A Theory on Consciousness - shared strand analogy

[C C]

I think the question of memory hinges on what level we’re talking about.

In my model, biological memory, storage, recall, cognition, identity ... clearly belongs to nervous systems.

That’s where structured, usable memory exists in the sense we normally mean it.

When I talk about a more fundamental layer having “memory,” I don’t mean stored thoughts, knowledge, or recall. I mean something closer to continuity of pattern.

In other words, experience doesn’t just appear and vanish in isolation, but may contribute to an ongoing structure over time, even if we don’t understand the form that structure takes.

So I’m not proposing a universal brain or a literal storage system. I’m suggesting that if awareness is fundamental, it might also have continuity, and continuity implies some form of persistence.

I’m using “memory” in that broader sense, not cognition, but the possibility that experience leaves traces in the overall structure of reality, rather than being entirely self-contained at the biological level.

Well, there's the mention of "universal awareness", that the brain -- apparently regarded as reducing valve -- narrows to the limitation of a distinct, personal identity ("experience with borders"). "Awareness" is a term that's usually loaded with at least some degree of cognition -- of knowledge or a minimal degree of processing. If that intellectual ability (identification and understanding) is always in connection with something biological or technological, then no problem.

Everything about consciousness is amenable to being satisfactorily explained by science (except for the manifestations of thought and vision, hearing, touch, etc). The "easy stuff" is much ado about nothing. Sapience, analyzing data and navigating in an environment have all been rudimentarily accomplished in robots and AI (and a "model of self" could be installed in the latter, if industry wanted to dangerously go in that direction).

With respect to the problem of the manifestations (isolated from the easy issues), Smolin both illuminated the way to avoid both the "magical conjuring" route and why science can't grapple with it in any deeper manner than correlation...

• Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains. [Time Reborn ... page 270]

Panpsychism is vulnerable to misinterpretation (outsiders willfully do it all the time) because the Greek "psyche" root etymologically boils down to "mind" in totality (the intellectual attributes, not just the experiences). Terms like "pan-phenomenalism" or "pan-experientialism" arguably avoid that, where the manifestations (primitive versions of them) would precede or be more fundamental than cognition. Russellian monism could serve as a bridge between philosophy and physics, but that's all it would ever be, unless the latter literally introduced precursors for the complex phenomenal experiences of the brain to emerge from (highly unlikely to happen, apart from ignorable fringe papers).
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[Lumen]

I think the problems of dualism are what propelled thinkers like Russell and Wm James towards a neutral monism. In those approaches, some kind of awareness becomes a property of matter, rather than a thing. Per previous posts (like mine, #8, and #9-10, from CC) panpsychism generally avoids dualism. Consciousness becomes something matter does, but only in a very rudimentary form unless it is causally organized towards information processing.

Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is considered a scientific form of panpsychism. (Though it differs from traditional panpsychism by requiring specific causal interactions, which I can get into later if Lumen has any interest)

I think that’s a helpful distinction to raise.

I’m not intending to treat consciousness as a separate substance in a Cartesian sense, and I can see how describing it as an “underlying awareness” could sound that way if taken too literally.

What I’m trying to point toward is closer to a structural or process view than a thing-like entity. In other words, I’m not imagining a ghostly layer added onto matter, but wondering whether what we call awareness might be a more fundamental aspect of reality that becomes organised and shaped through biological systems, particularly nervous systems.

So I probably sit somewhere between those positions. I don’t see consciousness as something generated from nothing by brains, but I also don’t see it as a separate object.

I’m trying to describe it more as something that becomes localised and structured into individual experience through the brain.

That’s partly why panpsychist and neutral monist ideas feel adjacent to what I’m describing, even though I arrived at the model independently and without a technical background in the existing literature.

My interest is mainly in whether individuality could arise from the filtering and organisation of something more general, rather than awareness being created entirely from scratch.

I don’t have any detailed knowledge of IIT, but I’m open to hearing more about it, especially in terms of how it explains the formation of distinct individual perspectives.

EDIT:

This may be a rough analogy, but it helps me visualise what I’m trying to describe.

If you think of biology as one component (like blue) and a more basic form of awareness as another component (like yellow), then what we call a conscious person might be more like the result of those two interacting (green).

The outcome isn’t identical to either part on its own it’s something new that only appears when both are present.

I’m not suggesting these are literal substances being mixed.

I just mean that individual consciousness might arise from the interaction between a biological system and something more fundamental, rather than being entirely produced from scratch by the brain alone.

 

[TheVat]

With respect to the problem of the manifestations (isolated from the easy issues), Smolin both illuminated the way to avoid both the "magical conjuring" route and why science can't grapple with it in any deeper manner than correlation...

• Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains. [Time Reborn ... page 270]

I recall being struck by the clarity of that passage when I read Smolin - a useful take on Nagel's "what it's like" or "qualia." Intrinsic aspects of nature seem to float beyond the space which can be addressed by the detectors or symbol systems of physics. And yes, panphenomenalism is an appealing term as it frames something more fundamental and less directed than cognition. Panpsychism does always tempt me, as a term, to imagine tree spirits issuing angry polemics about the lumber industry. Or hurling their apples at Kansas farm girls.

 

[kieransimkin]

Calling the view a shared underlying consciousness still leaves an individuation problem. If the base awareness is literally one, what explains why my present experience has access to these memories and not yours? Saying that brains are filters relocates the question unless the filter model predicts when streams merge, split, or remain separate.

First-person reports of unity are relevant phenomenological data, but by themselves they do not distinguish one universal subject from many subjects undergoing a similar loss of self-boundaries. What observation would come out differently under the shared-strand view and under a model in which separate brains converge on the same phenomenology?

 

[exchemist]

I think that’s a helpful distinction to raise.

I’m not intending to treat consciousness as a separate substance in a Cartesian sense, and I can see how describing it as an “underlying awareness” could sound that way if taken too literally.

What I’m trying to point toward is closer to a structural or process view than a thing-like entity. In other words, I’m not imagining a ghostly layer added onto matter, but wondering whether what we call awareness might be a more fundamental aspect of reality that becomes organised and shaped through biological systems, particularly nervous systems.

So I probably sit somewhere between those positions. I don’t see consciousness as something generated from nothing by brains, but I also don’t see it as a separate object.

I’m trying to describe it more as something that becomes localised and structured into individual experience through the brain.

That’s partly why panpsychist and neutral monist ideas feel adjacent to what I’m describing, even though I arrived at the model independently and without a technical background in the existing literature.

My interest is mainly in whether individuality could arise from the filtering and organisation of something more general, rather than awareness being created entirely from scratch.

I don’t have any detailed knowledge of IIT, but I’m open to hearing more about it, especially in terms of how it explains the formation of distinct individual perspectives.

EDIT:

This may be a rough analogy, but it helps me visualise what I’m trying to describe.

If you think of biology as one component (like blue) and a more basic form of awareness as another component (like yellow), then what we call a conscious person might be more like the result of those two interacting (green).

The outcome isn’t identical to either part on its own it’s something new that only appears when both are present.

I’m not suggesting these are literal substances being mixed.

I just mean that individual consciousness might arise from the interaction between a biological system and something more fundamental, rather than being entirely produced from scratch by the brain alone.

I’ve only just got round to reading this, as a result of kieransimkin ’s intervention. I take your point that you are not proposing consciousness - or awareness - to be a separate entity in its own right, but with your colour analogy it seems to me you are still using language that suggests this, or something like it.

What I still do not understand is why so many philosophers feel the need for something extra to biological systems to account for awareness or consciousness. Surely what we know of biochemistry reveals systems that react to external stimuli in particular ways? Why is that not sufficient to account for the awareness of organisms?

 

[TheVat]

What I still do not understand is why so many philosophers feel the need for something extra to biological systems to account for awareness or consciousness. Surely what we know of biochemistry reveals systems that react to external stimuli in particular ways? Why is that not sufficient to account for the awareness of organisms?

I would guess that it's raw feelings, the qualia, that interior perspective on being a brain. Most things in the world we can find there's one basic perspective. Look at that pebble. It's a collection of minerals, it's solid, its properties are easily reduced to objective facts about atoms, molecular bonds, etc. There's generally no question of "what it's like to be a pebble."

Consciousness seems difficult to account for reductively, as emergent processes can be. Physical explanations are mechanistic, they explain by appealing to underlying functions and structures. And, though explanations of this sort seem to work well for a wide variety of phenomena, conscious experience seems uniquely resistant to functional explanations. Even hard-nosed thinkers like Russell fell back on neutral monism, at a loss to grapple with mental phenomena. And panpsychists see consciousness as what reality looks like 'from the inside' and the physical world is what reality looks like 'from the outside.' It's the sense of tension between inside and outside, a fundamental disconnect between those perspectives, that seems to drive the search for "something extra."

 

[exchemist]

I would guess that it's raw feelings, the qualia, that interior perspective on being a brain. Most things in the world we can find there's one basic perspective. Look at that pebble. It's a collection of minerals, it's solid, its properties are easily reduced to objective facts about atoms, molecular bonds, etc. There's generally no question of "what it's like to be a pebble."

Consciousness seems difficult to account for reductively, as emergent processes can be. Physical explanations are mechanistic, they explain by appealing to underlying functions and structures. And, though explanations of this sort seem to work well for a wide variety of phenomena, conscious experience seems uniquely resistant to functional explanations. Even hard-nosed thinkers like Russell fell back on neutral monism, at a loss to grapple with mental phenomena. And panpsychists see consciousness as what reality looks like 'from the inside' and the physical world is what reality looks like 'from the outside.' It's the sense of tension between inside and outside, a fundamental disconnect between those perspectives, that seems to drive the search for "something extra."

Yes, I suppose that’s why, but it is really no more than a feeling. There is certainly no evidence to suggest there is more at work than biochemistry. I may have posted it before, but it seems to me Massimo Pigliucci expresses well my scepticism about qualia requiring something extra: https://philosophynow.org/issues/99/What_Hard_Problem

 

[TheVat]

but it seems to me Massimo Pigliucci expresses well my scepticism about qualia requiring something extra:

Yes, I've read Pigliucci several times on this, and always come away with some healthy misgivings about qualia. He and others (Dennett, e.g.) owe a debt to the eminent Gilbert Ryle who first developed the concept of a category error, and had much useful to say about the differences between explanations and experiences. If we go the Pigliucci route, then we have to accept that ordinary language will be riddled with conceptual pitfalls where category errors are often inherent in how we speak about phenomenal experience.

There are classic examples, like team spirit. I describe baseball and how it relies on team spirit. I then describe what each position in the field does, what each player's role in the game is, and you then ask me which player has the team spirit. Category error. Semantic pitfall of conflating a metaphor with an object. One of probably hundreds of semantic problems that philosophy of science must deal with.

 

[C C]

Calling the view a shared underlying consciousness still leaves an individuation problem. If the base awareness is literally one, what explains why my present experience has access to these memories and not yours? Saying that brains are filters relocates the question unless the filter model predicts when streams merge, split, or remain separate.

First-person reports of unity are relevant phenomenological data, but by themselves they do not distinguish one universal subject from many subjects undergoing a similar loss of self-boundaries. What observation would come out differently under the shared-strand view and under a model in which separate brains converge on the same phenomenology?

Yah, it takes memory or information retention that can be systematically processed to create and maintain the illusion of a "subject" as something essentialist. Obviously a brain confines its local manifestations (the private presentations of images, sounds, tactile sensations, etc) to being identified and understood by the data exclusively stored in that skull. And not the memories of other organisms separated by distance and similarly isolated by distinct bodies.

So if there were some higher or primal echelon where the "phantasms" of thought and perception across the whole universe were unified, there would be no global "subject" dispensing identifications, understandings, and motivations (cognition) of such due to the lack of a memory apparatus.

The Eastern schools of thought that posit a storehouse consciousness (memory?) that can be appended to the six bardos and the like would have to be facilitated at a prior-in-rank level that makes the apparent natural or physical world possible. Speculations like that probably can't be tested within the product itself. For example, psychonautics is just more private exploration that could be fabricated from brain memory (hallucinations) rather than tapping into whatever proposed "more" fundamental provenance that's generating realities.
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[exchemist]

Yes, I've read Pigliucci several times on this, and always come away with some healthy misgivings about qualia. He and others (Dennett, e.g.) owe a debt to the eminent Gilbert Ryle who first developed the concept of a category error, and had much useful to say about the differences between explanations and experiences. If we go the Pigliucci route, then we have to accept that ordinary language will be riddled with conceptual pitfalls where category errors are often inherent in how we speak about phenomenal experience.

There are classic examples, like team spirit. I describe baseball and how it relies on team spirit. I then describe what each position in the field does, what each player's role in the game is, and you then ask me which player has the team spirit. Category error. Semantic pitfall of conflating a metaphor with an object. One of probably hundreds of semantic problems that philosophy of science must deal with.

I'm not sure I follow the team spirit example. Surely there is a real phenomenon whereby a sports team performs better than expected on paper, due to the psychological cohesiveness and morale of the group? I rowed in a school 1st VIII which had that. But I don't think anyone would have asked who in the crew had team spirit, since obviously it was an emergent property of the group collectively.

So I'm not sure why going the Pigliucci route on consciousness necessarily implies a host of other category errors in our speech. We can use metaphorical labels for real phenomena, surely, without making a category error?

 

[TheVat]

So I'm not sure why going the Pigliucci route on consciousness necessarily implies a host of other category errors in our speech

It doesn't. I seem to have just rambled into a sidebar on category errors. I guess the baseball example appealed as it seemed analogous (if the interlocutor had no knowledge of baseball or what team spirit is). I.e. when we give consciousness the status of a thing or essence, we could be like someone (a naive ET visitor perhaps) looking at player's CT scans to locate the team spirit. But yes, for those aware of emergent phenomena, there would be less likelihood of category error for them even if our language is loaded with the semantic pitfalls for them. I mean, English idiom is heavily larded with dualism, but many of us manage not to be dualists.