X-Message-Number: 7964 Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 09:22:15 -0800 (PST) From: Joseph Strout <> Subject: clarification re. understanding consciousness I see that my previous comment -- that perhaps biology and physics will not be enough to explain consciousness -- was misconstrued. I did not say that *science* would be insufficient to explain it; I merely said this about biology and physics. I'm talking about the "hard problem" of consciousness, as it's put by David Chalmers. (I think yesterday I quoted Dennet, but I actually meant Chalmers -- such is what you get for a human brain!) The "easy problems" of consciousness are things like, How does consciousness correlate with brain activity? What kind of processing can we do without consciousness? What happens in our brain when we become aware of something? And also what seems to be Bob's emphasis: what kind of brain activity correlates with emotion, pain, and other basic feelings? The "hard problem" of consciousness is: how is it that ANY system of physical stuff can have any awareness at all? Whence comes "consciousness"? Can you imagine (as some believe they can) a great superbrain more intelligent and adaptive than ourselves, which yet experiences nothing? If so, why do WE have conscious experience? If not, why is it that such a brain must be conscious? This is a fundamental question, and biology and physics alone will not provide an answer. We need some *new* types of theories. Chalmers proposes -- and I suspect he is right -- that consciousness is somehow an attribute of the universe which must be dealt with as its own thing. We'll need theories of consciousness, in addition to theories of physics. This is not to say that consciousness is anything mystical; just that it's a kind of phenomenon we don't yet have a good framework for. Perhaps (Chalmers suggests, and Bob detests) consciousness arises wherever there is information processing. (Yes, in this case, a thermostat would have a tiny little insignificant bit of consciousness.) Perhaps it arises from only certain kinds of information processing; some (in "A History of the Mind", author forgotten at the moment) have proposed that it requires reverberating feedback loops between sensory and motor areas. Perhaps it arises from reverberating magnetic fields. In any of these cases, physics and biology won't tell us WHY consciousness should arise from whatever it arises from. We'll need a new fundamental proposition, "consciousness arises from X!" and have to accept it on a level with "photons propagate through space!". Of course, some scientists think that when the easy problems are solved, the hard problem will disappear -- just as "life" seemed hard before it was found to be merely a semantic category, definable as you please. The two are probably quite analogous. Only time will tell! It's #2 on my list of Great Mysteries I hope to see resolved one day (#1 is the Fermi paradox). Warm regards, -- Joe ,------------------------------------------------------------------. | Joseph J. Strout Department of Neuroscience, UCSD | | http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/ | `------------------------------------------------------------------' Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7964