] Ramesh [Balsekar] says,

“Self-enquiry is a passive rather than an active process. Mind is allowed to subside into its source even while engaged in normal activity, which then becomes an undercurrent of witnessing that gradually extends throughout all waking hours and begins to pervade all one’s activities without intruding on them or interfering with them.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj was a striking example of successful enquiry. In an article in the October 1978 issue of The Mountain Path, Jean Dunn, a disciple of his, wrote that he once said,

“When I met my guru he told me, ‘You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense “I Am”, find your real Self.’ I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! It took me only three years to realize my true nature.”

— Stanley Sobottka,
A Course in Consciousness
(http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness/), Chapter 22 – Disidentification through Enquiry

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/06/index25article3.html

Psychology was cognitive at its origins in the mid-to-late 19th century. Structuralists such as Wilhelm Wundt and E. B. Titchener attempted to decompose conscious experience into its constituent sensations, images, and feelings. On the very first page of the Principles of Psychology (1890), the discipline’s founding text, William James asserted that “the first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on,” and the functionalist tradition that he and John Dewey established sought to understand the role of thinking and other aspects of mental life in our adaptation to the environment.

In the early 20th century, however, John B. Watson attempted to remake psychology as a science of behavior rather than, as James had defined it, a science of mental life. For Watson, public observation was the key to making psychology a viable, progressive science. Because consciousness (not to mention “the unconscious”) was essentially private, Watson argued that psychology should abandon any interest in mental life and instead confine its interest to what could be publicly observed: behavior and the circumstances in which it occurred. In Watson’s view, thoughts and other mental states did not cause behavior; rather, behavior was elicited by environmental stimuli. Thus began the behaviorist program, pursued most famously by B. F. Skinner, of tracing the relations between environmental events and the organism’s response to them. Psychology, in the words of one wag, lost its mind.

The behaviorist program dominated psychology between the two world wars and well into the 1950s, as manifested especially by the field’s focus on learning in nonhuman animals, such as rats and pigeons. Gradually, however, psychologists came to realize that they could not understand behavior solely in terms of the correlation between stimulus inputs and response outputs. E. C. Tolman discovered that rats learned in the absence of reinforcement, whereas Harry Harlow discovered that monkeys acquired general “sets” through learning as well as specific responses. Noam Chomsky famously showed that Skinner’s version of behaviorism could not account for language learning or performance, completely reinventing the discipline of linguistics in the process, and George Miller applied Chomsky’s insights in psychology. Leo Kamin, Robert Rescorla, and others demonstrated that conditioned responses, even in rats, rabbits, and dogs, were mediated by expectations of predictability and controllability rather than associations based on spatiotemporal contiguity. These and other findings convinced psychologists that they could not understand the behavior of organisms without understanding the internal cognitive structures that mediated between stimulus and response.

The “cognitive revolution” in psychology, which was really more of a counterrevolution against the revolution of behaviorism, was stimulated by the introduction of the high-speed computer. With input devices analogous to sensory and perceptual mechanisms, memory structures for storing information, control processes for passing information among them, transforming it along the way, and output devices analogous to behavior, the computer provided a tangible model for human thought. Perceiving, learning, remembering, and thinking were reconstrued in terms of “human information processing,” performed by the software of the mind on the hardware of the brain. Artificial intelligence, simulated by the computer, became both a model and a challenge for human intelligence. Jerome Bruner and George Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard University in 1960, intending to bring the insights of information theory and the Chomskian approach to language to bear on psychology. Miller’s book, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960; written with Karl Pribram and Eugene Galanter) replaced the reflex arc of behaviorism with the feedback loops of cybernetics. The cognitive (counter) revolution was consolidated by the publication of Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology in 1967 and the founding of a scientific journal by the same name in 1970. With the availability of a comprehensive textbook on which undergraduate courses could be based, psychology regained its mind.

… The cognitive revolution in psychology was paralleled by the development of the field of cognitive science, whose practitioners included philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, behavioral biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. In some sense, the rise of cognitive science may have been a reaction to the dominance of behaviorism within psychology: Many who wished to pursue a science of mental life may have believed that they would have to go outside psychology to do so. By the same token, it seems reasonable to hope that the combined efforts of many different disciplines are more likely to yield a better understanding of cognitive processes than any one working in isolation.

Whereas some early cognitive psychologists viewed the computer as a model of the human mind, some early cognitive scientists believed that it offered the prospect of implementing the “mechanical mind” debated by philosophers at least since the time of Descartes…

Cognitive psychology remains an important component of cognitive science. However, to the extent that it seeks to develop intelligent machines on their own terms, without reference to human intelligence, cognitive science departs from cognitive psychology.

— John F. Kihlstrom, Lillian Park,
‘Cognitive Psychology, Overview’
– An entry in
Encyclopedia of the Human Brain,
editor-in-chief V.S. Ramachandran

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/07/index25article2.html

It is unlikely, in my opinion, that anyone will ever make a robot that is conscious in just the way we human beings are. Presumably that prediction is less interesting than the reasons one might offer for it. They might be deep (conscious robots are in some way “impossible in principle”) or they might be trivial (for instance, conscious robots might simply cost too much to make). Nobody will ever synthesize a gall bladder out of atoms of the requisite elements, but I think it is uncontroversial that a gall bladder is nevertheless “just” a stupendous assembly of such atoms. Might a conscious robot be “just” a stupendous assembly of more elementary artifacts—silicon chips, wires, tiny motors and cameras—or would any such assembly, of whatever size and sophistication, have to leave out some special ingredient that is requisite for consciousness?

Let us briefly survey a nested series of reasons someone might advance for the impossibility of a conscious robot:

1. Robots are purely material things, and consciousness requires immaterial mind-stuff. (Old-fashioned dualism.)

It continues to amaze me how attractive this position still is to many people. I would have thought a historical perspective alone would make this view seem ludicrous: over the centuries, every other phenomenon of initially “supernatural” mysteriousness has succumbed to an uncontroversial explanation within the commodious folds of physical science. Thales, the pre-Socratic protoscientist, thought the loadstone had a soul, but we now know better; magnetism is one of the best understood of physical phenomena, strange though its manifestations are. The “miracles” of life itself, and of reproduction, are now analyzed into the well-known intricacies of molecular biology. Why should consciousness be any exception? Why should the brain be the only complex physical object in the universe to have an interface with another realm of being? …

2. Robots are inorganic (by definition), and consciousness can exist only in an organic brain.

… [I]t is conceivable—if unlikely—that the sheer speed and compactness of biochemically engineered processes in the brain are in fact unreproducible in other physical media. So there might be straightforward reasons of engineering that showed that any robot that could not make use of organic tissues of one sort or another within its fabric would be too ungainly to execute some task critical for consciousness…

3. Robots are artifacts, and consciousness abhors an artifact; only something natural, born not manufactured, could exhibit genuine consciousness.

… Consider the general category of creed we might call origin essentialism: only wine made under the direction of the proprietors of Chateau Plonque counts as genuine Chateau Plonque; only a canvas every blotch on which was caused by the hand of Cézanne counts as a genuine Cézanne… Let us dub origin chauvinism the category of view that holds out for some mystic difference (a difference of value, typically) due simply to such a fact about origin. Perfect imitation Chateau Plonque is exactly as good a wine as the real thing, counterfeit though it is, and the same holds for the fake Cézanne, if it is really indistinguishable by experts…

4. Robots will always just be much too simple to be conscious.

After all, a normal human being is composed of trillions of parts (if we descend to the level of the macromolecules), and many of these rival in complexity and design cunning the fanciest artifacts that have ever been created. We consist of billions of cells, and a single human cell contains within itself complex “machinery” that is still well beyond the artifactual powers of engineers. We are composed of thousands of different kinds of cells, including thousands of different species of symbiont visitors, some of whom might be as important to our consciousness as others are to our ability to digest our food! If all that complexity were needed for consciousness to exist, then the task of making a single conscious robot would dwarf the entire scientific and engineering resources of the planet for millennia. And who would pay for it?

If no other reason can be found, this may do to ground your skepticism about conscious robots in your future, but one shortcoming of this last reason is that it is scientifically boring. If this is the only reason there won’t be conscious robots, then consciousness isn’t that special, after all. Another shortcoming with this reason is that it is dubious on its face. Everywhere else we have looked, we have found higher-level commonalities of function that permit us to substitute relatively simple bits for fiendishly complicated bits. Artificial heart valves work really very well, but they are orders of magnitude simpler than organic heart valves, heart valves born of woman or sow, you might say. Artificial ears and eyes that will do a serviceable (if crude) job of substituting for lost perceptual organs are visible on the horizon, and anyone who doubts they are possible in principle is simply out of touch. Nobody ever said a prosthetic eye had to see as keenly, or focus as fast, or be as sensitive to color gradations as a normal human (or other animal) eye in order to count as an eye. If an eye, why not an optic nerve (or acceptable substitute thereof), and so forth, all the way in?

— Daniel C. Dennett,
Brainchildren -
Essays on Designing Minds,
Chapter 9 – The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9974/08/index25article1.html

We experience the world as a whole. Although myriad signals relentlessly bombard our senses, we somehow integrate them into unified moments of conscious experience that cohere together despite their diversity. Because of the apparent unity and coherence of our awareness, we can develop a sense of self that can gradually mature with our experiences of the world. This capacity lies at the heart of our ability to function as intelligent beings. The apparent unity and coherence of our experiences is all the more remarkable when we consider several properties of how the brain copes with the environmental events that it processes.

First and foremost, these events are highly context-sensitive. When we look at a complex picture or scene as a whole, we can often recognize its objects and its meaning at a glance, as in the picture of a familiar face. However, if we process the face piece-by-piece, as through a small aperture, then its significance may be greatly degraded. To cope with this context-sensitivity, the brain typically processes pictures and other sense data in parallel, as patterns of activation across a large number of feature-sensitive nerve cells, or neurons. The same is true for senses other than vision, such as audition. If the sound of the word GO is altered by clipping off the vowel O, then the consonant G may sound like a chirp, quite unlike its sound as part of GO.

During vision, all the signals from a scene typically reach the photosensitive retinas of the eyes at essentially the same time, so parallel processing of all the scene’s parts begins at the retina itself. During audition, each successive sound reaches the ear at a later time. Before an entire pattern of sounds, such as the word GO, can be processed as a whole, it needs to be recoded, at a later processing stage, into a simultaneously available spatial pattern of activation. Such a processing stage is often called a working memory, and the activations that it stores are often called short-term memory (STM) traces.

For example, when you hear an unfamiliar telephone number, you can temporarily store it in working memory while you walk over to the telephone and dial the number. In order to determine which of these patterns represents familiar events and which do not, the brain matches these patterns against stored representations of previous experiences that have been acquired through learning. Unlike the STM traces that are stored in a working memory, the learned experiences are stored in long-term memory (LTM) traces. One difference between STM and LTM traces concerns how they react to distractions. For example, if you are distracted by a loud noise before you dial a new telephone number, its STM representation can be rapidly reset so that you forget it. On the other hand, if you are distracted by a loud noise, you (hopefully) will not forget the LTM representation of your own name.

The problem of learning makes the unity of conscious experience particularly hard to understand, if only because we are able to rapidly learn such enormous amounts of new information, on our own, throughout life. For example, after seeing an exciting movie, we can tell our friends many details about it later on, even though the individual scenes flashed by very quickly. More generally, we can quickly learn about new environments, even if no one tells us how the rules of each environment differ. To a surprising degree, we can rapidly learn new facts without being forced to just as rapidly forget what we already know. As a result, we do not need to avoid going out into the world for fear that, in learning to recognize a new friend’s face, we will suddenly forget our parents’ faces.

I have called the problem whereby the brain learns quickly and stably without catastrophically forgetting its past knowledge the stability-plasticity dilemma. The stability-plasticity dilemma must be solved by every brain system that needs to rapidly and adaptively respond to the flood of signals that subserves even the most ordinary experiences. If the brain’s design is parsimonious, then we should expect to find similar design principles operating in all the brain systems that can stably learn an accumulating knowledge base in response to changing conditions throughout life. The discovery of such principles should clarify how the brain unifies diverse sources of information into coherent moments of conscious experience.

— Stephen Grossberg,
Brain Learning, Attention and Consciousness,
Chapter 61 in
Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness,
ed. Bernard J. Baars et al.

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/01/index24article8.html

Imagine that your brain starts to deteriorate in such a way that you are slowly going blind. Imagine that the desperate doctors, anxious to alleviate your condition, try any method to restore your vision. As a last resort, they try plugging silicon chips into your visual cortex. Imagine that to your amazement and theirs, it turns out that the silicon chips restore your vision to its normal state. Now imagine further that your brain, depressingly, continues to deteriorate and the doctors continue to implant more silicon chips. You can see where the thought experiment is going already: in the end, we imagine that your brain is entirely replaced by silicon chips; that as you shake your head, you can hear the chips rattling around inside your skull. In such a situation there would be various possibilities. One logical possibility, not to be excluded on any a priori grounds alone, is surely this: you continue to have all sorts of thoughts, experiences, memories, etc., that you had previously; the sequence of your mental life remains unaffected. In this case, we are imagining that the silicon chips have the power not only to duplicate your input-output functions, but also to duplicate the mental phenomena, conscious and otherwise, that are normally responsible for your input-output functions.

I hasten to add that I don’t for a moment think that such a thing is even remotely empirically possible. I think it is empirically absurd to suppose that we could duplicate the causal powers of neurons entirely in silicon. But that is an empirical claim on my part. It is not something that we could establish a priori. So the thought experiment remains valid as a statement of logical or conceptual possibility.

But now let us imagine some variations on the thought experiment. A second possibility, also not to be excluded on any a priori grounds, is this: as the silicon is progressively implanted into your dwindling brain, you find that the area of your conscious experience is shrinking, but that this shows no effect on your external behavior. You find, to your total amazement, that you are indeed losing control of your external behavior. You find, for example, that when the doctors test your vision, your hear them say, “We are holding up a red object in front of you; please tell us what you see.” You want to cry out, “I can’t see anything. I’m going totally blind.” But you hear your voice saying in a way that is completely out of your control, “I see a red object in front of me.” If we carry this thought experiment out to the limit, we get a much more depressing result than last time. We imagine that your conscious experience slowly shrinks to nothing, while your externally observable behavior remains the same.

… To those who are puzzled how such a thing is possible, let us simply remind them: As far as we know, the basis of consciousness is in certain specific regions of the brain, such as, perhaps, the reticular formation. And we may suppose in this case that these regions are gradually deteriorating to the point where there is no consciousness in the system. But we further suppose that the silicon chips are able to duplicate the input-output functions of the whole central nervous system, even though there is no consciousness left in the remnants of the system.

Now consider a third variation. In this case, we imagine that the progressive implantation of the silicon chips produces no change in your mental life, but you are progressively more and more unable to put your thoughts, feelings, and intentions into action. In this case, we imagine that your thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, etc., remain intact, but your observable external behavior slowly reduces to total paralysis. Eventually you suffer from total paralysis, even though your mental life is unchanged. So in this case, you might hear the doctors saying,

The silicon chips are able to maintain heartbeat, respiration, and other vital processes, but the patient is obviously brain dead. We might as well unplug the system, because the patient has no mental life at all.

Now in this case, you would know that they are totally mistaken. That is, you want to shout out,

No, I’m still conscious! I perceive everything going on around me. It’s just that I can’t make any physical movement. I’ve become totally paralyzed.

The point of these three variations on the thought experiment is to illustrate the causal relationships between brain processes, mental processes, and external observable behavior.

… What is the philosophical significance of these three thought experiments? It seems to me there is a number of lessons to be learned. The most important is that they illustrate something about the relationship between mind and behavior. What exactly is the importance of behavior for the concept of mind? Ontologically speaking, behavior, functional role, and causal relations are irrelevant to the existence of conscious mental phenomena. Epistemically, we do learn about other people’s conscious mental states in part from their behavior. Causally, consciousness serves to mediate the causal relations between input stimuli and output behavior; and from an evolutionary point of view, the conscious mind functions causally to control behavior. But ontologically speaking, the phenomena in question can exist completely and have all of their essential properties independent of any behavioral output.

— John Searle,
The Rediscovery of the Mind,
Chapter 3 – Silicon Brains, Conscious Robots, and Other Minds

http://www.thegreatonwardpress.com/9975/03/index24article6.html

From a single fertilized egg the process of cell division results first in a sort of container of ‘external cells’ surrounding a bundle of ‘internal cells’; then, by further gradual stages, in an embryo; then in a foetus which acquires more and more human features until it is ready to be born. In its early stages the embryo cannot usefully be described as a behaving system at all. Even after several weeks it still seems to be, at most, a pure reflex system. But at some stage in the transition from foetus, through birth, to an infant a few weeks old, we have an organism with the basic package. It will be useful to consider some relevant facts. Here are passages from a couple of textbooks:

— During a significant part of the fetal period (from 9 to 26 weeks), the eyes are closed, but toward the end of the fetal period, the fetus can see light and hear sound. The heartbeat is affected by the level of light or the tempo of music to which the mother is exposed.

— The sensation of taste also seems to be present in utero. Experiments in which the rate of swallowing has been measured have shown that the addition of saccharine to the amniotic fluid increases the rate of swallowing, whereas distasteful materials such as opaque media cause almost complete cessation of swallowing.

It is a sensitive question whether the foetus is perceptually conscious. Does it really see and hear and have sensations of taste? At this stage I am not considering that question, but only whether it is a decider*. The quotations show that the foetus is at least differentially sensitive to various stimuli in different sensory modalities; but that is consistent with its being a pure reflex system. More to the point is evidence that the foetus can learn and remember things. For example, newborn infants have been shown to prefer their mother’s voice to that of an unfamiliar female. To rule out the possibility that this learning was post-natal, it has further been shown that the babies studied show ‘a preference for their mother’s voice as it sounded in the womb’, rather than as it sounded after birth. There is also evidence that the foetus can learn to distinguish not just types of sound but sound-patterns. P. G. Hepper found that ‘babies, if their mothers had watched the TV soap “Neighbours” when pregnant, preferred this tune after birth to other unfamiliar tunes’.

There is similar evidence relating to other sense modalities. However, even that amount and type of learning is consistent with its being a matter of acquiring new stimuli, or at most, new triggering conditions. It doesn’t add up to a demonstration that the foetus has the basic package; the evidence is consistent with its being a triggered reflex system with acquired conditions.

… There is also some evidence against the view that the foetus is capable of learning in anything like the sense in which a decider learns. This shows up in facts about the development of the infant’s nervous system after birth. There is for example a reflex that makes the baby’s eyes follow any passing object. It takes time for the baby to become capable of overriding this reflex: that happens only with the explosion in brain growth around ten weeks. Then, by inhibiting the reflex, the baby becomes able to attend to something without being distracted. As time passes nervous connections permitting this control are strengthened. That suggests, even if it doesn’t imply, that the newborn baby lacks control over its behaviour. Now, we cannot sensibly ascribe to the foetus cognitive capacities not yet possessed by the neonate. So if the baby really can’t control its behaviour until after those post-natal developments in its nervous system, only then can it come to possess the basic package, and only then does it perceive the world in what I am calling the full sense. If that is correct, then… it is only at that stage that the infant is a candidate for genuine perceptual-phenomenal consciousness. So there is some reason to say that even the foetus ready to be born is not yet a decider.

The foetus is still picking up quantities of information—information that will make a difference to the baby’s behaviour. But that is consistent with the newborn baby’s being no more than a triggered reflex system with acquired reflexes, in which case its perception is of a low grade. What the foetus acquires is not yet information ‘for it’: or rather, it is at best information for it as it will become, not for it as it is. Watching a baby develop is an excellent way to see how the terms I am using to define the basic package (‘interpretation’, ‘assessment’, ‘decision-making’) do not pick out unitary all-or-nothing capacities, but complex clusters of capacities and skills which take time to develop. There is a time when the baby cannot sensibly be said to have any control over its behaviour—when it just seems to be a bundle of reflexes—and there is a time when it has clearly acquired at least some degree of control: some control over its voice, for example. But the interval between those times is taken up with the gradual accumulation of those capacities, whose complexity becomes obvious when you observe and reflect on their development.

— Robert Kirk,
Zombies and Consciousness,
Chapter 7 – Decision, Control and Integration

* A decider is by definition able to control its behaviour on the basis of stored and incoming information. It can also interpret information, assess its situation, and make decisions, in however rudimentary a way.