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+--- Thread: Article Why scientists haven’t cracked consciousness (/thread-14337.html)
Why scientists haven’t cracked consciousness - C C - Jul 5, 2023
The science of consciousness still has no theory
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/6/30/23778870/consciousness-brain-mind-hard-problem-neuroscience-koch-chalmers
EXCERPTS: In 1998, at the conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), the neuroscientist Christof Koch made a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers: by 2023, science would be able to explain how the brain’s tangle of neurons gives rise to the phenomenon we call consciousness. The winner would get a case of wine.
[...] At the 26th ASSC conference this past weekend, 25 years after the initial wager, the results were declared: Koch lost. Despite years of scientific effort — a time during which the science of consciousness shifted from the fringe to a mainstream, reputable, even exciting area of study — we still can’t say how or why the experience of consciousness arises. [see Chalmers or Koch: who won the bet about consciousness made 25 years ago?]
[...] While the Western science of consciousness only grew into a reputable field over the past few decades, part of the reason answers remain so elusive may be buried in the deep structure of scientific inquiry itself, reaching back to the 1600s.
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei is widely credited with inventing the scientific method. As the philosopher Philip Goff recounts in his 2019 book Galileo’s Error, in order to formalize the study of objective qualities like size, shape, location, and motion,
Galileo bracketed out the fuzzier domain of conscious experiences. The modern scientific endeavor he helped create is a study of the universe shorn of what Galileo called the soul, and what we today might call sensory qualities, the gestalt of what consciousness feels like. The scientific method can explain the electrical activity that sparks in the brain when you jump into a freezing lake, but it can’t explain why a subjective experience of invigoration comes along with it.
“Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us,” Goff writes. “Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.”
In other words, Galileo’s scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why it’s perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his method’s inheritors still struggle to explain it.
[...] consciousness is basically the experience of an internally generative model complex enough to imagine states of the world that have not yet happened. ... Well, predictive processing claims that the same sort of thing is happening during waking consciousness, with a few caveats.
In other words, the kind of world you’re experiencing when awake is basically the same kind of world you experience in a dream: a hallucination. The difference is that our brains are constantly comparing our waking hallucinations to the sensory input they receive from the outside, fine-tuning the waking dream to keep it in line with what the incoming sensory data suggests is going on beyond our skulls. That’s what the neuroscientist Anil Seth means when he calls consciousness a “controlled hallucination.”
[...] there’s no guarantee that some critical mass of correlations between brain states and feelings can ever tell us how or why consciousness happens. Chalmers suspects that at the conclusion of their renewed bet in 2048, despite all the surrounding progress of insight that’s sure to unfold, the mystery may remain as perplexing as ever... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED (scivillage): The hallucination of consciousness: Riccardo Manzotti interviews Anil Seth
RE: Why scientists haven’t cracked consciousness - Magical Realist - Jul 6, 2023
Quote:Goff’s preferred resolution is to reintroduce consciousness into our understanding of nature by way of a secular version of panpsychism, the theory that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous element of the physical world. In this view, physical sciences à la Galileo describe matter from “the outside.” Consciousness is also a property of matter, but matter as experienced from the inside
The crux of all this goes back to the hard problem. Why is there something it is like to be a brain? Is there something it is like to be a tree or a rock or a star? In the case of brains it appears matter has entered a whole new stage of being. First hand experience dawns upon its trillions of synaptic interstices. A transparence of matter flickers into being such that being inside becomes being outside too. The conspicuously missing subject peers out of its five senses to construct a world which by its very existence it assumes. It's Hofstadter's strange loop, whereby a shape curves around to contain its own existence. It is the nature of consciousness to "world"--to instantiate a world or cosmos that by its nature includes itself. The mystery remains uncracked. We are as stumped by the phenomenon as ever.
RE: Why scientists haven’t cracked consciousness - confused2 - Jul 7, 2023
Organic life has had about 2 billion years of living under constant threat of attack, starvation and failing to reproduce. Our ability to be (sometimes) slightly ahead of the game is what we call consciousness.