ConsciousnessSide dish or the whole shebang?

Sean Davis Erin Hecht Kris Tew Lydia WoodCOGS 175 Spring 2005

Erin

• Definitions• Philosophy & evolution

Lydia• Motor commands & social theory

Kris• Quantum physics & determinism

Sean• Meditation & “The Prime Mover”

Introduction to the Debate About Consciousness

Definitions, Philosophy and Evolution

Erin Hecht

Definitions• Consciousness

• Awareness; free will; qualia

• Epiphenomenon• Dictionary: “A secondary phenomenon that

results from and accompanies another”• Conscious epiphenomenalism: “Mental states

are produced by physical states but have no causal role to play”

– Blackmore 2004

• Physical Mental but NOT Mental Physical

Definitions

• Causal• Mental Physical• The causal paradox: “Viewed from a first-

person perspective, consciousness appears to be necessary for most forms of complex or novel processing. But viewed from a third-person perspective, consciousness does not appear to be necessary for any form of processing”

- Max Velmans, quoted in Blackmore 2004

A thought experiment

• Chalmers’s zombies• Humans without consciousness

• “The hard problem”• Why do we exist instead of zombies?

• Dennet’s zimboes• Zombies with recursive loops

Three ways to approach the evolution of consciousness

1. Epiphenomenalism or conscious

inessentialism• Zombies are possible• Consciousness is separable from

intelligence, memory, language, etc. & adding it to these abilities makes no difference in behavior of the organism.

• The question: So how did we evolve?

Three ways to approach the evolution of consciousness

2. Consciousness serves an evolutionary function

• Zombies are not possible• Consciousness is separate from other

functions, but adding it makes a difference• The question: What is its evolutionary

purpose?

Three ways to approach the evolution of consciousness

3. Functionalism• Zombies are not possible• Not separable from other functions; a

conscious creature is a package deal (or consciousness = emergent property)

• The question: How do these other functions give rise to consciousness?

Consciousness as a Causal Phenomenon

•Voluntary Motor Control•Impact of Social Cognition

Lydia Wood

Libet’s Argument• Motor plan initiation indicated by

presence of Readiness Potential (RP)• RP found over central sensorimotor

area (Cz) slow negativity preceding a movement

• RP occurs ~500 ms before voluntary movement, self-reported decision to move occurs only ~200 ms before movement

Libet et al. (1983)

Therefore…• The person becomes aware of the

decision to move only after the motor plan has been initiated

• Conscious decisions do not have a causal relationship with voluntary motor control

• Are voluntary movements voluntary?

Problems With Libet’s Methods • Used average time of reported

consciousness, instead of earliest time• Smearing effect produces skewed EEG

avgs• RP more likely to reflect general

readiness prior to an action than specific command to execute a particular action• Lateralized Readiness Potential (LRP)

Trevarna and Miller (2002)

Trevana and Miller’s Results• Earliest decisions to move still

occurred after onset of RP• 20% of people reported decision to

move prior to mean LRP onset• Consciousness may play a causal

role in the execution of an action

Trevarna and Miller (2002)

Social Self-Awareness• Three parts of self-awareness

• Sense of continuity• Sense of personal agency• Sense of identity

• Self-awareness allows for introspectively based social strategies for competing and cooperating

Gallup (1998)

What Can You Do With Consciousness?• Make mental object of self and other • Simulate counterfactual mental

states based on previous experience (pretending)

• Infer other mental states (empathy)• Modify behavior to take advantage of

other mental states (deception)

Back to ZimbosSay there is a computer…

• With subroutines that monitor operation of specific features

• That then uses this information to make inferences about similar systems in other computers

• And then modifies its own processing performance to gain competitive edge

Gallup (1998)

Internal States and Determinism

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Double Slit

Kris Tew

Materialism to Determinism• Early 19th - 20th Century Materialism states only material things

exist whose behavior is totally defined by the laws of physics.

• Theoretically if you knew the position and momentum of all matter within a system everything done within that system could be predicted.

• The human brain is composed of matter, the behavior of the brain is, in theory, predictable.

• Problem: If only material things exist, either internal states like understanding must not exist or they must have a material

component.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle• It is not possible to know the exact

position and momentum of matter.• The more precisely the position is

determined the less precisely the momentum is known.

The Double Slit Experiment• Waves and the Interference Pattern

• A single electron causes an interference pattern as if it was a wave

Inherent Randomness• Path selection and monitoring

• Interference pattern vanishes• Waves to Bullets• Random selection

Heisenberg, Consciousness and Uncertainty

• Monitoring the slits• Unpredictable change within a system• Internal states can exist within a

material system because of uncertainty.

Consciousness as a Causal Phenomenon

-Meditation Causes Physiological Changes-Consciousness is the Prime Mover

Sean Davis

Meditation• Compassion meditation is a purely

internal phenomenon

• Meditation causes physiological changes

• Perhaps physical states and mental states are the same

The Prime Mover• The stick hits the ball… the hand

moves the stick… the arm moves the hand... where does it start?

• Consciousness is the originator, or prime mover

Cognition is Distributed• Expectation and environment are the

two major influences of a psychadelic experience

• Maybe cognition exists outside the body

Thought Provoking Questions• Is consciousness epiphenomenal or

causal?• What does it mean to have free will?

How does it relate to determinism?• Are zimbos conscious? Zombies?

Can they exist?• Is consciousness something that is

individual, or socially distributed?

More questions• Fast or slow?

• Tattersall: “any novelty has to arise spontaneously as an exaptation, a structure existing independently of any new function for which it might later be co-opted,” so consciousness arose “abruptly, as the by-product of something else”

• Genetic or memetic?• Dennet: memeplex and selfplex; parallel

processor with a serial virus (“the Joycean machine”)

• Jaynes: Greeks and the bicameral mind

ReferencesBlackmore, Susan. (2004) Consciousness. Oxford University Press.Gallup, G. G. (1998). Self-awareness and the evolution of social intelligence.

Behavioral Processes. 42, 239-247. Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious

intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (Readiness-Potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain. 106, 623-642.

Tattersall, Ian. (2004) What Happened in the Origin of Human Consciousness? The Anatomical Record (Part B: New Anat.) 276B: 19-26.

Trevarna, J. A. & Miller, J. (2002). Cortical movement preparation before and after a conscious decision to move. Consciousness and Cognition. 11, 162-190.

Wright, Robert. (1994) The Moral Animal. Vintage Books. Lutz, A. et al., (2004) Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma

synchrony during mental practice. PNAS, 101: 16369-16373Newberg, A.B. and Iversen, J. (2003) The neural basis of the complex mental

task of meditation: neurotransmitter and neurochemical considerations. Medical Hypotheses, 61(2): 282-291