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Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 30 Oct
QuEST 30 Oct 2020
We will continue this week discussing the Types of Qualia. Starting from where we ended last week with the idea that our simulation we call consciousness (some of the simulation is supported by sensory data and other aspects are created via pattern completion inferencing) that we experience is a result of a set of processes that create the acceptable amount of content that is inferred versus sensed, the amount of situatedness, and the amount of structural coherence to achieve stability / consistency / usefulness of the conscious representation :
From Dahaene – Stability / consistency / usefulness as features of consciousness:
• Direct contrasts between seen “consciously perceived” and unseen pictures or words confirm that such ignition (all or none) occurs only for the conscious percept.
• As explained earlier, nonconscious stimuli may reach into deep cortical networks and influence higher levels of processing and even central executive functions, but these effects tend to be small, variable, and short-lived [although nonconscious information decays at a slower rate than initially expected (39, 40)].
• By contrast, the stable, reproducible (consistent) representation of high-quality information (useful) by a distributed activity pattern in higher cortical areas is a feature of conscious processing (Table 1).
Note the characteristic – STABLE, REPRODUCIBLE = CONSISTENT, HIGH QUALITY INFORMATION = USEFUL —features of conscious processing!
• Such transient “meta-stability” seems to be necessary for the nervous system to integrate information from a variety of modules and then broadcast it back to them, achieving flexible cross-module routing.
‘Types of Qualia’:
• Qualia that capture aspects of the environment – perception representation (some of those are sensation based some are pattern completion inferencing) – JND + single quale entities (noun qualia) fall into this type of qualia–
– There are dreams that have the feel of being about the environment but are imagined present (feel like they are capturing perception)
– related there are qualia for what the environment might be at some future time (imagined future)
– and some about what the environment might have been at some past time (imagined past) –
– those have to have associated with them the ‘imagined’ quale to capture they are NOT sensory based –
• and this brings up the point of a type of qualia associated with capturing information about the qualia being attended to
• Self – the only way to have ‘thoughts’ that aren’t some attribute of a physical entity in the environment is if I can associate them with something in that environment – and that is my mind – thus I need to have a quale of self
– All thoughts you have (all qualia are thoughts) are ‘felt’ to be part of you – inside your head – part of self – from your perspective
– Body sensations – hungry / thirsty … qualia are ‘felt’ to be part of ‘self’ – they are tied to you as an agent
– ToM – since you associate your thoughts to be inside of you – and you deduce other agents are having thoughts – you are willing to attribute those to be their mental states = ToM Theory of Mind
– Felt reactions – passions and emotions (disgust, love, …)
– Felt moods – happy / sad / excited …
• Self: set of processes that judge the usefulness of alternative plausible narratives that thinking generates – set of processes that determine what is to be experienced! Any agent that has such a set of processes is creating the quale of self
Qualia about Qualia:
• Aha – when you create the quale that some qualia is ‘understood’ – you know how to use it to accomplish the tasks you care about
• Time – the quale of change – all qualia are associated with relative time of occurrence
• Imagination – associating the idea of this quale is imagined
• Confidence – associated with any quale – belief in its ‘truthness’
• Verb – affordances – verb qualia – relating two or more other qualia on how they can interact
• Adj qualia – and Adverb qualia – any type of speech since it is designed to communicate qualia between aligned entities – modulates the qualia of other qualia
We then want to examine some of the characteristics of qualia – irrevocable, flexible …
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 23 Oct
We will continue this week discussing the characteristics of the conscious representation. Starting from where we ended last week with the idea that our simulation we call consciousness that we experience is a result of a set of processes that create the acceptable amount of situatedness and structural coherence to achieve stability / consistency / usefulness:
From Dahaene – Stability / consistency / usefulness as features of consciousness:
• Direct contrasts between seen “consciously perceived” and unseen pictures or words confirm that such ignition occurs only for the conscious percept.
• As explained earlier, nonconscious stimuli may reach into deep cortical networks and influence higher levels of processing and even central executive functions, but these effects tend to be small, variable, and short-lived [although nonconscious information decays at a slower rate than initially expected (39, 40)].
• By contrast, the stable, reproducible representation of high-quality information by a distributed activity pattern in higher cortical areas is a feature of conscious processing (Table 1).
Note the characteristic – STABLE, REPRODUCIBLE = CONSISTENT, HIGH QUALITY INFORMATION = USEFUL —features of conscious processing!
• Such transient “meta-stability” seems to be necessary for the nervous system to integrate information from a variety of modules and then broadcast it back to them, achieving flexible cross-module routing.
We want to then work towards a discussion of ‘Types of Qualia’:
For example:
• Thoughts – term that captures those aspects of qualia generation, manipulation or maintenance that are introspectively available (introspection is not mysterious – it is what it feels like to the agent that is manipulating its conscious representation – it is the quale created to capture that the thoughts (manipulation) is ongoing inside the agent having the thoughts)
– Sensations – sensations are thoughts –the introspectively available internal representation (mental counter parts) of the sensory data (note that it is only a quale when it is being attended to – when you are aware of its presence in the world model) (note: not all sensory data makes it to qualia – example the visceral sensors that control low level bodily functions like heart rate or body temperature ) (note: the quale associated with sensation can change without a change in the sensory data -> there is a TD process involved also – Necker cube) – plausible explanation of sensory data – includes body sensations like (hunger, pain, dizzy, …) – using current qualia vocabulary to construct a representation of the sensor data within an acceptable narrative
– Imagination – thoughts associated with combination of qualia that might occur (note how imagined pain doesn’t ‘hurt’ the same) – similar process used in the generation of plausible narratives (the attended to narrative is the Cartesean Theater), ToM!, memory
– Self – thoughts associated with the existence of the entity creating the qualia (may be levels here – dogs don’t commit suicide?), a set of processes (coming slide)
– Dreams – thoughts probably associated with the reorganization of the qualia memories to allow more efficient use of them – since they ‘feel’ different than other imagined thoughts they are a different type of quale
– Memory – thoughts associated with possible explanations for prior experiences – (combination of qualia that might have occurred but using current qualia to generate plausible reconstruction) plausible narrative explanation for prior experiences (not what happened – but what you imagine might have happened!)
• Emotions/moods
• Time
• Types of Speech
• Confidence from the Daheane C2 model
Reading material for this week
Consciousness Platform: The Greatest Mystery of All Time
January 2010
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine 29(1):60-2
Source, PubMed
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 16 Oct
QuEST 16 Oct 2020
We will start this week discussing the characteristics of the conscious representation. Starting from where we ended last week, in the Dahaene article they speak of:
Stability / consistency / usefulness as features of consciousness:
• Direct contrasts between seen “consciously perceived” and unseen pictures or words confirm that such ignition occurs only for the conscious percept.
• As explained earlier, non-conscious stimuli may reach into deep cortical networks and influence higher levels of processing and even central executive functions, but these effects tend to be small, variable, and short-lived [although non-conscious information decays at a slower rate than initially expected (39, 40)].
• By contrast, the stable, reproducible representation of high-quality information by a distributed activity pattern in higher cortical areas is a feature of conscious processing (Table 1).
Note the characteristic – STABLE, REPRODUCIBLE = CONSISTENT, HIGH QUALITY INFORMATION = USEFUL —features of conscious processing!
• Such transient “meta-stability” seems to be necessary for the nervous system to integrate information from a variety of modules and then broadcast it back to them, achieving flexible cross-module routing.
We want to then work towards a discussion of ‘Types of Qualia’:
For example:
• Thoughts – term that captures those aspects of qualia generation, manipulation or maintenance that are introspectively available (introspection is not mysterious – it is what it feels like to the agent that is manipulating its conscious representation – it is the quale created to capture that the thoughts (manipulation) is ongoing inside the agent having the thoughts)
– Sensations – sensations are thoughts –the introspectively available internal representation (mental counter parts) of the sensory data (note that it is only a quale when it is being attended to – when you are aware of its presence in the world model) (note: not all sensory data makes it to qualia – example the visceral sensors that control low level bodily functions like heart rate or body temperature ) (note: the quale associated with sensation can change without a change in the sensory data -> there is a TD process involved also – Necker cube) – plausible explanation of sensory data – includes body sensations like (hunger, pain, dizzy, …) – using current qualia vocabulary to construct a representation of the sensor data within an acceptable narrative
– Imagination – thoughts associated with combination of qualia that might occur (note how imagined pain doesn’t ‘hurt’ the same) – similar process used in the generation of plausible narratives (the attended to narrative is the Cartesean Theater), ToM!, memory
– Self – thoughts associated with the existence of the entity creating the qualia (may be levels here – dogs don’t commit suicide?), a set of processes (coming slide)
– Dreams – thoughts probably associated with the reorganization of the qualia memories to allow more efficient use of them – since they ‘feel’ different than other imagined thoughts they are a different type of quale
– Memory – thoughts associated with possible explanations for prior experiences – (combination of qualia that might have occurred but using current qualia to generate plausible reconstruction) plausible narrative explanation for prior experiences (not what happened – but what you imagine might have happened!)
• Emotions/moods
• Time
• Types of Speech
• Confidence from the Daheane C2 model
•
QuEST Discussion Topics, 9 Oct
QuEST 9 Oct 2020
We will continue the discussion this week of neuro-physiologically motivated models of consciousness – specifically the models by Dahane and responses by Lamme from the last two weeks. We want to finish the discussion of the model specifically the C2 aspects we hadn’t gotten to yet and then Note the end of the article:
… leaving aside the experiential component (“what it is like”)
• Still, such a purely functional definition of consciousness may leave some readers unsatisfied.
• Are we “over-intellectualizing” consciousness, by assuming that some high-level cognitive functions are necessarily tied to consciousness?
• Are we leaving aside the experiential component (“what it is like” to be conscious)? Does subjective experience escape a computational definition?
Although those philosophical questions lie beyond the scope of the present paper, we close by noting that empirically, in humans the loss of C1 and C2 computations covaries with a loss of subjective experience. For example, in humans, damage to the primary visual cortex may lead to a neurological condition called “blindsight,” in which the patients report being blind in the affected visual field.
• Remarkably, those patients can localize visual stimuli in their blind field but cannot report them (C1), nor can they effectively assess their likelihood of success (C2)—they believe that they are merely “guessing.” In this example, at least, subjective experience appears to cohere with possession of C1 and C2.
• Although centuries of philosophical dualism have led us to consider consciousness as unreducible to physical interactions, the empirical evidence is compatible with the possibility that consciousness arises from nothing more than specific computations.
“A more pertinent question for the field might be: “What would constitute successful demonstration of artificial consciousness?”
Our Colleague ‘Ancient Mike’ would like to lead a conversation on consciousness that emphasizes this ‘hole’ in the Dahaene work.
As background:
What is consciousness, and could
machines have it?
Stanislas Dehaene,1,2* Hakwan Lau,3,4 Sid Kouider5
Dehaene et al., Science 358, 486–492 (2017) 27 October 2017
The controversial question of whether machines may ever be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain. We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for
computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first sense), and the self monitoring of those computations, leading to a subjective sense of certainty or error (C2, consciousness in the second sense).We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing (C0) in the human brain.We review the psychological and neural science of unconscious (C0)
and conscious computations (C1 and C2) and outline how they may inspire novel machine architectures.
There were letters commenting on the article:
Conscious machines: Robot rights
Article in Science · January 2018
Conscious machines:
Defining questions
26 JANUARY 2018 • VOL 359 ISSUE 6374
Olivia Carter,1 Jakob Hohwy,2 Jeroen
van Boxtel,2 Victor Lamme,3 Ned Block,4
Christof Koch,5 Naotsugu Tsuchiya2*
… We agree with Dehaene et al. that to address the question of machine consciousness, we must start with a theory of human consciousness. Given current disagreement on that topic, we are all left to speculate whether machines will ever be conscious. A more pertinent question for the field might be: “What would constitute successful demonstration of artificial consciousness?”
Then the material on the P300:
This is just a quick pass but I wanted to send some articles surrounding the P300/ task relevance/ post-perceptual processing stuff we were talking about yesterday. I still need to dig into the tasks more to be able to potentially say something here about why you do or don’t get P300. I am sending the articles now as I work through that. I am not even sure if these are the best articles to communicate yet..maybe don’t read them unless you are interested. Scott, the first one is where the data came from that I talked about in the second meeting–very respectable lab.
Conscious perception without P300:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01078/full
“stimuli that were consciously perceived yet not immediately accessed for report (aware, task-irrelevant condition) elicited a mid-latency posterior ERP negativity (~200–240 ms), while stimuli that were accessed for report (aware, task-relevant condition) elicited additional components including a robust P3b (~380–480 ms) subsequent to the mid-latency negativity. Overall, these results suggest that some of the NCCs identified in previous studies may be more closely linked with accessing and maintaining perceptual information for reporting purposes than with encoding the conscious percept itself. “
P300 without conscious perception:
“Using a P3b oddball paradigm, we instead show that P3b… occur under rigorously subliminal conditions…. Collectively, our results suggest that complex, sustained cognitive processing can occur unconsciously and that P3b is not an NCC after all.”
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