Aug 24, 2021 04:08 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 24, 2021 04:48 PM by C C.)
The origin of consciousness
https://iai.tv/articles/the-origin-of-co..._auid=2020
INTRO: The origin of consciousness was a world-defining event, comparable only with the origin of life itself. Buried deep in the evolutionary record, the transition to minimal consciousness has far-reaching biological and philosophical implications. In this article, accompanied by art illustrations by Anna Zeligowski, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka put forward their new theory about how it began. Inspired by a scientific method used to pinpoint the transition from non-life to life, they establish a set of criteria for minimal consciousness and a unique identifying marker that fits them. This marker, they argue, drove the Cambrian explosion of biological diversity and provides an answer to the question of what organisms have consciousness.
EXCERPTS: MuZero is an algorithm with a superhuman ability to learn: it has learned to play 57 different Atari video games as well as Chess, Go and Shogi, and defeated the greatest human masters in every one of them. Yet, this amazing algorithm and the computer in which it is implemented are as conscious as your washing machine.
Its “intelligence”, manifest in its learning ability, has nothing to do with consciousness – the ability to feel, perceive and think in the deeply subjective sense that we cherish. If you were told that you would become deprived of all subjective perceptions and feelings, you would be devastated and consider such a life to be meaningless. Intelligence – having the ability to learn and solve complex problems like MuZero does – and consciousness – being the subject of experience – seem to be unrelated.
[...] Most people have the strong intuition that clever animals like chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and dogs are conscious, whereas they are less sure about animals like sea anemones, worms and slugs that show only very simple forms of learning.
In the 19th century George John Romanes, an ardent follower of Charles Darwin, articulated this intuition. He interpreted animal psychology within the Darwinian evolutionary framework and defined mind (which he and others of his time used as a synonym for consciousness) in terms of the ability to make learning-based choices...
[...] However, as the MuZero example shows, intelligence and consciousness can be decoupled. Do we therefore have to conclude that there is no deep relationship between them and forget about learning as a key to consciousness?
We believe that this would amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Although learning is not sufficient for consciousness, we have reached the conclusion that the evolution of learning drove the evolution of consciousness and that the cognitive architecture of complex learning in living organisms constitutes basic consciousness.
The evolution of learning drove the evolution of consciousness and the cognitive architecture of complex learning in living organisms constitutes basic consciousness. [...] Animal evolution ever since has been guided and driven by the perceptions, motivations, aversions, appetites and choices of learning, conscious animals.
Unlimited associative learning was an adaptive strategy that dramatically expanded the ability of animals to learn to exploit new environmental resources during their own lifetime. So was it one of the engines that drove the Cambrian explosion? We believe that it was. The abilities of associatively-learning animals made them more effective predators, more discriminating mates, and more evasive prey... (MORE - missing details)
The brain doesn’t think the way you think it does
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-ph...-20210824/
EXCERPT: . . . But a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified — it’s misleading. “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” [Lisa Feldman] Barrett said. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”
Neuroscientists generally agree about how the physical tissue of the brain is organized: into particular regions, networks, cell types. But when it comes to relating those to the task the brain might be performing — perception, memory, attention, emotion or action — “things get a lot more dodgy,” said David Poeppel, a neuroscientist at New York University.
No one disputes that the visual cortex enables sight, that the auditory cortex enables hearing, or that the hippocampus is essential for memory. Damage to those regions impairs those abilities, and researchers have identified mechanisms underlying them in those areas. But memory, for example, also requires brain networks other than the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is turning out to be key to a growing number of cognitive processes other than memory. Sometimes the degree of overlap is so great that the labels start to lose their meaning.
“The idea that there’s some kind of strong parallelism between mental categories that neuroscientists use to try and understand the brain and the neural implementation of mental events is just wrong,” Barrett said.
Portrait photo of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University, thinks that familiar categories of mental function such as perception and memory are “poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”
And while the current framework has led to important insights, “it’s gotten us stuck in certain traps that are really stifling research,” said Paul Cisek, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal — an outcome that has also directly hobbled the development of treatments for neurological and psychological conditions.
That is why Barrett, Cisek and other scientists argue that for us to truly understand how the brain works, concepts at the field’s core may need to be revised, perhaps radically. As they grapple with that challenge, they are uncovering new ways to frame their questions about the brain, and new answers: This month alone, one such approach revealed an unexpected link between memory formation and metabolic regulation. But even if a new framework succeeds in explaining the brain’s operation, some researchers wonder whether the price of that success will be a loss of connection to our human experience... (MORE - details)
https://iai.tv/articles/the-origin-of-co..._auid=2020
INTRO: The origin of consciousness was a world-defining event, comparable only with the origin of life itself. Buried deep in the evolutionary record, the transition to minimal consciousness has far-reaching biological and philosophical implications. In this article, accompanied by art illustrations by Anna Zeligowski, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka put forward their new theory about how it began. Inspired by a scientific method used to pinpoint the transition from non-life to life, they establish a set of criteria for minimal consciousness and a unique identifying marker that fits them. This marker, they argue, drove the Cambrian explosion of biological diversity and provides an answer to the question of what organisms have consciousness.
EXCERPTS: MuZero is an algorithm with a superhuman ability to learn: it has learned to play 57 different Atari video games as well as Chess, Go and Shogi, and defeated the greatest human masters in every one of them. Yet, this amazing algorithm and the computer in which it is implemented are as conscious as your washing machine.
Its “intelligence”, manifest in its learning ability, has nothing to do with consciousness – the ability to feel, perceive and think in the deeply subjective sense that we cherish. If you were told that you would become deprived of all subjective perceptions and feelings, you would be devastated and consider such a life to be meaningless. Intelligence – having the ability to learn and solve complex problems like MuZero does – and consciousness – being the subject of experience – seem to be unrelated.
[...] Most people have the strong intuition that clever animals like chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and dogs are conscious, whereas they are less sure about animals like sea anemones, worms and slugs that show only very simple forms of learning.
In the 19th century George John Romanes, an ardent follower of Charles Darwin, articulated this intuition. He interpreted animal psychology within the Darwinian evolutionary framework and defined mind (which he and others of his time used as a synonym for consciousness) in terms of the ability to make learning-based choices...
[...] However, as the MuZero example shows, intelligence and consciousness can be decoupled. Do we therefore have to conclude that there is no deep relationship between them and forget about learning as a key to consciousness?
We believe that this would amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Although learning is not sufficient for consciousness, we have reached the conclusion that the evolution of learning drove the evolution of consciousness and that the cognitive architecture of complex learning in living organisms constitutes basic consciousness.
The evolution of learning drove the evolution of consciousness and the cognitive architecture of complex learning in living organisms constitutes basic consciousness. [...] Animal evolution ever since has been guided and driven by the perceptions, motivations, aversions, appetites and choices of learning, conscious animals.
Unlimited associative learning was an adaptive strategy that dramatically expanded the ability of animals to learn to exploit new environmental resources during their own lifetime. So was it one of the engines that drove the Cambrian explosion? We believe that it was. The abilities of associatively-learning animals made them more effective predators, more discriminating mates, and more evasive prey... (MORE - missing details)
The brain doesn’t think the way you think it does
https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-ph...-20210824/
EXCERPT: . . . But a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified — it’s misleading. “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” [Lisa Feldman] Barrett said. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”
Neuroscientists generally agree about how the physical tissue of the brain is organized: into particular regions, networks, cell types. But when it comes to relating those to the task the brain might be performing — perception, memory, attention, emotion or action — “things get a lot more dodgy,” said David Poeppel, a neuroscientist at New York University.
No one disputes that the visual cortex enables sight, that the auditory cortex enables hearing, or that the hippocampus is essential for memory. Damage to those regions impairs those abilities, and researchers have identified mechanisms underlying them in those areas. But memory, for example, also requires brain networks other than the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is turning out to be key to a growing number of cognitive processes other than memory. Sometimes the degree of overlap is so great that the labels start to lose their meaning.
“The idea that there’s some kind of strong parallelism between mental categories that neuroscientists use to try and understand the brain and the neural implementation of mental events is just wrong,” Barrett said.
Portrait photo of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University, thinks that familiar categories of mental function such as perception and memory are “poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”
And while the current framework has led to important insights, “it’s gotten us stuck in certain traps that are really stifling research,” said Paul Cisek, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal — an outcome that has also directly hobbled the development of treatments for neurological and psychological conditions.
That is why Barrett, Cisek and other scientists argue that for us to truly understand how the brain works, concepts at the field’s core may need to be revised, perhaps radically. As they grapple with that challenge, they are uncovering new ways to frame their questions about the brain, and new answers: This month alone, one such approach revealed an unexpected link between memory formation and metabolic regulation. But even if a new framework succeeds in explaining the brain’s operation, some researchers wonder whether the price of that success will be a loss of connection to our human experience... (MORE - details)
