Received today a notification about lecture this week on CERN titled "The Science of Consciousness". Intrigued by the title I went to check what it's about and had sort of knee jerk reaction to the lecture description (especially bolded part; below). Can't really elaborately point out why, it just doesn't feel right, e.g. indicating that humans are animals, that being conscious equals having a subjective experience (implying that consciousness can't be objective, IMO) and stating that consciousness of mice and bees represents "more difficult case [to study]" than in [adult] humans.
I might be seeing to much into this and "adding" things which are not really there, so a comment/view from others would be appreciated.
However, to me, it seems like consciousness is striped off of any spiritual dimension and reduced to purely mechanical (neural) processes of a machine. Well, maybe that's how "machines" are [only] capable of apprehending consciousness.
About Tononi (there are only two search outputs with his name, none related to IIT, which is not mentioned on the forum, AFAIK it):
Koch is the guy giving this lecture which notification is described above.
About IIT:
The underlined part above kind of confuses me (well, all other things are also presented in much "higher" academic language than normal layman like myself could easily wrap his mind around them), knowing that the entropy S of a system is defined as (Boltzmann equation): S ~ ln W, where W is accessible phase space, i.e. possible states of the system. So, as I understand above underlined part, it states that information increases the entropy of a system (variable)?
Well, it's a Wikipedia entry, which reliability is always questionable, so here's the article from journal The Biological Bulletin (it says open access to full article):
Well, after reading this I feel like I've just drunk Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (from D. Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), but the overall understanding about this theory is that neither consciousness, nor information, nor experience, are really defined independently from each other, making things go in circles and self-reference.
Some help from those more experienced in neuro-, cognitive and psychology sciences would be appreciated.
Also, if all this has already been covered in some other topic, I apologise for starting new thread, and ask the mods to merge it with appropriate one. Like I said, I didn't find it using Search function.
edit: Well, maybe the fairest question to those more experienced in these things would be: Is there any real use in diving deeper into this representation of consciousness? For me it seems not...
I might be seeing to much into this and "adding" things which are not really there, so a comment/view from others would be appreciated.
However, to me, it seems like consciousness is striped off of any spiritual dimension and reduced to purely mechanical (neural) processes of a machine. Well, maybe that's how "machines" are [only] capable of apprehending consciousness.
_http://indico.cern.ch/event/393890/ said:CERN Colloquium
The Science of Consciousness
by Dr. Christof Koch (Chief Scientific Officer, Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle)
Description
We not only act in the world but we consciously perceive it. The interactions of myriad of neuronal and sub-neuronal processes that are responsible for visual behaviors also give rise to the daily movie screened for our benefit in the privacy of our own skull. I will discuss the empirical progress that has been achieved over the past several decades in characterizing the behavioral and the neuronal correlates of consciousness in human and non-human animals and in dissociating selective visual attention from visual consciousness. I will introduce Tononi’s integrated Information Theory (IIT) that explains in a principled manner which physical systems are capable of conscious, subjective experience. The theory explains many empirical facts about consciousness and its pathologies in humans. It can also be extrapolated to more difficult cases, such as fetuses, mice, or bees. The theory predicts that many, seemingly complex, systems are not conscious, in particular digital computers running software, even if these were to faithfully simulate the neuronal networks making up the human brain.
About Tononi (there are only two search outputs with his name, none related to IIT, which is not mentioned on the forum, AFAIK it):
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Tononi said:[...]
This research has led to a comprehensive hypothesis on the function of sleep (proposed with sleep researcher Chiara Cirelli), the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, wakefulness leads to a net increase in synaptic strength, and sleep is necessary to reestablish synaptic homeostasis. The hypothesis has implications for understanding the effects of sleep deprivation and for developing novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to sleep disorders and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Tononi is also a leader in the field of consciousness studies, and has co-authored a book on the subject with Gerald Edelman. He developed the integrated information theory (IIT): a scientific theory of what consciousness is, how it can be measured, how it is realized in the brain and, why it fades when we fall into dreamless sleep and returns when we dream. The theory is being tested with neuroimaging, TMS, and computer models. His work has been described as "the only really promising fundamental theory of consciousness" by Christof Koch.
Koch is the guy giving this lecture which notification is described above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christof_Koch said:Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology.
[...]
Since the early 1990s, Koch has studied the physical basis of consciousness as a scientifically tractable problem, and has been influential in arguing that consciousness can be approached using the modern tools of neurobiology. His primary collaborator in the endeavor of locating the neural correlates of consciousness was the molecular biologist turned neuroscientist, Francis Crick and, more recently, the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. Koch advocates for a modern variant of panpsychism, the ancient philosophical belief that some minimal form of consciousness can be found in all biological organisms, from single cells to humans, and in appropriately built machines. Koch writes a popular column, Consciousness Redux, for Scientific American Mind on scientific and popular topics pertaining to consciousness.
[...]
In early 2011, Koch became the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, leading their ten-year project concerning high-throughput large-scale cortical coding. The mission is to understand the computations that lead from photons to behavior by observing and modeling the physical transformations of signals in the visual brain of behaving mice. The project seeks to catalogue all the building blocks (ca. 100 distinct cell types) of the then visual cortical regions and associated structures (thalamus, colliculus) and their dynamics. The scientists seek to know what the animal sees, how it thinks, and how it decides. They seek to map out the murine mind in a quantitative manner. The Allen Institute for Brain Science currently employs about 270 scientists, engineers, technologists and supporting personnel. The first four years of this ten-year endeavor to build brain observatories were funded by a donation of $300 million by Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.
About IIT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory said:Integrated information theory (IIT) is a proposed theoretical framework intended to understand and explain the nature of consciousness. It was developed by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Tononi's initial ideas were further developed by Adam Barrett, who created similar measures of integrated information such as "phi empirical".
Overview
The integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness attempts to explain consciousness, or conscious experience, at the fundamental level using a principled, theoretical framework. The theory starts from two key postulations regarding the nature of consciousness: That consciousness has information regarding its experience, and that the experience is integrated to the extent that parts of an experience are informative of each other.
Here, IIT embraces the information theoretical sense of information; that is, information is the reduction in uncertainty regarding the state of a variable, and conversely is what increases in specifying a variable with a growing number of possible states. When applied to conscious experience as we know it, since the number of different possible experiences generated by a human consciousness is considerably large, the amount of information this conscious system must hold should also be large. The list of a system's possible states is called its "repertoire" in IIT.
In a system composed of connected "mechanisms" (nodes containing information and causally influencing other nodes), the information among them is said to be integrated if and to the extent that there is a greater amount of information in the repertoire of a whole system regarding its previous state than there is in the sum of the all the mechanisms considered individually. In this way, integrated information does not increase by simply adding more mechanisms to a system if the mechanisms are independent of each other. Applied to consciousness, parts of an experience (qualia) such as color and shape are not experienced separately for the reason that they are integrated, unified in a single, whole experience; applied in another way, our digestive system is not considered part of our consciousness because the information generated in the body is not intrinsically integrated with the brain.
In IIT 3.0, the 2014 revision of IIT, five axioms were established in underpinning the theory:
The suggestion is that the quantity of consciousness in a system is measured by the amount of integrated information it generates.
- Consciousness exists
- Consciousness is compositional (structured)
- Consciousness is informative
- Consciousness is integrated
- Consciousness is exclusive
The underlined part above kind of confuses me (well, all other things are also presented in much "higher" academic language than normal layman like myself could easily wrap his mind around them), knowing that the entropy S of a system is defined as (Boltzmann equation): S ~ ln W, where W is accessible phase space, i.e. possible states of the system. So, as I understand above underlined part, it states that information increases the entropy of a system (variable)?
Well, it's a Wikipedia entry, which reliability is always questionable, so here's the article from journal The Biological Bulletin (it says open access to full article):
_http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full said:Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto
Giulio Tononi
Abstract
The integrated information theory (IIT) starts from phenomenology and makes use of thought experiments to claim that consciousness is integrated information. Specifically: (i) the quantity of consciousness corresponds to the amount of integrated information generated by a complex of elements; (ii) the quality of experience is specified by the set of informational relationships generated within that complex. Integrated information (Φ) is defined as the amount of information generated by a complex of elements, above and beyond the information generated by its parts. Qualia space (Q) is a space where each axis represents a possible state of the complex, each point is a probability distribution of its states, and arrows between points represent the informational relationships among its elements generated by causal mechanisms (connections). Together, the set of informational relationships within a complex constitute a shape in Q that completely and univocally specifies a particular experience. Several observations concerning the neural substrate of consciousness fall naturally into place within the IIT framework. Among them are the association of consciousness with certain neural systems rather than with others; the fact that neural processes underlying consciousness can influence or be influenced by neural processes that remain unconscious; the reduction of consciousness during dreamless sleep and generalized seizures; and the distinct role of different cortical architectures in affecting the quality of experience. Equating consciousness with integrated information carries several implications for our view of nature.
Well, after reading this I feel like I've just drunk Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (from D. Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), but the overall understanding about this theory is that neither consciousness, nor information, nor experience, are really defined independently from each other, making things go in circles and self-reference.
Some help from those more experienced in neuro-, cognitive and psychology sciences would be appreciated.
Also, if all this has already been covered in some other topic, I apologise for starting new thread, and ask the mods to merge it with appropriate one. Like I said, I didn't find it using Search function.
edit: Well, maybe the fairest question to those more experienced in these things would be: Is there any real use in diving deeper into this representation of consciousness? For me it seems not...