Feeling Neurons?

Posted on February 13, 2021 by James Cross

A recent post on panpsychism in relation to a book review and a comment by Travis R. has me thinking about some things.

One thing is whether we are fundamentally conflating two related but somewhat distinct concepts in discussions of consciousness.

The first concept relates to the connection between information and consciousness. The second concept is the feeling of the information.

Since information is physical, there is no reason to believe that matter itself even in its smallest forms might not contain information. An electron, for example, might be conceptualized as an “information field” that is a continually fluctuating wave of calculations about its itself and environment. I am using “information field” in an attempt to suggest something implementation neutral. It might be quantum, electromagnetic, or some other wave-like mechanism not understood at this time. It may be something like a tensegrity structure that I wrote about quite a while ago and that Donald Ingber discussed in a Scientific American piece. While Ingber was primarily talking about living forms towards the end of his discussion he writes:

Finally, more philosophical questions arise: Are these building principles universal? Do they apply to structures that are molded by very large scale forces as well as small-scale ones? We do not know. Snelson, however, has proposed an intriguing model of the atom based on tensegrity that takes off where the French physicist Louis de Broglie left off in 1923. Fuller himself went so far as to imagine the solar system as a structure composed of multiple nondeformable rings of planetary motion held together by continuous gravitational tension. Then, too, the fact that our expanding (tensing) universe contains huge filaments of gravitationally linked galaxies and isolated black holes that experience immense compressive forces locally can only lead us to wonder. Perhaps there is a single underlying theme to nature after all. As suggested by early 20th-century Scottish zoologist D’Arcy W. Thompson, who quoted Galileo, who, in turn, cited Plato: the Book of Nature may indeed be written in the characters of geometry.

The key idea is that there might be similar organizing principles in the small and the large and the principle might involve wrapping information and binding it into structure. The panpsychists then could be correct that consciousness in its information aspect is found throughout the universe in all matter and structures from the smallest to the largest. The complex consciousness that we humans have is but another example of an information structure built on common principles from which all structures in the universe are constructed.

At the same, however, our consciousness seems different, seems to be more than just information. The reason is that it is felt. This might be where the panpsychists, the IIT theorists, and computationalists go wrong when they conflate the feeling of the information with the information itself. Hence, we get absurd statements about electrons feeling things from the panpsychists or the notion that a thermostat might be minimally sentient from an IIT theorist.

Perhaps the prototypical neuron is the sensory neuron – a neuron that senses (feels?) something about its environment. The apparent “feeling” of consciousness is actually neurons sensing the feedback generated by other neurons in its environment. The mind in this feeling aspect is biological and localized to small areas over which neurons are able to be sensed, that is brains. The feedback itself provides an explanation for apparent causal ability of mind without which an evolutionary explanation for its origin is difficult. Consciousness as we know it and feel it represents a sort of wrapped structure, an “information field”, but it belongs to biological matter and is also felt.

Posted in Consciousness, Information, Waves | 7 Comments

Civil Servant With No Brain Explained

Posted on February 6, 2021 by James Cross

Occasionally I have seen various papers, blog posts, and comments referencing the famous 44 year French civil servant who lives a normal life seemingly without a brain. Sometimes the writers demand an explanation from consciousness theories. Other times arguments are made that substantial parts of mental processing must actually be occurring outside the brain (in the ether or mind at large, I suppose). The case was reported in The Lancet originally and was accompanied by this image of a brain scan.

The patient suffers from non-communicating hydrocephalus that likely has developed over the course of many years. The man is not missing a cortex. Rather the cortex has been compressed into a thin sheet.

A paper in 2018 Revisiting Paradoxical Situations Associated with Hydrocephalus explains how people with hydrocephalus can seemingly have normal brain functions.

Presumably, functioning of the neural network of the brain does not depend on the volume of fluid that surrounds its structures provided that certain physical parameters are met. The main requirement is that the behavior of this fluid does not interfere with the function of the brain structures, including the cortical neural network.

If the behavior of cerebrospinal fluid in a hydrocephalic subject meets all three conditions, that is constancy of velocity, normal cerebrocranial pressure, and comparatively low density (in the range of 1.003–1.008 g/mL) of the fluid (or specific weight, which is the same), then the overfilling of the brain with CSF does not limit the efficient functioning of all parts of the brain, including the cortex. This explains the fact that the patients with hydrocephalus who meet these conditions can exist and develop normally.

What cases like this and others tell us is that the brain is very flexible. It can function in a variety of shapes and forms. It can compensate for damages and defects within a fairly wide range. That is amazing but by itself doesn’t present any special paradox to brain and mind theories.

Posted in Brain size, Consciousness, Intelligence | 9 Comments

The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness

Posted on January 23, 2021 by James Cross

The book by Arthur Reber that I mentioned in my last post arrived from Amazon. I’ve read it and would like to provide some additional thoughts on my previous post. I won’t repeat ground covered in the previous post so take a look at that if you haven’t read it before reading this.

The book itself is short but it covers a lot of ground in its discussion of consciousness. At various points Searle’s Chinese room and Chalmer’s hard problem put in an appearance. Its main goal is to introduce the author’s Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory but it places the theory in the context of the many contemporary issues and views about consciousness. CBC is quite hypothetical in that it doesn’t really have a clearly defined mechanism for sentience. It does offer the suggestion that excitable membranes that permit the flow of ions in cells might be a place to look. It also offers a possible way that the capabilities might have developed in the earliest organisms. Aside from that, CBC is mostly a proposal for how to proceed with future research on the question of consciousness. That way would be to look at the simplest organisms with a critical anthropomorphism for the indications of sentience, try to explain how those capabilities work, then examine how they have evolved in increasingly complex organisms until we end up with humans. This can be contrasted with the reverse approach, which Reber faults, of looking at the most complex brain – the human one – and trying to understand how its structures produce consciousness, then looking for analogs in simpler organisms.

As a research proposal, I think the idea is great. I have thought for a time that insects would be a great place to start to understand consciousness. Reber wants to go even simpler, back to protozoa and amoeba. The Catch-22 problem, however, is how do we know one celled creatures can be sentient if we don’t actually know what is the mechanism. Reber returns to this issue more than once responding to comments in private communication with Daniel Dennett. The issue undercuts his argument in chapter one for why robots or machines cannot be conscious. The argument essentially is that consciousness is an attribute of living beings – all living beings from simplest and earliest to the most complex – because sentience is required for surviving and thriving in complex world with ever changing conditions. Hard wiring of inflexible repertoires of responses in genes wouldn’t be sufficient or optimal. Consciousness is highly conserved as we move up in evolutionary complexity (he does, however, think that plants went down a path that might have dropped it) and it a property built directly into the wetware of the organic molecules of life. Algorithms running on silicon and copper aren’t sufficient. Metal doesn’t feel. It’s an argument I agree with but I’m not one hundred percent dogmatic about. Without a good theory of how living organisms become conscious, I can’t be sure that a robot couldn’t be conscious. I also’ can’t be persuaded a robot, even if it reproduced human behavior without flaw, is conscious without somebody providing a general mechanism for consciousness and how the robot implements the mechanism to produce its behaviors.

Reber does present some remarkable behaviors found in one celled organisms that I found surprising. They can learn. They have memories that can persist for long periods of time relative to their lifespan. They can exhibit remarkably complex behaviors that look like decision-making. They can communicate among themselves and even across species to control growth rates of collective groups. The evidence isn’t just in isolated one-off studies but across multiple studies. Is it conscious, sentient behavior, or complex fixed repertoire? We could be easily fooled.

I have generally thought to look for the first hints of consciousness in the first nervous systems. Neurons and sensory cells are the specialized cells that have evolved in many celled organisms that exhibit that same reactivity Reber identifies as sentience in single celled organisms. They do it with similar excitable membranes based on ion flows that Reber may have identified as the mechanism for the remarkable behaviors of single cell organisms. The difference is that this is the primary role of the neuron, the task it is specialized to do. Their job is to react to external stimuli in the case of sensory cells and to other neurons in case of neurons in the nervous system and the brain. They do it in groups, communicating among themselves. And that may make a big difference in whether there is sufficient critical mass to achieve sentience.

Still I’m intrigued by Reber’s idea but also wonder why not take another step with it. If sentience arose with the first life then could it be a key to understanding the origin of life? If excitable membranes are the source of sentience, might they be the critical feature that binds together the bag of chemicals that is the cell?

Posted in Consciousness, Human Evolution, Mysteries, Origin of Life | 34 Comments