UKC

I found myself thinking the other day and noted how odd it seemed that I could hear my own thoughts. Being bilingual I also noted that I could think in another language and hear that in my own voice.
I find it strange that we should need to hear our own thoughts rather than just think them. We can ofcourse recall a particular images of something we have seen, but not smells, feelings or tastes other than by describing them in words.
Would this mean that someone without any spoken language from birth is unable to process thoughts in the same way, or what do they hear when they think?
I presume its the neocortex that is the part of the brain responsible for listening to your thoughts.
Thought this may make an interesting topic for discussion.

In reply to Pesda potato:

anything complex we think about in partly verbal terms. We latch language onto concepts to make composite ideas. In understanding a process or mechanism we generally use a narrative and in making decisions an internal dialectic is often employed. For that to happen we need to be able to "hear" each side of the conversation.

I was once really interested by a description of some theories that at the same time our language capabilities appear to evolved we also started tool making. Fascinating stuff.

In reply to Pesda potato:

It is a bit strange when you hear your own voice say things you didn't know you knew!

For no reason at all I heard my voice asking "I wonder if Chris Bonington is here yet?" as I got out of a friend's van outside Penrith wall on a totally randomly organised visit. First person we saw when we got in? Yes.

used to hear my voice calling a run of the outcomes in games of poker dice at university and was asked to shut up.

Much more recently I went looking in moorland for a small black plastic piece from a beloved kite the kids had lost there the day before while I had been somewhere else. Made a short and methodical search of the area where I was told they had been playing and found nothing at all. Realised it was pretty hopeless and made the totally irrational decision to "seek help from elsewhere". Closed my eyes and turned round a few times till my voice said "Walk this way until you know more" - which took me a couple of hundred yards and out of sight of the first search, over a slight heathery rise. Suddenly I said "turn right now and take a couple of steps and there it is" - I got a very prickly feeling when I saw the piece gleaming in the heather after 2 or three steps. Ridiculous and the wife didn't believe me when I came home with it after they had spent an hour looking the previous day!

Where did the voice come from?

In reply to ultrabumbly:

I'm sure we all have several layers or pieces of personas that makes us who we are, we just probably don't need or listen to all of them all the time.
Without resorting to mysticism or telepathy, it's not possible to know something you didn't know, it would have already been there stored away without you visually bring aware of it as it wasn't pertinent before.

In reply to Pesda potato:

I disagree that you cannot recall taste, feelings, or smells. In describing them to others we use common language , but internally that is not how we remember them. You can hear your thoughts as they are your conscious thoughts. Unconscious thoughts you do not hear. When clmbing you are thinking about what hold to go for, how to position your body, where to place feet, but you do not hear those thoughts, we not many anyway.

In reply to Pesda potato:



How then did we ever conceive or invent anything?

While nothing can be magicked into existence through thought alone, description of phenomena usually have a narrative element to their representations and the development of those representations. Sure, there is nothing supernatural involved. Thought does occasionally result in something "new", at least the appreciation of its existence. e.g. The photoelectric effect is not directly visually appreciable. Language didn't change the nature of how we understand the behaviour of light. People relating, rigorously, to themselves and others what they were observing indirectly brought us understanding and technology we would otherwise not have gained. In our minds eye we can now picture the quanta involved but the accepted visualisation came after it was first considered and verified and at best they can be considered adequate representations rather than a truth that we might see if we biologically capable of doing so. We can now represent these phenomena by purely mathematical and diagrammatic means though those would mean nothing to us without the language that they represent. I would strongly argue that without narratives the process would have been impossible and we would never have had the foundation of science from which to even start.

In reply to Pesda potato:

Ceiling cat.

D

In reply to Dauphin:

Not him again

In reply to Pesda potato:
Fascinating stuff, philosophy of language, but I don't really know enough to give much of a contribution. I think intuitively though that yes, we do need language in order to think. Chomsky (I think) would say that language did not evolve as a way of communicating, but as a way of forming concepts in the first place, which could then be communicated. Without the language, there would be no concepts to communicate. Someone who has actually read and understood some of this work would be able to give a much better precis of what he's on about.

youtube.com/watch?v=KEmpRtj34xg&

I would let go of ideas about different anatomical regions of the brain 'speaking' and 'listening' to one another - the brain isn't really like that. It's all interconnected and utterly mysterious. If I *think* a word then an fMRI scanner would show the auditory bits of my brain activate just as if I'd heard the word, or indeed spoken it. How firing neurons generate a conscious experience is one of the ultimate mysteries of reality, and scientists and philosophers have spent a great deal of effort making near enough no progress at all on this for the past couple of millennia.

A similar question is with vision: the stimuli of light on the retina set off an unbelievably complex chain of neurons firing, analysing the stimuli to identify bouldaries, objects, movement, colour which form the picture (or movie) in our heads. But who is watching the movie? This conundrum is gone-on about a lot by Daniel Dennett who uses the idea of the "Cartesian theatre" to demonstrate the circularity of this "homunculus argument". He's got a point, but his so-called solution really doesn't work for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

In reply to wercat:

Burn the witch!

Or tell me next week's lottery numbers and I'll let you off.

The kite part? You'd seen it, but not registered that you had seen it?

In reply to captain paranoia:

As I said I was miles away from the family during most of the kite flying and came back to find them looking for the lost part. I helped look in the area I'd seen them in with the kite when I left and where I gave up the methodical search the next day. No one had mentioned the area my voice got me to search which was hundreds of metres away and out of sight - creepy. I thought someone was playing a joke with reality at the time, like the Truman show. Supposed to run in the family as my Grandmother scared a few folk with her abilities.

In reply to Pesda potato:


Absolutely. There have been a few cases of feral children who missed the window in which it's possible to learn language. It's a reasonably well-documented area and a film was made about the first such child to come to public attention, a couple of hundred years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Human memory appears to operate asociatively. When you perceive something via the senses all of the recollections within immediate reach fetch themselves into "mind" - both conscious and subconscious. Sometimes this results in conceptual thinking and sometimes the linguistic elements come to mind. As our mind associates sound with language its not hard to envisage memories of hearing language elements reporting themselves upwards as well. In turn this might initate thought reactions involving an imagined speech narrative. For people in the habit of speaking to themselves this would produce a spoken output, to others an imagined internal "voice".

I wonder if anyone has researched whether people who habitually speak to themselves might sometimes have less internal communication going on between parts of the brain?

In reply to Pesda potato:
My Mrs hears my thoughts whilst I sleep.
Then, she gets up earlier in the morning so that she can hate me for longer.

In reply to Dauphin:

Veiled speech?

In reply to captain paranoia:

btw I wasn't speaking in my first post about an internal voice but actually hearing myself come out with the words in all cases. Hearing my own speech either to others or to myself was the first I knew of the information in all of those cases.

In reply to wercat:

Something similar happened to me at the weekend. Got back to car in sun from cinema to find I no longer had my car key(Card). Returned to cinema to loads of empty seats in darkness. Apart from the voice shouting "shuuruup" to the kidz a bit of muttering and my inner self found a seat. A search under and around proved nothing but then slotted between the cushion and plastic seat I felt the card Result!

How through all of these seats did I find the right one?

In reply to ultrabumbly:

I've been thinking about this a bit and I'm not so sure that is the case. What seems to be happening when I think 'verbally' is that I'm constructing arguments to convince myself the decision I've already made is the right one.

In reply to fmck:

Because you'd been there just a few minutes before.

In reply to Pesda potato:

I have a funny thing happen to me occasionally. I believe it happens when I'm on the very edge of wakefulness, although this in itself is difficult to recall.

A couple of people will appear audibly in my mind, I never see them, but their voices are always quite distinct and not my own, nor those of anyone I actually know. The two people will have a conversation on a given subject about which I know nothing (although clearly my mind is feeding their conversation with remembered information, even if I can't grasp it consciously), often scientific or medical subject matter. The sentences are fully formed and appear to make sense. Whilst I have no idea what they are going to say, I have the distinct impression that I am steering the conversation to a certain extent, although neither of the two voices is 'me'.
It's all very weird. Quite unlike my traditional idea of a dream and as I say I think it happens on the very edge of wakefulness, i.e. I feel more awake than asleep - so not REM.

Only been happening for the past few month and I have no idea what it is.

In reply to Sir Chasm:

Nope. It was the trail of pop corn left by my kids. There was only two couples other than us in the cinema due to it being the morning showing. If it wasn't for them I would of been stuffed.

In reply to wercat:





That's a cool couple of stories. 'Second sight' wercat.

In reply to Tom Last:

Do you have Radio 4 on your alarm clock? Sounds like In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg...

In reply to wercat:

It's even cooler that your Grandmother was similar, I like things which go against what people think of as 'normal'.

i sometimes think that how reality functions (but is not yet fully understood) will probably explain things like your experiences, and your Grandmother's abilities. That the people who see it as mystical or make believe are possibly both wrong.

In reply to Pesda potato:

I have been studying translation this year, and as part of the course we looked at subtitling. One fact I found fascinating was that when subtitling for deaf and hard of hearing, the subtitles need to stay on the screen for longer (so less text can be used) as adults who have been deaf since birth have the reading speed of an average 9 year old, due to the fact that their brains can't process the writing as speech! I don't think that answers the question in any way, just a vaguely related fact that I thought was interesting!!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Haha, yes I do and yes it does a bit! Although I really can't understand any of In Our Time

Really is bloody weird though. I was thinking about it after I wrote it and I do recall distinctly that I've experienced it whilst awake.

In reply to Timmd:

Agree entirely -

physics has to have the answer, together with some biology, which of course is a branch of physics!


i don't think this is special by the way - I've always suspected it might be common to everyone but that some of us just have more "vacancy" for stuff to bubble up.

In reply to Tom Last:

I think those 'liminal' experiences are quite common. They come more easily in dim light and quiet. Having suffered many bouts of mania in my life I can vouch for them turning up unwanted in broad, noisy daylight too. Fairly sure most hallucinations are an intrusion of dream states into consciousness... easily done if you've not slept for a week. But, heck, I'm no expert.

In reply to David Alcock:

Maybe there is a universal autopilot. Some zen texts have a bit to say about this.Zen also states that words can be a very poor substitute for a more powerful reality.As words can be used for dicing logic,they can lead us into convoluted either/or conundrums.

In reply to wercat:
Have you ever thought about going into a casino if you can sometimes call dice results?

I'd be very tempted

In reply to paul mitchell:


I guess that comes down to life being full of shades of grey, and not either/or situations as much as we can think it is.

In reply to Timmd:
Until the kite incident I'd never found this phenomenon useful - it doesn't appear to be connected with conscious wishes generally and any pause for "thought" ruins the effect. When I was a member of a London based climbing club we used to have sweepstakes on time of minibus arrival in N Wales. When I just came out with a guess based on no thought on a couple of occasions I was within a minute or two of the right time, allowing for watch variations etc. Any subsequent "computed" revisions during the journey, even if paid for with a new stake, fell far wide of the original unthought guess.

Same with the poker dice, it's easy to shout out at random several times but after that you start thinking about what to say and it fails.

A couple of times random wanderings in the hills have brought useful results: One completely random set of choices made up as I went along, starting from home, took me near the corridoor route to Scafell Pike in mist. At the last minute I went off the past just because it seemed like a good idea and I came across 2 friends from London in the middle of a hillside far from any path to anywhere - they were trying to find out where they were!

Another time when living in Applecross I desperately needed an NPN medium power silicon transistor to repair someone's TV. I gave up worrying about where I'd get one and took the collie out for a random walk over the Clachan hill out for hours. Took a random course descending again far from any path on very steep rough ground only to be presented with the remains of a weather balloon including the transmitter board containing exactly the part required to fix the TV! Fixed it on getting home!

In reply to wercat:

That's really interesting.

You might be interested in the book called Strange Encounters by David Beaty, it covers all kinds of things, but it has instances of what can happen to you in it, it's about aircraft and flying and related peculiar events.

In reply to wercat:


I once read some famous American academic saying what a stroke of fate it was that he met his wife - there was a string of random exceptions to his daily work-routine, culminating in an unplanned game of golf, where upon further exceptions let to his meeting and eventually marrying his wife. He thought that this was absolutely amazing, almost as if he thought some god or kind fairy had intended this to happen and had deliberately engineered these chance events in order to bring it all off.

However, if you think about it, everyone's life is a mixture of the routine and the unexpected. At some stage along our journey through that mixed bag of the ordinary daily events and slightly one-off ones, all sorts of other random things are going to happen, and some of them are going to have repercussions or be coincidences that look like they have some kind of magical significance. After the event, if the repercussions of one of those random things are discovered to have been quite major, it's easy to look back and construct some kind of pattern to give some kind of often totally spurious meaning to what occurred. But then, if no pattern at all can be detected, humans are quite capable of reading something extraordinary into that too, as this guy did!

You end up going over events, looking for evidence to support whatever hypothesis you are trying to prove. But if some entirely opposite thing had happened, you would probably be able, with hindsight, to find 'evidence' to support a completely opposite hypotheses to fit those facts too. In fact substantial research has been done which demonstrates that often, this is exactly how humans behave!

I think that if you applied some rigorous research methods to some of the things that you are talking about, you might find that rather than supporting the conclusions you may have reached, it might just provide some interesting examples of what is sometimes called 'confirmation bias':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

In reply to Andy Morley:


youtube.com/watch?v=FHcuGsTbd-Y&

In reply to Pesda potato:
From WH Murray's autobiography: under heavy shell fire in North Africa he was about to jump into a newly made she'll crater ( received wisdom for improving chance of survival, as next shell not expected to be on identical trajectory) when a voice in his head said NO! So he rolled the other way then watched as another shell landed smack in the crater he'd been about to dive into. WH always thought he had a guardian angel after that....

In reply to Pesda potato:

Well we are definitely off topic, but its interesting never the less.
The shell story is interesting but does remind me - history is written by the victors / survivors

In reply to Pesda potato:


Good point, which also applies to evolution and natural selection. If the voice had said 'yes, go jump in the crater' he wouldn't be here to tell the tale.

In reply to Pesda potato and others:

I don´t think the thread has gone that far off topic. What unites several of the anecdotes is that we are not fully and at all levels synchronously aware of what our brain does. Sensory input, cognitive processing activity, and many other processes compete for processing power, and some things are delayed before they are let through to a higher (i.e., conscious level), or even screened out completely. Screening out stuff keeps us sane, but delays can confuse our perception of the temporal order of events.

A simple experimental demonstration of the competition phenomenon is that many people will fail noticing something obvious in their field of view if they are told to focus on a different, sufficiently complex task. The classic experiment is to have two teams of players passing balls. The experimental subjects are told they will be asked how many passes one of the teams completed. Instead, they are asked whether they saw something unusual. In some setups, as many as half of the observers will have missed a gorilla walking across the playing field, even if it stops and waves at the camera. This never happens with experimental subjects just casually watching the scene.

As for the temporal order, I was just recently sitting on the lawn in front of my institute talking to a colleague, when some thought of a four leafed clover leaf popped into my head. When I stopped the disucssion and looked, one was right in my field of view. Clearly, my eyes had seen this clover leaf, my visual system had processed it, my memory identified it as something notable, but had failed to get through. When I searched and found the clover leaf, this certainly was for the second time.

Similar phenomena probably account for most of the anecdotes in this thread, e.g. the kite or cinema seat situation.

Importantly, competition and temporal delays also apply to internal processes of our brains. Abstract thoughts are processed in terms of language, therefore will use the processing system of your brain´s speech centres. The conscious layers of your brain need not be involved. If and when the underlying thought process is sufficiently formed and deemed worthy of attention, or the filtering is relaxed by the higher layers in hierarchy because some other processes drop out, you may become conscious of such lower level processes. Depending on which part of the brain gets access first this may use channels that are otherwise used to give you feedback on your own speech, which you will e.g. also use without actually speaking (or hearing!) when you subvocalize and silently read a text out to yourself, creating the impression of hearing your own thoughts.

In reality, though, it is our reptilian overlords sending thought waves to your brain that sometimes accidentally get deflected to your ears.

CB

In reply to Pesda potato:

If you are interested in looking at this from the Buddhist perspective, then what hears your thoughts is not 'you' but consciousness itself.
There is no 'you', just awareness of thoughts that 'you' think 'you' are thinking but are actually just arising with no one actually thinking them.
This puts things into a rather different perspective i find.

In reply to Kimono:

A wrong perspective, maybe?

With my troll hat off again, how would such a pure consciousness be implemented, except as a set of dynamically evolving neuronal network states?

Does it therefore make any sense at all to differentiate between a consciousness and the brain in which it arises?

As a corollary, what about AI? Could an external "pure" consciousness also be able to pop up in a computer (probably not, IMO), or could it arise from the intrinsic complexity of a self referencing network (presumably, as this is what a brain represents, but probably not realistically implementable with today´s technology).


CB

In reply to cb294:

consciousness has nothing to do with the brain.

In reply to cb294:

As others have mentioned, consciousness if the filtered version of reality we get, so yes it is important to differentiate it from the brain / processing system by which it arose. An interesting example would be an octopus whereby some of its limbs can act independently of its main 'brain'.
The Buddhist view to which I sometimes ascribe would be similar and the way I view it is the great consciousness of everything is passed through the fabric of reality / matter which acts a bit like a colander and gives smaller divisions of the bulk. Now if each of these smaller divisions consider themselves conscious and observe other consciousnesses around them then they would perhaps mistakenly consider themselves an individual consciousness.

That to me is a more global potential view of consciousness, but it still doesnt answer my own query of which part of ourselves is able to hear / process our thoughts, is it a particular part of the brain, or is it an elusive subject that psychologists, psychiatrists, spiritualists etc try and define?

In reply to Kimono:

How do you arrive at this assertion? All evidence shows that this is exactly where consciousness arises.

Lines of evidence include evolutionary biology (consciousness is gradual!), but especially medicine followed later by experimental neurobiology.

Take away or transiently inactivate regions of the brain, and you can switch consciousness on and off at will. You can even break this down further, and leave the regions as such running but screw up the electrical activity of neurons or their communication, with the same result. As an aside, in mice you can even implant faked or edited memories, uncouple memories of events from associated emotions such as fear

This means that consciousness is either generated there, or is at these sites transferred from some mystical, external source onto the body. Personally I choose the more parsimonious explanation, especially as there are as yet no hints it may be wrong. The same cannot be said about dualism, regardless of the particular flavour under discussion.

Just to pick up on the thought experiment above: Do you believe that a sufficiently complex computer could in principle achieve consciousness (even if may not now or indeed ever be able to build such a machine)?

CB

In reply to Pesda potato:

Awareness of external reality does not constitute consciousness (e.g. you do not lose consciousness under sensory deprivation). Rather, the defining feature is self awareness of the system that does the processing.

That certain activities that can be centrally controlled (i.e. by the brain) are sometimes delegated to peripheral control is not uncommon. No need to invoke the Kraken, you can see this easily in humans, e.g. in the context of sexual arousal.

As to which part of your brain voices your thoughts, that is not elusive at all but amenable to experimental testing: Any perception of hearing something will involve processing by your auditory cortex, if what you hear makes semantic sense, decoding will have involved your language centres.

This has e.g. been demonstrated by fMRI on religious volunteers of different faiths during deep prayer or meditation. As predicted, volunteers of religions where prayer is considered a two way process (e.g. for Christian nuns in one study) showed activation of hearing, language decoding, and speech generating centres during silent prayer.

CB

In reply to cb294:

I agree and hadnt considered it that way before, consciousness is a self awareness, but how long can that last without external input? can it exist without memory?
Prayer / meditation aims to loose consciousness by shutting out any sensory input and internal thought thereby accessing the subconscious.
I think its different to be deprived of sensory input and wilfully ignoring your senses. Even in a state of sensory deprivation you are still aware of posture, gravity, temperature etc. I think if we were able to conduct experiments in total sensory deprivation that would be quite different.
I'm now trying to ponder whether there are different states of un-consciousness or is it an on/off situation?

In reply to Pesda potato:

As to your first point, I agree, but the fMRI still shows where in your brain the perception/illusion of speech is generated.
Hearing your own thoughts or hearing god just share the mechanism for passing subconscious processes to your consciousness mind. Put another way, our conscious mind classifies as input from hearing everything which comes via that pathway, regardless of true source. Similarly, if you get punched in the head in the dark, your conscious mind will "see" the stars even if you photoreceptors didn´t generate the signal. Along these lines, phenomena such as blindsight can teach us a lot about the processing of visual information.

As for your second point, consciousness is definitely gradual (think coma patients or anaesthesia),

CB

In reply to Pesda potato:

As a social species, the parts of our brains that monitor the actions, behaviour and likely motivations and intentions of other individual members of our species are highly developed. This is well-researched and understood and is the same in a good many other species, mammals in particular but also in some bird species. In the big picture, we are just another member of our tribe, but evolution/ natural selection gives us a special reason for paying attention to what we ourselves are up to. It seems likely to me that either we use the same neural mechanism to monitor ourselves that we use to monitor others, or that the part of the brain that monitors ourselves may have evolved out of the wider cognitive function of monitoring other individuals. I'm just speculating here as to what came where from an evolutionary perspective - I would have thought that there would be research into this area too, but there is definitely research into the behavioural aspects of self-awareness - try googling 'introspection', 'self awareness', 'mirror test' and 'red spot technique' and you'll find all sorts of accounts of the different reactions of human infants and chimpanzees when they see their reflections in mirrors.

In reply to Kimono:

How do drugs work then? What about strokes that take out part of the brain and change people's thoughts and feelings (resulting in different behaviour)? What about vision and hearing - is sensory perception separate to consciousness? Is that done by the brain?

I just don't think a sensible argument can be made that consciousness is anything other than a result of the neurons firing in the brain. That doesn't reduce it down to anything simple, it's still deeply mysterious: *how* does the neural firing generate consciousness? But "nothing to do with the brain" is completely at odds with facts we know about the world - unless of course you go all the way down the philosophical blind alley of solipsism that says that there are no facts, there is no reality, only one's own consciousness. No thanks!

In reply to Andy Morley:


It's a fascinating question. But I'm not sure this approach gets to the nub of it, which I think is the evolution of qualia and mental states (if you consider them to be different). The kind of monitoring systems you refer to, directed at others or the self, could be done without consciousness. My view is that consciousness is a neat evolutionary solution, like eyes or wings. It's the only way of making an organism social; it's some kind of process separate to computation that is much more efficient at certain things such as vision, decision-making in a complex environment, and generating social behaviour.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I think that as well as social interaction, and possibly of prior importance, rational thought processes (and the nuts and bolts of creative thought, as opposed to inspiration and intuition) would be impossible without consciousness.

In reply to Pesda potato:


Definitely not one part of the brain 'listening' to another. The firing of neurons in a certain pattern (involving circuits responsible for auditory perception) generates the conscious experience of thinking. Another pattern of neural firing generates the experience of feeling joy, or jealousy, or disgust. The question is part of the broader mystery: what are mental states?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


They certainly would. I guess it depends if you take the 'hardcore evolutionist' stance or whether you think that consciousness, rational thought and creativity are associated with some kind of higher purpose...

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Qualia and consciousness have, to me, are theories looking for some facts to support them. What are the actual phenomona involved? How would you define 'consciousness'? The only evidence that I'm aware of is of the kind of monitoring systems that you seem to dismiss - it's as if 'consciousness', the way you seem to use it and in which others seem to use it to is akin to a religious concept like 'soul' - to me such things are a hangover from a past religious view of the world that is trying to find a place for itself in the more modern lay perspective that we generally apply to such things.

In reply to Andy Morley:

I just can't understand how this view - Dennett's "consciousness ignored" - has gathered so much ground. While someone else's consciousness is objectively inaccessible, your own is pretty in-your-face and undeniable. The idea that such a thing doesn't really exist, doesn't require an explanation, isn't part of reality is to say that you can't tell the difference between when you're asleep (dreamless) and when you wake up. Are you sure you want to hold that position?

Edit: to address your questions directly: consciousness is what you have when you're awake and what you lose under anaesthesia (or in dreamless sleep). You're right to say that there is no objective *proof* that this exists (we could all be zombies) - but there is stacks of evidence. I know I'm conscious (and you can't tell me otherwise!), and everyone else behaves exactly *as if* they're conscious. So the evidence is everywhere!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

>>> I think that as well as social interaction, and possibly of prior importance, rational thought processes (and the nuts and bolts of creative thought, as opposed to inspiration and intuition) would be impossible without consciousness.


What on earth had my point got to do with 'a higher purpose'? It was mostly an empirical observation: for what evidence have we at all that the brain does any kind of (rigorous .. by definition) rational thought while we are asleep .. for example.

I would love to be able to prove it at a logical level too, rather in the manner of Wittgenstein, but that would be a more ambitious task.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Totally agreed with you on Dennett's fallacious thinking, though.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:



Nothing, clearly, from that response! I guess I don't see rational thought as particularly useful from an evolutionary point of view, certainly not until long after consciousness had evolved to help with selecting mates and maybe collaborating in gathering food or whatever basic stuff it evolved for.


Yes, I see. I just consider rational thought and creativity to be the "peacock's tail" side of the human brain, rather than something the brain has evolved to do.

In reply to Pesda potato:

Question to the teacher at a BSL class: "If deaf people have no words in their heads, how do they think?"

Brilliant question in a way but less brilliant perhaps when you consider how trapped the questioner is their world of spoken language.

As an engineer (born as much as educated), I have come to accept that much of what I think occurs in pictures or amorphous concepts and must be translated into language. I cannot tell you what I am thinking but only a description of it if such a description is available within my vocabulary.

In reply to Pesda potato:

The brain bank has some interesting articles on this subject. Here one on consciousness.

http://thebrainbank.scienceblog.com/2013/03/04/what-is-consciousness-a-scie...

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I'm a great fan of Occam's Razor - none of the facts or evidence relating to thinking, perception, memory, theory of mind and self-monitoring require concepts like 'consciousness' or 'zombies' to explain them, except in a very simplistic form similar to being 'awake' as opposed to sleeping. There are various cognitive functions associated with the cerebral cortex and other areas of the brain that are active when the individual is active but which shut down when they are asleep. That use of the word 'conscious' is simple enough.

There is evidence that there are a lot of people around who want to believe in a concept called 'consciousness', which they then challenge the rest of us to prove or disprove. In this, it's a bit like the concept of God. You can choose to believe in it if you will, but you don't need 'consciousness' in any other sense, apart from being awake and monitoring the incoming flow of perception and acting on it in some circumstances, to explain any of the phenomena to which the term 'consciousness' is usually applied.

In reply to Andy Morley:

You're using the word 'awake' in place of my word 'conscious'.

If you agree that the way these monitoring systems work is through sensations like the pain of toothache, the sight and sound of the traffic on the main road we want to cross, the emotions of fear and lust - and that these are present only in the 'awake' states of mind - then you agree that qualia exist.

I'm not using 'consciousness' in any quasi-religious sense: it's a phenomenon accessed only subjectively, and produced by certain types of brain activity (but not others).

In reply to Pesda potato:

I'd also take a look at the papers on open mind

http://open-mind.net/papers/why-and-how-does-consciousness-seem-the-way-it-...

In reply to Jon Stewart:



I think that's a very bold (and unfounded) assumption. The oddity is that no one can explain quite what our almost ridiculously advanced intelligence and consciousness is 'for' in evolutionary terms. It seems to be a quantum leap forward than anything that is remotely 'necessary'.

Supper calls.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


If so, then my usage applies to other species too. Being awake usually means that the cognitive functions that monitor perceptions are able to respond to stimuli in a way that is adaptive and normally alert to threats, 'normally' meaning more or less similar to how other individuals of the same species might react. In sleeping, those cognitive functions are compromised or inactive to an extent, so that the individual is more vulnerable to danger, especially predation, because their ability to react to threats is compromised. Since this is a clear cost to the individual, it seems likely that there is some compensatory adaptive benefits to sleeping, for which physical and/or mental recuperation is the usual proposed explanation. But since 'awake' is the most clearly adaptive state, really it is sleep that is harder to explain than waking. With waking, our responses to stimuli all fit in to well-established patterns such as avoiding danger, seeking food, mating, attending to bodily functions etc, and also, the modelling and monitoring this whole process in the more intelligent species, ourselves in particular. But there's nothing particularly surprising about that.

Out of interest, how would you define a 'zombie'..?

In reply to Andy Morley:


Of course. I don't reckon an ant has an awful lot of consciousness, but a monkey has getting on for our level.


What's surprising is that there is a subjective distinction as profound as the existence or non-existence of the world between being awake and being asleep!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

In reply to Jon Stewart:

I've read much of the literature on consciousness, including Wikipedia. I was asking how YOU would define a zombie.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


In terms of senses and feelings, yes, but in terms of rational thought, absolutely not.


I don't believe it's a subjective distinction, although it's subjectively experienced. Consciousness exists in animals (to different degrees of sophistication) as an objective fact. It's not really a question of being surprising - almost everything in nature, from the big bang, to planet earth, to the existence of the Matterhorn or Ludwig van Beethoven or Albert Einstein is 'surprising' - but it is a HUGE riddle. Just how it works, or just what it 'is'. No one knows, however much we look at the firing of neurons.

In reply to Andy Morley:


Just as a (human) being which behaves precisely like a normal, conscious human being, but which has no internal experience. You could have monkey zombies too of course.

I don't believe that a "neurological zombie" is possible - that's too much dualism for me. If a bunch of neurons are wired up like mine, and housed in their usual biological environment, then they will generate a conscious experience just like mine. Indeed the way in which they are wired up is exactly what makes me me ( http://connectomethebook.com/ ). The interesting question is *how* does a bunch of neurons firing bring into existence that conscious world? Ignoring or attempting to belittle the conscious experience to being identical to computation strikes me as completely perverse when you wake up every day and the entire world starts existing again, and then you go to bed and it stops existing (or a different world, dreaming, takes its place).

In this short talk, John Searle (unlike many others in the field) doesn't say anything that departs from what I consider to be complete common sense:

youtube.com/watch?v=j_OPQgPIdKg&

In reply to Jon Stewart:


So can we be quite clear - this is something that's purely a philosophical concept, not an actual condition that affects real live human beings. Or is there an evidence base for the existence of actual, real zombies?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Yes I agree, but I think that rational thought is a small, fancy part of consciousness. The raw experience of being awake/aware/sentient at all the really fundamental, interesting bit for me.


Yes, I agree that the distinction is both subjective and objective: an unconscious brain is doing different things to a conscious brain. But the subjective angle - the entire existence of the world - is the more striking!


We don't know at the moment, but that doesn't mean we can't know. We didn't know what made water wet until we found out about the structure of matter. No reason we can't work out what makes brains conscious by understanding the physical processes involved.

In reply to Andy Morley:
I take your point about people seeing patterns and becoming involved in some kind of mysticism. It would be very easy if I were prone to that to see my meeting my own wife as "fated" as when I tell people about the sequence of events that led to us meeting they always say that. I simply think that it was extroardinary good luck, but that equally well I might not have been so lucky or might have been equally lucky to meet some other person. I'm not asserting mysticism but the phenomena I've experienced make me think that science will eventually find more going on than the common sense or our current level of understanding. For goodness sake, some are advocating more extra dimensions than we currently perceive in total so my mind is open.

I'm also fully aware that people see premonition when they fail to take into account alternative explanations for their prescience or other inexplicable knowledge. To you and cb294 I'd have to ask where the information in the case of the kite piece (about 4mm dia black plastic twig about 20cm long) came from as the place I went STRAIGHT to after my ridiculous idea to give up logical search was far out of sight of where the family had been AND were looking for the bit when I returned after being several miles away. This place was out of sight from the road as well. Perhaps if I'd been hang gliding I could accept but the only explanantion that fits is that by incredible coincidence my voice told me, in a state where logic had failed, to walk in a stupid direction for 2 or 3 hundred metres go over a rise to a place I'd never been to before and then turn right to take 2 or three steps and find this tiny piece glistening in the heather. If so it is at least a surprising coincidence.

The event of meeting a future wife does not compare in any way to getting up out of bed wanting to walk in the hills but not knowing where to go and making every decision on the toss of a mental coin from Eamont Bridge onwards through to taking the A66 East instead of the Ullswater road, Keswick not St Johns in the Vale, Borrowdale, Seathwaite, Sty Head, Corridor route all agonised over through indecision and then bizarrely choosing walking off the path in thick mist "to see what was up there" in an instant whimwell before reaching Scafell Pike and suddenly coming directly to friends who were lost? One is seeing some significance in historey, the other going somewhere uncharted and unpathed randomly and inexplicably at just the moment when friends from London I hadn't heard from for months were to be there!

I accept your points but in this case I'd need to be shown evidence of the route by which I got the knowledge!

Or how my grandmother knew that someone would visit my aunt on a certain day and come to stay unexpectedly when the death that caused that sudden visit ocurred a couple of days after her prediction and the circumstances were not related to anyone who heard it except the person who was told she'd have someone coming to stay quite suddenly.


By the way,

fascinating discussion about consciousness being on or off, but is that really a binary situation. People asleep react to stimuli - I've seen our kids while asleep open their eyes to see who came into the room, still snoring and smile the eyes instantly closing again. I rather think that my ability to wake at a given required time might be because my sleeping self is opening its eyes and occasionally polling the alarm clock, giving the impression that I coincidentally wake up at exactly the time needed.

In reply to Andy Morley:

Yes. I think we can be pretty sure that when someone behaves as though they are conscious, then they are. I guess the nearest thing you get to zombies is people who have no recollection of things they did in their sleep...but I would conjecture that they were conscious (dreaming) when they did whatever it was they strenuously deny all knowledge of. The idea of there being evidence for zombies is contradictory: with a zombie, you could never tell whether or not they were conscious.


I hope not...although perhaps Daniel Dennett and people who agree with him *are* that evidence?

In reply to Jon Stewart:


This is very strange to me. Surely rational thought is one of the most extraordinary things in the whole living world, and belongs, so far, to only one species. It is just so hugely different. Summed up so beautifully by Niels Bohr's famous comment: 'A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.' Just!


Agreed completely. I don't believe for a moment that it will be forever beyond the reach of science, because science has answered so many baffling riddles in just three and a half centuries. The problem of qualia is going to be a difficult one though.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


) Can't resist re-quoting the now-famous scathing comment of one of his peers. 'The only thing philosophical about Dan is his beard.'

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

A good one from UKC was about Coel Hellier (arguing for consciousness as computation) failing the Turing test...

In reply to Jon Stewart:


So these are mythical beings invented by philosophers for purposes associated with their own, perhaps slightly convoluted, thought processes. Really, that's not a lot different from demons, invented by theologians for purposes associated with their own, perhaps slightly convoluted, religious doctrines.

You can take a leap of faith and believe in gods and demons if you so choose. You can make a similar leap of faith and believe in zombies. But zombies are not evidence for anything other than the human capacity to dream up imaginary beings. So maybe 'consciousness' is similarly the philosophical equivalent of religious notions of 'the soul'..?

In reply to Andy Morley:



Better to forget the religious notions and go right back to what Aristotle called the 'psyche' (which was early on translated as 'the soul', and was then appropriated by religion) ... which was very much what we now call consciousness, or much more loosely 'life'. The Latin translation of his book has always been 'De Anima', and it remains quite astonishingly modern and brilliant, and difficult. About every two years I go back and read it again in total astonishment.

In reply to Andy Morley:

Very different: philosophers dreamt up zombies as a thought experiment, to construct an entirely theoretical argument. No one is meant to believe they exist. Demons on the other hand were supposed to exist - they were invented to explain real phenomena and for people to respond to in their behaviour. Completely different categories of non-existent entity!


No one believes in them.


Indeed, but the idea of a zombie clarifies (a bit) the different positions of dualism and physicalism.


No it isn't. It's the huge, bloody obvious, absurd to deny, difference between being awake and being in dreamless sleep. As Searle says, "it is real and irreducible... It is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis or digestion or mitosis".

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Very happy to see someone standing up for the much-maligned Searle. Certainly one of the most intelligent philosophers I've ever read on the subject. Alongside the rather more wacky Chalmers.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


If it's entirely theoretical, then it's not empirical, so does not sit within the scientific tradition of Western Europe and America. Is that what we're saying?


So applying Occam's Razor, we don't actually need concepts like 'Zombies' to explain the difference between being awake and asleep. All of the observable behaviour associated with those two states (the empirical evidence) can be explained by far more parsimonious theories that those discussed by Dennett, Chalmers, Blackmore et al...

In reply to Jon Stewart:


What a lot of reductionists don't realise (a very basic philosophical blunder) is that by reducing a phenomenon to other terms doesn't explain anything. To describe consciousness in terms of firing neurons is not really any different in a problem-solving way from translating the same problem into Chinese. It then looks very different on paper, but the riddle/problem remains just the same.

In reply to Andy Morley:

You sound a bit over-obsessed with Occam's razor. Don't forget Einstein's equally or more important remark: 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'

In reply to Andy Morley:


It is. Zombies have got bugger all to do with science, it was philosophers who came up with them.


Well that's fine if you don't seek to explain the subjective experience associated with the observable behaviour. By all means, limit yourself to considering only the observable behaviour (it matters not whether the being is a zombie or not in this case), that is very interesting science. But it doesn't do away with the conundrum of how neurons firing bring into existence the internal, conscious world that I inhabit when I'm awake. Your disinterest in that question, or behaviourism's refusal to acknowledge the subjective realm as part of reality, doesn't diminish it one bit!

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I think that from an empirical perspective, the existence of zombies, as a social construct is evidence for something or other to do with the human imagination (not wanting to put the hypothetical cart before the empirical horse). I'd see all this as evidence of a certain puzzlement (for want of a more scientific term) on the part of humans, and some other mammals, when confronted by their own existence. Small children with red spots dabbed on their foreheads show signs of this when sat in front of mirrors. Chimps and dogs in front of mirrors show similar if less sophisticated traits.


I think that the concept of the 'gestalt' is more than adequate as a model for this sort of thing - something about a system being greater than the sum of its parts. Like a car that could be seen as a collection of various oddly shaped bits of metal and plastice, which however when deployed in a certain way can do things that other collections of plastic and metal could not. So there is such a thing as purpose and there is plenty of evidence for that.

In reply to Andy Morley:

There's been quite a long history of poisonous disparagement of any notion of systems. still more of the 'gestallt', for over half a century. That was at least half a century of wasted time in terms of advancement of knowledge. Thank goodness that systems biology is now right back on track again, trying to unravel some of the most interesting aspects of biology.

To almost anyone but a complete idiot, it's quite obvious that nature consists of (er, natural) systems, such that it is a hierarchy of systems within systems. In biology this is particularly striking, where any organism will be found to be made up of multiple systems, all interlocking and interrelated, all the way down to the cell, when it almost seems to become more complicated again, with another whole hierarchy of systems within systems.

For some reason, that's completely lost on me, there's a kind of reductionist scientist (surely a dying breed now) to whom the notion of natural systems is repugnant. I think in most cases that says more about their own (unscientific/'religious') hangups than the subject they purport to be studying.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


It's those zombies again, they get everywhere! My wife's turned into one this morning and I'm desperately trying to get her through the shower and off to the Peak before she bites someone. Things will seem better for me once I've got to Leek and had my first oatcake. I'll try to send you a virtual one as a kind of thought experiment - it might soak up some of the poison

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

PS, sorry for the rush but I want to get there and nick some guy's cam before some other ****er does (though it's probably gone already). And I have a brand shiny new Ocun harness to try out
"I'm conscious of time" as they say. Laters!

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Yes, I would have thought that was obvious.


Really? If you say so! However, what I do not understand is why anyone would consider a "systems" view and a reductionist view incompatible. At least in principle the systems should be reducible to massively complex interactions between fundamental particles (even if it might not be useful, practical or, at least for the time being, possible to study them at this level).

In reply to Robert Durran:

Well, there it was a persistent theme about 20 to 10 years ago. I couldn't understand what their problem with it was either, except a doctrinaire rejection of anything that smacked of 'order' in the universe, because they wrongly believed that that implied 'purpose' or even 'design'. Even self-organisation was regarded by some as suspect.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Probably the same people who objected to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs because it was hierarchical.