The Reification of Consciousness

[sealchan]

What is consciousness? Is it a thing? Or is it an abstract idea? Has it become so obvious and important to human self-understanding and identity that its abstraction is literally experienced as tangible when it is really just an abstraction?

Is consciousness real just because it is believed to be by a community of knowers?

I have a tickling idea, probably triggered by many hours of reading Hofstadter, that our mental experience of "I think; therefore, I am" is of a kind with other mental experiences that create some kind of phenomenological sense of "reality" in our mental awareness as opposed to "mentality" or "imaginality". But consciousness, or I, or ego, is so "self-evident" that it is the prime example of making something tangible that is, in fact, very, very intangible.

Are we fooling ourselves into existence/awareness or in fooling ourselves are we co-creating ourselves/our awareness?

 

[joe1776]

I'd like to help, but I don't have much to offer.

For me, consciousness is that state of mind that I experience when I'm awake and able to see, hear, smell, taste and feel sensations. I can start with that understanding of it and proceed to try figure out the causes for the effects that I sense.

But when I try to understand consciousness as you are trying to do, my thinking ranges from vague to blank.

 

[Axe Elf]

What is consciousness? Is it a thing? Or is it an abstract idea? Has it become so obvious and important to human self-understanding and identity that its abstraction is literally experienced as tangible when it is really just an abstraction?

Is consciousness real just because it is believed to be by a community of knowers?

I have a tickling idea, probably triggered by many hours of reading Hofstadter, that our mental experience of "I think; therefore, I am" is of a kind with other mental experiences that create some kind of phenomenological sense of "reality" in our mental awareness as opposed to "mentality" or "imaginality". But consciousness, or I, or ego, is so "self-evident" that it is the prime example of making something tangible that is, in fact, very, very intangible.

Are we fooling ourselves into existence/awareness or in fooling ourselves are we co-creating ourselves/our awareness?

I love Hofstadter too, especially his work in artificial intelligence based on the ability to make analogies as the foundation of intelligence.

As I understand him, he sees consciousness as kind of a meta-phenomenon resulting from the operation of millions of individual microprocesses in the brain, none of which themselves have any real awareness of the thoughts of which they are a part, much like an anthill is a meta-phenomenon resulting from the operation of thousands of individual ants, none of which have any real concept of the overall structure or functioning of the anthill.

So in terms of your original post, consciousness is a thing, in that it is a noun, but it's not really a tangible thing, in that it is something not defined completely by any of the physical processes of which it is composed, nor is it strictly an abstract idea, as it is rooted in and dependent upon the physical processes of which it is composed.

"I think, therefore I am" isn't really relevant to that issue, since it assumes consciousness a priori.

 

[Nous]

What is consciousness? Is it a thing? Or is it an abstract idea?

Consciousness is a hell of a hard word to define. When one tries to define it as something like "the state or quality of sentience, wakefulness, experience, knowledge, self-consciousness," etc., it just leads to the needing to define those further terms, which are hardly less difficult to pin down.

But having said that, I would definitely say that consciousness is not a "thing" such as an object that has location in spacetime. More positively, I would affirm that it is "abstract" (like, say, numbers). I would also affirm that consciousness at least sometimes or to some degree entails the important ability of volition, i.e., the ability to choose between available options.

Generally or to some degree, I would not agree that consciousness is "real just because it is believed to be by a community of knowers," although I would agree that there is some merit to such a seemingly paradoxical idea.

Consciousness is somehow undeniable, but it is also seemingly (to some degree) an impenetrable mystery.

 

[exchemist]

I love Hofstadter too, especially his work in artificial intelligence based on the ability to make analogies as the foundation of intelligence.

As I understand him, he sees consciousness as kind of a meta-phenomenon resulting from the operation of millions of individual microprocesses in the brain, none of which themselves have any real awareness of the thoughts of which they are a part, much like an anthill is a meta-phenomenon resulting from the operation of thousands of individual ants, none of which have any real concept of the overall structure or functioning of the anthill.

So in terms of your original post, consciousness is a thing, in that it is a noun, but it's not really a tangible thing, in that it is something not defined completely by any of the physical processes of which it is composed, nor is it strictly an abstract idea, as it is rooted in and dependent upon the physical processes of which it is composed.

"I think, therefore I am" isn't really relevant to that issue, since it assumes consciousness a priori.

That makes a lot of sense to me. I tend to think of consciousness as an activity - of the brain - rather than a "thing". Or at most as an emergent phenomenon from brain activity. This seems to fit with how computers behave.

I suspect we are all so culturally suffused with Cartesian dualism that we find it difficult to get away from the idea of consciousness as an entity, when in fact that is a category error.

 

[Nous]

That makes a lot of sense to me. I tend to think of consciousness as an activity - of the brain - rather than a "thing". Or at most as an emergent phenomenon from brain activity. This seems to fit with how computers behave.

I suspect we are all so culturally suffused with Cartesian dualism that we find it difficult to get away from the idea of consciousness as an entity, when in fact that is a category error.

I am not familiar with anything Descartes said so as to suggest that consciousness or mind is an object-like thing that has a spatial location.

Somehow humans seem to have a habit of trying to relate consciousness to the most sophisticated technology of the day. Huxley famously claimed that the relationship between mind and body is analogous to the steam that a steam locomotive produces. With the development of telephone switchboards, consciousness was explained as like the electrical signals being manipulated in these devices. People may still hold such ideas. Of course, these days consciousness is also commonly related to information processing in computers.

Interestingly, it seems to be difficult to deny that physicalism--as long as one doesn't assume eliminative physicalism--entails panpsychism, in which case, we might be justified in suspecting that consciousness is just an aspect of electromagnetic fields or other such fields known to physics (including the wave function).

 

[exchemist]

I am not familiar with anything Descartes said so as to suggest that consciousness or mind is an object-like thing that has a spatial location.

Somehow humans seem to have a habit of trying to relate consciousness to the most sophisticated technology of the day. Huxley famously claimed that the relationship between mind and body is analogous to the steam that a steam locomotive produces. With the development of telephone switchboards, consciousness was explained as like the electrical signals being manipulated in these devices. People may still hold such ideas. Of course, these days consciousness is also commonly related to information processing in computers.

Interestingly, it seems to be difficult to deny that physicalism--as long as one doesn't assume eliminative physicalism--entails panpsychism, in which case, we might be justified in suspecting that consciousness is just an aspect of electromagnetic fields or other such fields known to physics (including the wave function).

Yes that's a fair point, I suppose. However it seems hard to deny that computers do provide a rather better model for understanding how the brain works than steam. Telephone switchboards are just the same idea as computers, really, so both constitute one analogy. At the root of it is the idea of information storage and processing by means of arrays of electrical switches.

 

[sealchan]

I'd like to help, but I don't have much to offer.

For me, consciousness is that state of mind that I experience when I'm awake and able to see, hear, smell, taste and feel sensations. I can start with that understanding of it and proceed to try figure out the causes for the effects that I sense.

But when I try to understand consciousness as you are trying to do, my thinking ranges from vague to blank.

Yes, and understanding the sense of futility that seems to arise from this is what intrigues me. I have called consciousness a myth because it is seen as true and also mysterious by most people. It seems as if one has to not "look at it directly" to get the best view (sort of like bird watching).

I think that this quality should be seen as a vital aspect of what it is in our experience we are trying to label with the word 'consciousness'. Why does this term seem to evade further rational analysis in a way not like most other more mundane concepts?

 

[sealchan]

I love Hofstadter too, especially his work in artificial intelligence based on the ability to make analogies as the foundation of intelligence.

As I understand him, he sees consciousness as kind of a meta-phenomenon resulting from the operation of millions of individual microprocesses in the brain, none of which themselves have any real awareness of the thoughts of which they are a part, much like an anthill is a meta-phenomenon resulting from the operation of thousands of individual ants, none of which have any real concept of the overall structure or functioning of the anthill.

So in terms of your original post, consciousness is a thing, in that it is a noun, but it's not really a tangible thing, in that it is something not defined completely by any of the physical processes of which it is composed, nor is it strictly an abstract idea, as it is rooted in and dependent upon the physical processes of which it is composed.

"I think, therefore I am" isn't really relevant to that issue, since it assumes consciousness a priori.

I think one critique I have for the word 'consciousness' is that it is a "whole term". By that I mean it is a term that is meant to indicate the whole of something. If one says "Universe" then one means everything but also one has the sense of what is not in the Universe. That is really a contradiction. Anything we discover that is not in the Universe is then automatically now in the Universe unless we change our definition of the Universe to include what is and what is not in the Universe. In order to do that we have to have a sense that there is a difference and an ability to distinguish that difference in a consistent, rational way.

So maybe this problem of the "whole term" which is, perhaps, a way of looking at the problem of self-reference that Hofstadter often addresses, is a problem with human understanding itself attempting to use language to describe our sense of self-consciousness.

What this suggests to me is that there is something valid mixed in with something invalid with this term "consciousness" in the rational sense. We must learn to understand that our "languaging" has some sort of limit that "we can't see" in terms of our "sense of meaning". In acknowledging that limit to our languaging, we can begin to "see past" our own sphexish blind spot.

My sense is that the more we learn about "consciousness" the more we make smaller and less relevant what we used to mean by the term consciousness.

The same, perhaps, holds for understanding the Universe or God for that matter. The more we try to understand these things, the smaller these things become in our day to day reality, but the more we learn about our reality. It is as if these terms reference an invisible "body" of knowledge which we recognize as "a thing" but each time we pluck something useful from it, that thing diminishes and the item we plucked becomes "more real". That invisible body is comparably "not real" and sometimes we even want to dismiss it as irrelevant although, in the sense of this metaphor, we have been "feeding from it" for centuries now.

 

[sealchan]

Consciousness is a hell of a hard word to define. When one tries to define it as something like "the state or quality of sentience, wakefulness, experience, knowledge, self-consciousness," etc., it just leads to the needing to define those further terms, which are hardly less difficult to pin down.

But having said that, I would definitely say that consciousness is not a "thing" such as an object that has location in spacetime. More positively, I would affirm that it is "abstract" (like, say, numbers). I would also affirm that consciousness at least sometimes or to some degree entails the important ability of volition, i.e., the ability to choose between available options.

Generally or to some degree, I would not agree that consciousness is "real just because it is believed to be by a community of knowers," although I would agree that there is some merit to such a seemingly paradoxical idea.

Consciousness is somehow undeniable, but it is also seemingly (to some degree) an impenetrable mystery.

Yes and my response to Axe Elf could as easily been a response to your post here...

I'm definitely friendly to the idea that consciousness references something which "arises" out of neural behavior but it isn't something you can chemically isolate in a test tube.

I think that there is a movement in science to try and understand what "information" is and maybe that is relevant to consciousness as well. And maybe energy is important here as well. I think of energy as causing an organization of matter. Information exists in a system that can organize itself in order to preserve a past state via an organization of matter and recall that past state.

So if consciousness is simply a biological, evolutionary way to store and retrieve information, would that explain consciousness or would we still "feel unsatisfied" by this answer. Is our lack of "satisfaction" to be assumed a fault of the answer? Or is our languaging mechanism merely sphexishly limited?

 

[sealchan]

That makes a lot of sense to me. I tend to think of consciousness as an activity - of the brain - rather than a "thing". Or at most as an emergent phenomenon from brain activity. This seems to fit with how computers behave.

I suspect we are all so culturally suffused with Cartesian dualism that we find it difficult to get away from the idea of consciousness as an entity, when in fact that is a category error.

I attempt to get at the notion of "category error" in my response to Nous.

 

[Axe Elf]

I think one critique I have for the word 'consciousness' is that it is a "whole term". By that I mean it is a term that is meant to indicate the whole of something. If one says "Universe" then one means everything but also one has the sense of what is not in the Universe. That is really a contradiction. Anything we discover that is not in the Universe is then automatically now in the Universe unless we change our definition of the Universe to include what is and what is not in the Universe. In order to do that we have to have a sense that there is a difference and an ability to distinguish that difference in a consistent, rational way.

So maybe this problem of the "whole term" which is, perhaps, a way of looking at the problem of self-reference that Hofstadter often addresses, is a problem with human understanding itself attempting to use language to describe our sense of self-consciousness.

What this suggests to me is that there is something valid mixed in with something invalid with this term "consciousness" in the rational sense. We must learn to understand that our "languaging" has some sort of limit that "we can't see" in terms of our "sense of meaning". In acknowledging that limit to our languaging, we can begin to "see past" our own sphexish blind spot.

My sense is that the more we learn about "consciousness" the more we make smaller and less relevant what we used to mean by the term consciousness.

The same, perhaps, holds for understanding the Universe or God for that matter. The more we try to understand these things, the smaller these things become in our day to day reality, but the more we learn about our reality. It is as if these terms reference an invisible "body" of knowledge which we recognize as "a thing" but each time we pluck something useful from it, that thing diminishes and the item we plucked becomes "more real". That invisible body is comparably "not real" and sometimes we even want to dismiss it as irrelevant although, in the sense of this metaphor, we have been "feeding from it" for centuries now.

You kind of lost me at what it would mean to discover something that wasn't in the universe--how would we be able to discover it if it wasn't in the universe?--and how that subsequently makes our concept of the universe contradictory.

But it's not really that important to me, so whatev.

 

[sealchan]

Yes that's a fair point, I suppose. However it seems hard to deny that computers do provide a rather better model for understanding how the brain works than steam. Telephone switchboards are just the same idea as computers, really, so both constitute one analogy. At the root of it is the idea of information storage and processing by means of arrays of electrical switches.

Metaphors seem to be a very valuable tool for forging understanding where existing terms don't seem to "foot the bill". For me the use of metaphors in the process of developing human understanding is now being better understood scientifically and should eventually help to create a profound new understanding of...well, understanding!

 

[joe1776]

Yes, and understanding the sense of futility that seems to arise from this is what intrigues me. I have called consciousness a myth because it is seen as true and also mysterious by most people. It seems as if one has to not "look at it directly" to get the best view (sort of like bird watching).

I think that this quality should be seen as a vital aspect of what it is in our experience we are trying to label with the word 'consciousness'. Why does this term seem to evade further rational analysis in a way not like most other more mundane concepts?

Your post reminds me of a metaphor which came to me while experimenting with vivid dreaming. I entered the "dream" wanting to know more about the conscious and unconscious states.

Imagine a house at night. The artificially-lit interior represents the conscious state. Outside, moving about in the darkness, is a faceless, powerful creature. The powerful creature is the unconscious state. It's faceless because it can't form intent.

The unconscious mind operates full-time. It never goes offline. However, the conscious mind is only online when we're awake, (when the artificial light is on)

The house itself (the mind) is a construction that is built to separate it from a mysterious "greater reality." This same construction separates the unconscious from the conscious (the inside from the outside of the house).

Maybe you can get more out of this metaphor than I did.

 

[sealchan]

You kind of lost me at what it would mean to discover something that wasn't in the universe--how would we be able to discover it if it wasn't in the universe?--and how that subsequently makes our concept of the universe contradictory.

But it's not really that important to me, so whatev.

I think I probably meant to say that calling the Universe the Universe doesn't have any explanatory power, it is just a name of the set of all things as consciousness and God are similarly "whole terms". Such terms fail to be treated with the same sort of "explanatory comfort" as things which are merely "parts of the whole".

Sorry for the confusion.

 

[sealchan]

Your post reminds me of a metaphor which came to me while experimenting with vivid dreaming. I entered the "dream" wanting to know more about the conscious and unconscious states.

Imagine a house at night. The artificially-lit interior represents the conscious state. Outside, moving about in the darkness, is a faceless, powerful creature. The powerful creature is the unconscious state. It's faceless because it can't form intent.

The unconscious mind operates full-time. It never goes offline. However, the conscious mind is only online when we're awake, (when the artificial light is on)

The house itself (the mind) is a construction that is built to separate it from a mysterious "greater reality." This same construction separates the unconscious from the conscious (the inside from the outside of the house).

Maybe you can get more out of this metaphor than I did.

Well that is a fairly new metaphor that comes out of Freud and Jung's types of psychology and now, much more recently, this is being demonstrated within cognitive science. That there is mental activity and only some of it is conscious.

That really makes the metaphor of conscious is light more of a challenge. It has always been one of those inconsistencies that, as a Jungian, I have had to ignore at times because it pervades any kind of thought about unconscious thoughts. Sometimes people have used "unconscious contents" to indicate things of the mind that could be thoughts but which we didn't directly experience consciously. Now really that is making an educated guess by almost definition as we cannot by definition verify the precise qualities of anything that does not by definition enter our consciousness.

That creature outside in the dark only exists in our self-awareness to the degree that it impacts the light in the house. We must, of necessity, deduce or guess at what that creature is. That creature is, really, a projection of our house out onto that outer darkness. It is an evaluation of "what it must be" given what it is doing to the state of the house.

But we might also understand that the inner room arises from that outer darkness and is a special case of some sort from the rest of the "psychic landscape". The house, its walls and the light, are all a part of the metaphor of this "supposed" separation between our conscious mind and the greater unconscious mental activity. Sort of like a cell might arise out of an organic soup in which it finds itself. That cell is not only interconnected with the outer environment, it is entirely dependent on it not only for its maintenance but for its origins as well.

Now such educated guesses can prove to be right but more often they are at least partially wrong. Currently in our myth of consciousness, however, I think that your image is representative of not only what most people might understand but also of what one might literally dream. Our dreaming brains would give us such metaphors and if we recognize them then we grasp something of what the dream is telling us. But is the dream communicating objective truth about the psyche or is it parroting our cultural myth back at us because that is the language of the "residue" that the brain is "cleaning up" from the day's toils?

 

[sealchan]

Let me try phrasing the OP a little differently in the light of the discussion above...

Is consciousness something we know directly or is it something we believe in based on the experience of being conscious?

This either or is so close that I can barely make out the sense of it...which is to say it is more non-sense than sense.

Is consciousness a thing to notice or is it a deduction of our general understanding of reality? Does the term "consciousness" have meaning but also does the term have more to say about the limits of our rational self-understanding than it has to offer for an understanding of ourselves?

Another way of getting at this is to say that consciousness like God or the Universe is a term which we use because of the limitations of our understanding rather than due to the merits of our accumulated knowledge. Perhaps in the general development of ideas the term consciousness is only a pretense to have a term more modern than "soul", "spirit" or "life force". It does have an obvious value to us, but it speaks more to our ignorance than it does to our knowledge.

 

[Axe Elf]

I think I probably meant to say that calling the Universe the Universe doesn't have any explanatory power, it is just a name of the set of all things as consciousness and God are similarly "whole terms". Such terms fail to be treated with the same sort of "explanatory comfort" as things which are merely "parts of the whole".

Sorry for the confusion.

Maybe you were kind of getting at the same thing I'm getting at when I argue that evil is a necessary component to the best of all possible universes, because if there was no evil by which to define good, then "goodness" merely becomes the quality of everything--and the word "good" has no explanatory power by itself. Goodness exists as a meaningful term only on contrast to evil, and appreciating goodness is better than not appreciating goodness, even if it means that we also have to have evil as well.

Or maybe you weren't.

 

[Nous]

Yes and my response to Axe Elf could as easily been a response to your post here...

I'm definitely friendly to the idea that consciousness references something which "arises" out of neural behavior but it isn't something you can chemically isolate in a test tube.

I think that there is a movement in science to try and understand what "information" is and maybe that is relevant to consciousness as well. And maybe energy is important here as well. I think of energy as causing an organization of matter. Information exists in a system that can organize itself in order to preserve a past state via an organization of matter and recall that past state.

So if consciousness is simply a biological, evolutionary way to store and retrieve information, would that explain consciousness or would we still "feel unsatisfied" by this answer. Is our lack of "satisfaction" to be assumed a fault of the answer? Or is our languaging mechanism merely sphexishly limited?

I find the seemingly undeniable relationship between consciousness and information extremely interesting--first and foremost, and perhaps unfortunately, because “information” is likewise a difficult term to define. In the most non-technical sense, information can be defined as a reduction in uncertainty. Yet, in physics, information is a well defined and highly important quantity. See: What is information?

In this regard, I think one should not overlook that a recent study showed that the assumption by which Ralph Landauer famously asserted that "information is physical"--i.e., is logically irreversible, and therefore is physically irreversible--is false:

The motivation that led Bennet to introduce logical reversible operations was to overcome the minimum energy expenditure introduced earlier by Landauer. Bennet wrote:

"Landauer has posed the question of whether logical irreversibility is an unavoidable feature of useful computers, arguing that it is, and has demonstrated the physical and philosophical importance of this question by showing that whenever a physical computer throws away information about its previous state it must generate a corresponding amount of entropy. Therefore, a computer must dissipate at least kBT ln2 of energy (about 3 X 10-21 Joule at room temperature) for each bit of information it erases or otherwise throws away."

This limit was generally attributed to all the logical irreversible devices, and among them, the traditional logic gates like "OR", "AND" and "NAND." The work of Landauer and Bennet inspired a significant amount of scientific literature opposing or supporting the existence of such a minimum limit. It's no exaggeration to state that for more than 40 years, the topic has been considered highly controversial.

Now, an experiment has settled this controversy. It clearly shows that there is no such minimum energy limit and that a logically irreversible gate can be operated with an arbitrarily small energy expenditure. Simply put, it is not true that logical reversibility implies physical irreversibility, as Landauer wrote.

The results of this experiment by the scientists of NiPS Laboratory at the University of Perugia are published today in Nature Communications. They measured the amount of energy dissipated during the operation of an "OR" gate (that is clearly a logically irreversible gate) and showed that the logic operation can be performed with an energy toll as small as 5 percent of the expected limit of kBT ln2. The conclusion of the Nature Communications article is that there is no fundamental limit and reversible logic is not required to operate computers with zero energy expenditure.

[. . . ]

Though Landauer famously said "information is physical," it turns out that information is not so physical after all.​

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-refutes-famous-physical.html#jCp

So apparently information processing in a computational device can be done with no minimum expenditure of energy--I find that just a mind-boggling fact. Yet, it does not ameliorate the importance or fundamental nature of information in physics and other scientific disciplines, as succinctly summarized by physicist Jacob Bekenstein in a 2003 article in Scientific American, Information in the Holographic Universe:

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told “matter and energy.” Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
​

Bekenstein proceeds to elucidate the quantitative nature of information and its association to thermodynamics:

Shannon’s entropy does not enlighten us about the value of information, which is highly dependent on context. Yet as an objective measure of quantity of information, it has been enormously useful in science and technology. For instance, the design of every modern communications device -- from cellular phones to modems to compact disc players -- relies on Shannon entropy. Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement.​

So in my overtly ignorant way, I would try summarize some of the above as indicating that information is a fundamental phenomena in the empirical universe and even in the development of biological entities; information is a quantity; information is not “physical”; and information and consciousness are somehow inextricably related.

Granted, everything I just said would presumably be quite unsatisfying to a lot of people. And I must admit that I find unsatisfying some of the arguments I've seen for a metaphysics in which information is fundamental, where (therefore) consciousness is explained by and is a product of information. I don't think that the consequent of that conditional is where the facts lead. If nothing else, I keep coming back to simplest forms of the premises and conclusion of Strawson's argument whereby physicalism--as long as we do not assume eliminative physicalism--entails panpsychism. But beyond that, I think that the idea that information accounts for consciousness misidentifies the cart and the horse.

In any case, these days I want to be committed to avoiding the pitfalls of commitment to any particular metaphysical thesis. In RF and other such debate forums, I believe I perceive that and how such commitments to a favorite metaphysical thesis lead otherwise highly intelligent and reasonable people into spouting just abject nonsense. But I think there is a clue or puzzle piece supplied by some of the above regarding consciousness and information and the empirical universe.

 

[Nous]

BTW, sealchan:

Or is our languaging mechanism merely sphexishly limited?

That's the most excellent sentence I've read all year!