Consciousness

Where to Begin?

There are thousands of books and articles and videos about consciousness. If you want to start with broad encyclopedic overviews, you can find good ones at Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

If you prefer shorter articles, here are two that introduce you to the possibly opposing views of (1) consciousness coming from the brain (though we may not know how or why) versus (2) consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality. The first isthis overview article from 2007 and the other from Psychology Today.

Do you like videos? The series Closer To Truth has tons of several dozen episodes on consciousness. 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?

Two philosophers who have become big names in the study of consciousness are David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett. Here's a 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 Wikipedia’s Mind and Brain Portal. Or start following links from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.

If you are interesting in creating or building 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:

The Descriptive Question

What is consciousness? What are its principal features? And by what means can they be best discovered, described and modeled?

The Explanatory 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 Functional 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?

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?
• Is an AI chatbot conscious? If we make models underlying current chatbots one million times larger would consciousness emerge? Could consciousness ever emerge from an non-biological or non-embodied substrate?

Maybe consciousness is a product of evolution?

Whatever it is, it seems that we still don’t have any good answers yet about what it is or where it comes from (but that we might some day)

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
• A very old Closer to Truth video with Marvin Minsky
• 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).

Intelligence vs. Consciousness

We seem to have a bit of bias that since we are both intelligent and conscious, that they are pretty intertwined. But they are rather distinct. Here is an attempt to define the terms:

Intelligence

Intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, and apply knowledge to solve problems and adapt to new situations. It encompasses various cognitive abilities, including reasoning, problem-solving, planning, abstract thinking, and learning from experience. Intelligence can be measured through various tests and assessments, and it can manifest in different forms, such as linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligence. A device can be programmed to process inputs and act on them in ways that can be said to express intelligent behavior.

Consciousness

Consciousness is the state of being aware of and able to think about one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, and surroundings. It involves subjective experience and self-awareness, i.e., “what it is like to be” experiences. Consciousness allows individuals to perceive and interpret the world around them, to have thoughts and feelings, and to make decisions based on that awareness. It is often associated with the ability to experience emotions, have a sense of self, and to be aware of one's own mental states. Consciousness is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that is still not fully understood, and it is a central topic of study in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

AI and Consciousness

Generative AI systems backed by LLMs are sometimes attributed some level of consciousness or sentience. But even if consciousness is an illusion or a physical emergent property of a brain, that need not imply that artificial intelligence systems, no matter how advanced, would possess consciousness. AI can simulate intelligent behavior without experiencing subjective awareness. There are quite a few papers, articles, and videos that make this case, many based on ideas such as:

• People sometimes mistake simulation for actual experience. Again, intelligence can exist without sentience.
• The static nature of trained LLMs prevents the continual learning and adaptation that may be necessary for consciousness.
• Mimicry of conversation is not proof of feeling or awareness of internal states, despite how proficient LLMs are at generating human-like responses.
• The lack of an embodied self within a simulation means LLMs cannot possess a “what is it like” experience.

For videos on the topic, the following search will return a pretty rich set of resources:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=llms+and+consciousness

Here’s one that lasts over an hour:

Recall Practice

Here are some questions useful for your spaced repetition learning. Many of the answers are not found on this page. Some will have popped up in lecture. Others will require you to do your own research.

1. What is the video series in which Robert Lawrence Kuhn explores consciousness (among other philosophical concepts)?
   Closer to Truth

Summary