We finally understand consciousness
Much is written about consciousness without attempting to define it, or state clearly what its function might be. There’s usually a pattern. After a lot of preamble, the non-definition of “what it feels like” is offered. This is an indication that our understanding of consciousness is so poor that we cannot articulate the question itself.
Why are some experiences conscious and some experiences not? Why is spotting a ball conscious, but the precise arm movements that take it there unconscious? (Can you tell what your elbow or your back muscles did as your arm maneuvered towards the ball?)
We finally understand consciousness.
Not just at a metaphorical level (Daniel Dennett has done a wonderful job of that), but at a mechanistic how-is-it-put-together level. Rather that focus on who has solved it, I’ll talk about what it is (That info is at the end)
What is the function of consciousness? Among others, it is the “hierarchical, simultaneous, and rapid resolution of uncertainty.” Our world, of large macro-scale beings, is fundamentally ambiguous.
The dominant “bayesian” and “information” metaphors for understanding brain functions do not take time and fundamental ambiguity inherent to the world into account. Meaning is not given to us on a plate. It must be manufactured by the brain. Information is constructed from sensory data. How? And what does it mean?
Here is an example: Listen to this audio. What do you hear?
Firstly, note that whatever you hear is a conscious percept. It is your brain orchestrating its daily unceasing miracle of resolving uncertainty and helping you consciously perceive.
“The scent of the two-cent stamp sent me back”
Are you hearing that? If not, you will now (and why is that?)
There are three homonyms here — SCENT, CENT, and SENT — which all sound the same; I made sure of that when synthetically generating this audio snippet. The three identical snippets in this audio sequence, which unfolds over time, are seemingly instantly and simultaneously resolved into three entirely different meanings. How?
That is one example of fundamental ambiguity. Computation is everything that the brain does to the sensory data it takes in. The auditory sequence in this case. Consciousness is what you consciously perceive. The three different meanings, somehow resolved all at once. And if you think about it, there’s some time-travel involved here. SCENT and CENT can only be resolved in meaning towards the end of the sentence. Consciousness is what allows us to do this resolution into something stable and take action, and be entirely oblivious to all the many possibilities that this could have been. And we do this thousands of times everyday as go about perceiving and acting on what is filtered through this conscious perception.
This example also helps us focus on one crucial aspect of consciousness that *every* major theory or discussion out there ignores. There is a timeline to consciousness. What “it feels like” undulates over time.
Any theory of consciousness must be able to explain the phenomenological timeline. But since our understanding is so poor, every major theory ignores this entirely. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 for a great review of all the major theories. The authors lament how all the major theories are imprecise, and sugest they offer “computational models to bring mechanistic specificity” and be able to account for “temporality” among other things.
And that brings me to the final part.
We already have a wonderfully precise, mechanistic, and stunningly coherent “computational” framework for consciousness. Stephen Grossberg, often hailed as a pioneer in computational neuroscience and brain modeling, has explained consciousness by attempting to model every other facet of perception, which most take for granted as the “easy stuff”. His work is of great importance for AI too which, for all the wonderful seemingly-magical stuff deeplearning has generated, is largely a one-trick pony riding error-backpropagation way too hard. His 65-year body of work, however, is largely unknown. The sentiment is captured by this tweet from an academic:
That is unfortunate. Grossberg’s work is important, and most importantly, offers the only coherent mechanistically precise, computational framework that also happens to explain consciousness.
We expanded on why his work is important in this response in an academic journal: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/0/158/files/2022/05/FinalAJOP.ReplyToReberReviewofJOURNEYOFTHEMIND.05.23.22B.pdf
That response was to a review of our recent book, Journey of the Mind, which apart from unpacking thinking, attempts to make Grossberg’s work accessible. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-mind
And finally, you can go directly to the source. Stephen Grossberg’s book (Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain) has his entire 65-year body of work collated into one coherent whole. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/conscious-mind-resonant-brain-9780190070557
I’ve written about it here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-youve-never-heard-of-17c61b654a3e
PS: There is one aspect of consciousness, of “what it feels like”, that every theory ignores. It is that someone must be having the conscious experiences. Who is that “I”? To put it more precisely, how is the “I” constructed? That’s a bridge too far for theories of consciousness. They take the I for granted, but a theory must necessarily explain both the conscious experience and the conscious experiencer. More about that in an another post.
UPDATE! How can a good theory explain both the conscious experience and the conscious experiencer? And why is that important? I write about it here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e
