Consciousness

Where to Begin?

There sure are a lot of books and articles and videos out there. Perhaps it doesn’t hurt to start with the Wikipedia article.

Then perhaps read this overview article from 2007. Then read this one, which seems to take a different perspective from the first, sort of.

The series Closer To Truth has tons of videos on consciousness, and you can find dozens on YouTube. Here’s the “What Is Consciousness” video:

This series has so many more episodes on consciousness, among them:

• Confronting Consciousness
• Why is Consciousness Baffling?
• Is Human Consciousness Special?
• Are Brain and Mind the Same Thing?
• Is the Person All Material?
• What Makes Brains Conscious?
• How Brain Makes Mind?
• Is Consciousness Fundamental?
• Is Consciousness Ultimate Reality?
• Can Brain Alone Explain Consciousness?
• Does Consciousness Require a Radical Explanation?

In the first article, you learned a little about a couple big names in Consciousness studies, David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett. Now watch this 10-minute interview of Chalmers (by the Closer To Truth guy of course):

Dennett doesn’t agree with Chalmers. He sees consciousness as an illusion. Watch Dennett’s TED talk now:

Now you can go off and explore on your own. Start at Wikpedia’s Mind and Brain Portal. And don’t miss the consciousness article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Can we build consciousness? Read the article Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines for ideas.

Can consciousness be non-biological? Here’s yet another Closer To Truth video:

Nick Humphrey has been doing a lot of cool work recently. Here’s a talk of his:

Questions about Consciousness

Most people agree consciousness is hard to define. Some might say we are not ready to define it, or that it may not even exist. But nearly everyone has an intuitive understanding of it. Rather than defining consciousness, let’s list some questions asked about it.

Here are the three questions from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

• What is consciousness? What are its principal features? And by what means can they be best discovered, described and modeled? (The Descriptive Question)
• How does consciousness of the relevant sort come to exist? Is it a primitive aspect of reality, and if not how does (or could) consciousness in the relevant respect arise from or be caused by nonconscious entities or processes? (The Explanatory Question)
• Why does consciousness of the relevant sort exist? Does it have a function, and if so what it is it? Does it act causally and if so with sorts of effects? Does it make a difference to the operation of systems in which it is present, and if so why and how? (The Functional Question)

Other questions:

• How do we distinguish conscious and unconscious mental computation? (Chalmers’ Easy Problem)
• Why does consciousness feel like something? That is, how does subjective experience arise from physical neural activity? (Chalmers’ Hard Problem)
• Why is the experience of something different from knowledge about it?
• How is consciousness similar to, and different from, sentience and self-awareness?
• Is language required for consciousness?
• To what extent is consciousness explained by symbols, and in particular a “self-symbol”?
• Why is it that symbols have meaning? How do they acquire meaning?

And here’s a video with a possible answer to where consciousness might have come from:

Why Care?

Some people don’t care at all about studying consciousness (or studying much at all), but some people do, and here are some reasons why they might:

• The question of why there is consciousness is interesting in its own right, and rather similar to “Why is there something instead of nothing?”, “Where did all this something come from?”, “Why are some arrangements of matter and energy alive while others are not?”, and “How does a mind arise from a brain?” Knowledge of the universe and of oneself empowers you.
• Consciousness is connected with ethics and morality. Maybe knowing about it might help us live a better life. Should our laws take into account the livelihood of other conscious beings?
• A loss of consciousness, whatever that is, seems pretty terrifying; perhaps knowing more about it may lead to medical procedures to preserve or restore it in patients.

The Study of Consciousness

Like most things worth studying, you can’t really study consciousness in isolation. It is studied along with the brain, language (especially syntax and semantics), logic, self-reference, levels of meaning, cognition, thought, sentience, knowledge, and information processing (computation).

Research on consciousness is done in:

• Philosophy
• Psychology (especially cognitive and evolutionary)
• Computer Science
• Neuroscience, neurobiology

You can find many thousands of articles, books, studies, and videos the examine and study and attempt to describe consciousness, or at least speculate on where it comes from. Here is a very small list:

• A list of papers compiled by David Chalmers
• Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I
• Dennett’s Consciousness Explained
• Another Dan Dennett video, and one by V. S. Ramchandran, and an oldie with a very young Chalmers
• Vsauce’s introductory video
• A video of a talk by Susan Blackmore, and Blackmore’s Very Short Introduction book on consciousness
• Slides on the easy and hard problems of consciousness by Aaron Sloman
• The Wikibook Consciousness Studies
• An article by Karl Friston, hypothesizing that consciousness is a process of inference.
• Kevin Simler’s four part essay (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) on Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
• Questions tagged Consciousness on Quora
• Scientific American Articles:
  • What is Consciousness?
  • Unlocking the Mystery of Consciousness
  • Consciousness Goes Deeper Than You Think
  • Will Science Ever Unlock the Mysteries of Consciousness, Free Will, and God?
  • There is No Such Thing As Conscious Thought
• An article on Integrated Information Theory equating consciousness with experience
• The article Seeing and Somethingness, by Nicholas Humphrey, arguing how blindsight can answer the hard problem of consciousness. Dennett says Humphrey’s “new speculations are a bold but well-evidenced step in the right direction.”

For something pretty radical in consciousness studies, check out Orchestrated Objective Reduction.

Interestingly enough, Orch-OR, made this list of ten "brain-breaking scientific concepts" (whatever that means).

One more (old) video here: Marvin Minsky. Are his views closer to Dennett’s or Chalmers’?