Dec 15, 2023 05:05 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 15, 2023 05:53 PM by C C.)
The self is a prediction of the brain
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-do..._auid=2020
EXCERPTS: We typically feel like we are the conscious subject, the one who has experiences. [...] Thinking in terms of conscious subjects was present at the very origins of the scientific method, in the work of Rene Descartes. [...] Many scientific accounts of consciousness also appeal to a self-like mechanism in the brain that is responsible for bestowing the illuminating quality of consciousness on the informational content processed by the brain,
[...] There’s one issue, however, the fact that frontal areas of the brain are recruited by the act of communication. When the subject in an experiment reports what it is that they are consciously perceiving, we cannot tell if the frontal brain activity is due to it playing a role in consciousness itself or merely the act of reporting on the contents of consciousness. One study found a clever way around this, by deciphering what subjects were experiencing based on physiological data, such as pupil dilation. When the subjects didn’t have to report the contents of consciousness, the frontal correlates diminished. The neural structures we associate with the idea of the introspecting subject seem to not underpin consciousness itself after all, but to instead merely report on the contents of consciousness.
[...] Beyond the neuroscientific study of consciousness, phenomenological analysis also reveals the self to not be the possessor of experience. In mystical experiences induced by meditation or psychedelics, individuals typically enter a mode of experience in which the psychological self is absent, yet consciousness remains. While this is not the default state of the mind, the presence of consciousness in the absence of a self shows that consciousness is not dependent on an experiencing subject.
[...] There is a branch of mathematics that deals with how we optimally update our beliefs in light of new evidence, known as Bayesian inference. One issue with seeing the brain as performing Bayesian inference is that this process involves knowing the probability of all possible causes that could have given rise to any piece of evidence, information the brain could not possibly have access to.
A workaround has been found in the strategy of “free energy minimization”, in which the brain starts with a guess about the causes of sensory inputs and updates it in light of how surprising the evidence it receives would be if that belief were true. With this approach, this initial belief is successfully sculpted to align with reality, with no need to know all of the possible causes behind any piece of evidence.
This dynamic is described in Karl Frison’s Free Energy Principle (FEP), and it goes a long way to account for how the contents of consciousness are shaped by the sensory inputs the brain receives, as well as by the prior beliefs that it holds. The FEP does not just explain how the beliefs that underlie our perception of the world become shaped, but it also accounts for how it is that we come to act in the world...
[...] In this view, consciousness does not require a complex brain that can construct a self with the power to make the contents of the mind conscious. Consciousness is instead seen as the attempt to know the world that all living things must engage in, in order to exist over time. In this way, we can see consciousness as existing in the way that the organism interacts with the world, as a process or behaviour rather than as a “thing”.
From this perspective, the space of awareness that exists prior to the experience of the self can be conceived of as what Thomas Metzinger has called an “epistemic space”, the space in which beliefs about both the character of the world and the self can arise. By understanding consciousness to exist prior to the experience of psychological selfhood, we can both remove a major roadblock to the scientific understanding of consciousness and come to know the nature of our own minds more fully... (MORE - missing details)
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-do..._auid=2020
EXCERPTS: We typically feel like we are the conscious subject, the one who has experiences. [...] Thinking in terms of conscious subjects was present at the very origins of the scientific method, in the work of Rene Descartes. [...] Many scientific accounts of consciousness also appeal to a self-like mechanism in the brain that is responsible for bestowing the illuminating quality of consciousness on the informational content processed by the brain,
[...] There’s one issue, however, the fact that frontal areas of the brain are recruited by the act of communication. When the subject in an experiment reports what it is that they are consciously perceiving, we cannot tell if the frontal brain activity is due to it playing a role in consciousness itself or merely the act of reporting on the contents of consciousness. One study found a clever way around this, by deciphering what subjects were experiencing based on physiological data, such as pupil dilation. When the subjects didn’t have to report the contents of consciousness, the frontal correlates diminished. The neural structures we associate with the idea of the introspecting subject seem to not underpin consciousness itself after all, but to instead merely report on the contents of consciousness.
[...] Beyond the neuroscientific study of consciousness, phenomenological analysis also reveals the self to not be the possessor of experience. In mystical experiences induced by meditation or psychedelics, individuals typically enter a mode of experience in which the psychological self is absent, yet consciousness remains. While this is not the default state of the mind, the presence of consciousness in the absence of a self shows that consciousness is not dependent on an experiencing subject.
[...] There is a branch of mathematics that deals with how we optimally update our beliefs in light of new evidence, known as Bayesian inference. One issue with seeing the brain as performing Bayesian inference is that this process involves knowing the probability of all possible causes that could have given rise to any piece of evidence, information the brain could not possibly have access to.
A workaround has been found in the strategy of “free energy minimization”, in which the brain starts with a guess about the causes of sensory inputs and updates it in light of how surprising the evidence it receives would be if that belief were true. With this approach, this initial belief is successfully sculpted to align with reality, with no need to know all of the possible causes behind any piece of evidence.
This dynamic is described in Karl Frison’s Free Energy Principle (FEP), and it goes a long way to account for how the contents of consciousness are shaped by the sensory inputs the brain receives, as well as by the prior beliefs that it holds. The FEP does not just explain how the beliefs that underlie our perception of the world become shaped, but it also accounts for how it is that we come to act in the world...
[...] In this view, consciousness does not require a complex brain that can construct a self with the power to make the contents of the mind conscious. Consciousness is instead seen as the attempt to know the world that all living things must engage in, in order to exist over time. In this way, we can see consciousness as existing in the way that the organism interacts with the world, as a process or behaviour rather than as a “thing”.
From this perspective, the space of awareness that exists prior to the experience of the self can be conceived of as what Thomas Metzinger has called an “epistemic space”, the space in which beliefs about both the character of the world and the self can arise. By understanding consciousness to exist prior to the experience of psychological selfhood, we can both remove a major roadblock to the scientific understanding of consciousness and come to know the nature of our own minds more fully... (MORE - missing details)
