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The Natural Mind: Consciousness and Self-Awareness

Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all.
- Nick Herbert

Consciousness: Subjective Experiences, and Neural Firings

Third person conciousness, according to David Chalmers can be likened to a characteristic that allows complex systems to scan their own processing. This is quite a straight forward definition. Existing self-diagnosing machines technically share this aspect of conciousness. Do such machines really have conciousness? Well, if they do, at most, this phenomenon would occur at a very rudimentary level.

Have you ever wondered why blue books look blue? Or why things look like anything at all? This is the problem of sensory qualia. Qualia are qualitive aspects of our mental states which can include taste, smell, touch, pleasure, etc. Physically speaking, when we look at a blue book, our brain triggers a pattern of nerve firings, whichs allow us to see the book. If looking at objects can be likened down to patterns of nerve firings then why does the experience of looking at a book seem so subjective? A scientific look at nerve firings and patterns will help us better understand qualia, and subjective experience.

Well, what of subjective experiences? Why do we even experience anything at all? Could we carry out daily day activities without these experiences. Are our physical actions the only things that matter? The epiphenomentalists certainly think so, they believe subjective experiences are of no importance and only physical processes count. Subjective states are "epiphenomenal", they are of no consequence. Zombies are beings that carry out physical processes without possessing any subjective mental states. Besides what may live in our memories from horror movies, zombies do not exist, but could they? Certainly if we were to create an android void of subjective experiences it could be classified as a zombie. However, many scientists believe machines are capable of experiencing subjective mental states. If we wish to endow machines with subjective experience, we must first discover the engine that creates conciousness and self-awareness.

Pattern and Information

Pattern and information always occur together, both are aspects of an entity we will label as pattern-information.

All information is carried by a pattern in the physical world

All patterns carry some information.

Patterns always come with information. Even obfuscatory patterns that cannot be read or easily discerned includes information. There can also be infinitely many "types" of information that can be extracted from any arbitrary pattern. The kind of information that an agent (such as us) can extract from an essay for example, depends on how it is processed. We could first read the essay, and summarize it. Or we could even count the number of words in the essay. Information can come in words, numbers almost anything. Suppose we take another pattern, this time it is composed of a bunch of nonsense scribbling on a wall. It doesn't say or mean anything, however there is still information that can be processed from that scribbling. We could for example analyze the hue of the scribbling and come up with a color- say red. Or we could calculate what percentage of the wall is covered. Thus there are very many processes that exist for extracting information given a pattern. Information is only relative to the choice of process.

We recall that, objectively speaking third-person mental events are patterns of neural firings in the brain. So if we are given patterns of neural firings, then where can the information be found? Qualia is just information from our subjective experience. No doubt if an agent undergoes subjective experiences then it is conscious. Thus, the claim that consciousness arises from patterns of neural firings can be substantiated.

Conclusion

Like David Chalmers, Donald Griffin believes that conciousness results from patterns of activity involving thousands or millions of neurons. Perhaps this claim is ambiguous, but it is a pretty good lead. If we modeled this neural activity on a machine, then could it be conscious - at least to some degree? We will have to wait and see.

Submitted: 12/12/1999

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