Is Consciousness Simple or Complex?

Pythagorean

I agree pftest, and we do often refer to systems of molecules having memory if the ensemble can consistently return to a prior state when it's not being acted on (having assumed an influenced state under action).

This is where the word "emergent" is useful. Because the ensemble of particles alone is not anything special; it's the properties that arise from particular ensembles that aren't properties of individual members of the ensemble.

Amorphos

To op

If consciousness is simple, is awareness also simple?
Is awareness a property electromagnetism, an arrangement of patterns generalised so as to give cohesion to the myriad of sensory info. Something akin to what’s presented on the computer monitor, rather than any particular or any set of informations occurring in the computer itself [processor etc].

If consciousness is an inherent property of the universe, but is not awareness, or awareness requires faculties of the brain; what is the inherent property?

edited for repetition.

I’d add that information is an important part of how we see consciousness. As far as I know, all physical information is collocative and patterns built from such [like binary in a computer or DNA].

Is that what all information is? …even this you are thinking right now, how about art and image based info? Or conceptual info which I feel occurs prior to linguistic thought, or underlies it.

sganesh88

Assuming consciousness arises out of physical processes in the brain, I don't understand its significance from the darwinian view.
Ok eyes, skin, ears and all those sensory organs give the data about the external environment to the brain and the different modules in brain respond to it. For eg., module A could exist which expects signals from the eye to initiate actions that the received information require. (A lion chasing you. Module A-reflex action- triggers the leg muscles to start running)

Similarly other modules might exist that receive, interpret the signals from other sense organs and trigger the necessary actions, if any. What is the role of consciousness here? Why should that info be CCed to the consciousness guy? Sharing the signals with the consciousness and nourishing whatever process that sustains consciousness seems to be an unnecessary burden for life.

If there were two branches of life, one with consciousness and one without, i would tend to think that the latter should have a better chance at survival.

An interesting example i can think of is about hackers with auto-aim plugins in the online first-person shooter game Counter Strike . The auto-aim enabled hacker is like the latter version of life. The program 'sees' an enemy approaching, just aims at his head and shoots. Mission accomplished.! The hacker is a loser with no life. But that's a different discussion.

The humans on the other hand have loads of unnecessary things going on in their coconut shell. Millions of neurons firing carrying absolutely trivial stuff!
"That shot would get me to a 50 frags!"
"I swear b3A$t was a playing like a noob last week. must be a hack!"
"Mom! Yes.. coming down for lunch in a minute!"
"When am i ever gonna start studying for the math test?"

Seeing the huge score difference even between an experienced player and a hacker, i wonder how could life with consciousness have survived had there been a consciousness-free version.
Imagine a battle between Terrorists full of hackers and Counter Terrorists with a mix of brilliant and dull non-hackers. Puppies vs Velociraptors.!

chasw

Art imitates life. Modern computers reflect the function and architecture of the human brain, they have been created "in our own image". Accordingly, consciousness exists in the brain's cyberspace. It is one aspect of the phenomenology of mind. - CW

Pythagorean

I disagree, the human brain's architecture is vastly more complex than a computer's. A computer has been designed with a goal from the start. Brain's evolved over a long period of time and in some cases, lacks the efficiency of a computer, but the computer lacks the ingenuity of a brain.

In fact, many projects are currently under way to reproduce brain architecture in computers; IBM has gotten a lot of press for their attempts, Eugene Izhikevich runs Brain Corp. which does many of the similar things. To the computer world, the brain architecture is rather novel.

chasw

"In fact, many projects are currently under way to reproduce brain architecture in computers; snip. To the computer world, the brain architecture is rather novel."

Thanks, P. My point exactly, animal brains are very old, while computers are relatively new human artifacts patterned after our understanding of how the brain works. The brain's function and architecture evolves slowly, but our artificial analog to the brain is still undergoing rapid improvements.

In the initial stages of information technology, most computers have been based on the concept of a unified machine with built-in data storage, volatile memory and a central processor, think of iRobot. In the next stage, humans have begun to separate these functions with specialized machines for data storage and data processing. For example, a modern Beowulf-style high-performance compute cluster behaves like a collective mind, with many little artificial brains working in concert, think of the Borg. Our efforts to build a thinking machine have only just begun. - CW

StationZero

My history of study is brain science so I have something to say about consciousness. First of all, consciousness is best understood from a non-reductionist perspective ala David Chalmers. Does that mean its an "emergent" phenomenon? Well, yes, but... The best way to understand consciousness is to realize that it appeared in human evolution in relation to emergence of self-awareness. The awareness of self put boundary conditions upon the brain that demanded that that brain produce what Piaget referred to as "action schemes" in order to negotiate simple AND complex scenarios in its environment.

The self can viewed as the central character in this scheme construction, and the scheme construction only becomes manifest as qualititive experience or "sentience," insofar as the brain's ability to distinguish the varied properties of that constructed universe. Thus, consciousness equates to the ability of the central character manifested within the brain's dynamic physiology to distinguish stimuli. That is what consciousness is, it is the property of a derived central character within the brain in the act of distinguishing stimuli. That stimuli can be sights, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., and it can also be emotions, thoughts, or other non modality specific signals.

StationZero

Yes there are, and that is a good thing, regardless. However, none of these efforts have much chance of success barring some self-organized assembly of information evolution emerging from the infrastructure, which would manifest unintentionally from the original design perspective. I have studied this. Current efforts to model brain function according to this paradigm use a "brute force" approach by using as the kernal of functionality the individual neuron, complete with the Hodgkin-Huxley equations in every brute force Petaflop iteration.

But, as I stated in my previous post, the scale to analyze consciousness is not on the small scale. i.e., neuronal or quantum level, it is on the level of the cytorchitectonically defined cortical region, such as V1 or S1, etc. At this level, brain processes are modelled as a set of coupled oscillators, the maths of which can be modelled by coupled sets of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Modelling the brain and consciousness this way is an active and current direction of basic research in the USA, and is cuurently being funded by DARPA research grants.

FredoX

Of course, the brain is important, it must be?
However, there is an increasing body of empirical evidence that contradicts the "brain as the ultimate seat of consciousness" hypothesis:

- There are many known cases like the one reported here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/...s-doctors.html in which a normally functioning human (education, job, family, social skills) turns out to have just a fraction of the brain tissue compared to other normally functioning humans.
- A patient has recently been observed who has severe brain damage in all the brain areas that neuroscience has identified as important for consciousness and cognition who is still able to pass the famous "mirror test":
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...e-0038413-g001
- it is known that in cases of severe epilepsy in children (younger than about 8) removing one entire hemisphere will yield (after revalidation) no noticable impairments later on in life.

So the brain alone may not be enough to explain the complexity of consciousness, but is a leg important? There have been reports of patients who had limbs amputated (if I recall correctly especially when the hands were concerned) who "forgot" certain specialistic actions they were able to perform very proficiently before the amputation (f.i. Professional motor skills like those of a musician or locksmith) in the sense that they could not remember nor imagine perfoming the action.

Disciplines of the behavioural sciences who are concerned about the role of the body, nervous system and the environment in the emergence of complex adaptive behaviour are ecological psychology and embodied embedded cognitive science. If anyone is interested I can elaborate on what they would have to say about the subject.

Ryan_m_b

Welcome to the forums. Cases like this are examples of how adaptive the brain is, over time different areas can take on functions previously lost.
Those sound like pseudo-scientific anecdotes. If there is any change after amputation it is likely do to the psychological stress of the event, not because memories have been kept in the limb.

FredoX

Thanks, these are very interisting forums indeed.

The examples I used sure are examples of brain plasticity! But to me they raise the question what you can learn about consciousness by studying the cytoarchitecture of area V1 when people can be conscious and cogent if it is removed altogether? In your answer also lies a question.... If a function can be lost and then taken over by other areas... Where resides this function? It cannot be located exclusively in the piece of brain that was lost, how else can you recover it?

Also take into account that the patients in which the head contains more liquid than brain tissue, loss of brain tissue is so extreme there is no "other", healthy area that can take over. Moreover, there is no dramatic loss of function that prompts the discovery of these cases they are often accidental discoveries. So these examples are not exactly the same as recovery of function after acute acquired brain damage.

If by anecdotal pseudo-science you mean that no experiments can be found in the literature in which people have been deliberately amputated to answer this question you are right :)
I must admit I cannot find the paper I was referring to right now, but here is a much more recent study in which it is shown that motor imagery, imagining a movement or action sequence is impaired in amputees (and f.i. not in immobilized patients) http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/23/5/449.short

[edit just to be sure: I am not suggesting there are memories stored in the limb, just that memories / function are not stored in the brain as if it were an information database]

Noja888

Why not think of the brain in a quantum sense? This still makes it a physical object but allows for much more possibilities. Entaglement, qubits and such. The quantum landscape emerges into the classical existance we experience with our classical senses. Yet the definition of conciousness eludes us, interpretations thru history are always in the classical physics sense. Perhaps humans have been using the wrong set of tools in an attempt to explain this great question of wonder?