The Alice Illusion

[charlou]

But with that, I've chased the tangent bus.

*ahem*

[apophenia]

...Sartre also observes that consciousness, in addition to being intentional, that consciousness is consciousness of some thing, consciousness is also being conscious of being conscious; we are (normally) conscious of the fact that we are conscious.
That disappears in the experience of "running for the bus".

hmmm ... normally conscious of our consciousness ... I don't know that we are ... ? and this is nothing to do with whether we think we should be. Mundane, habitual actions would belie that notion, for a start ... Or exercising the mind outside itself in any activity, such as reading, listening to music, or sport, for example, where the focus is externalised rather than on self.

I would agree in principle. John Searle maintains that consciousness is a matter of degrees, from unconscious to fully aware.

But then I personally think Searle is a big bag of *CENSORED* mostly water.

But let me suggest a demonstration. Think back to something you did a few days ago -- say reading the forums, or a book, or watching a TV show or a movie. Were you conscious at the time? If you weren't conscious of being conscious, how did that datum end up in memory? Are you mistaken? Were you not conscious at the time and your internal editor added the 'idea' that you were conscious to the memory, cause it would be silly otherwise? How much of your life did you live, unconsciously, and simply misremember it?

ETA: This becomes all the more telling when we compare such times to times when we feel we aren't fully conscious. Take automatic driving for example, where we drive from A to B, all the while not being fully aware of our driving and our decisions -- usually ending up at Aunt Martha's when our original plan was to meet Auntie at a boutique near her home. Whoops! And what about sleep -- why do we believe we aren't conscious when we sleep? I'm sure there's more there, but the absence of being conscious of being conscious is surely part of it. Why do we distinguish dreams from reality, unless there is something about dream consciousness which signals the difference? (Obligatory Taoist shout out -- Chuang Tse is the originator of the question as to whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who is dreaming he is a man.)

[Xamonas Chegwé]

How much of your life did you live, unconsciously, and simply misremember it?

Does dunk count as conscious? If not, probably most of it!

[mistermack]

This alice illusion is interesting, but its not exactly new.
It's a well known fact that a wank with the left hand is more fun than the right, cos it feels like someone else's hand.

I think that the future for this technology is mainly in the sex industry.
If you can convince someone that they can feel what's happening in porn, the sky's the limit. Or that they have enormous body parts. Not that I know anything about that sort of thing.
.

[charlou]

...Sartre also observes that consciousness, in addition to being intentional, that consciousness is consciousness of some thing, consciousness is also being conscious of being conscious; we are (normally) conscious of the fact that we are conscious.
That disappears in the experience of "running for the bus".

hmmm ... normally conscious of our consciousness ... I don't know that we are ... ? and this is nothing to do with whether we think we should be. Mundane, habitual actions would belie that notion, for a start ... Or exercising the mind outside itself in any activity, such as reading, listening to music, or sport, for example, where the focus is externalised rather than on self.

I would agree in principle. John Searle maintains that consciousness is a matter of degrees, from unconscious to fully aware.

But then I personally think Searle is a big bag of *CENSORED* mostly water.

But let me suggest a demonstration. Think back to something you did a few days ago -- say reading the forums, or a book, or watching a TV show or a movie. Were you conscious at the time? If you weren't conscious of being conscious, how did that datum end up in memory? Are you mistaken? Were you not conscious at the time and your internal editor added the 'idea' that you were conscious to the memory, cause it would be silly otherwise? How much of your life did you live, unconsciously, and simply misremember it?

ETA: This becomes all the more telling when we compare such times to times when we feel we aren't fully conscious. Take automatic driving for example, where we drive from A to B, all the while not being fully aware of our driving and our decisions -- usually ending up at Aunt Martha's when our original plan was to meet Auntie at a boutique near her home. Whoops! And what about sleep -- why do we believe we aren't conscious when we sleep? I'm sure there's more there, but the absence of being conscious of being conscious is surely part of it. Why do we distinguish dreams from reality, unless there is something about dream consciousness which signals the difference? (Obligatory Taoist shout out -- Chuang Tse is the originator of the question as to whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who is dreaming he is a man.)

Ahhh ... see, here you're using 'conscious of consciousness' and being 'conscious' interchangably ... conflating the two. Let's separate them by the use of 'self-conscious' and the more general 'conscious' to denote the distinct states.

The driving example must be a popular one .. I was going to use it in my previous post.

I don't think we're self-conscious when performing actions that require focus on external data ... our brains are processing external input and we make decisions based on that. We're conscious, but we're not usually self-conscious in our actions ... we don't drive from A to B, self-consciously thinking "I'm starting the car now, I'm putting it in gear now, I'm checking the mirrors now ...etc "

It's interesting to note also, the more practiced we become in a task, the more established the neurological pathways become, the less we need to focus on it, yet the better we generally become at performing it.


An aside ... I recall a few moments during my teens where I've felt very self-conscious and become awkward as a result ... along the lines of feeling that I'm being watched and becoming hyper-aware of my movements, and trying to move 'normally' and as a result moving abnormally, ironically like a jerky puppet. It's a somewhat uncomfortable and embarrassing state to be in, and I can imagine living with that as an ongoing condition must be difficult.

[FBM]

John Searle maintains that consciousness is a matter of degrees, from unconscious to fully aware.

This sounds pretty much like my experience. Unconsciousness (or lower degrees of consciousness) comes pretty easy; most of us, as Athur Koestler observed, sleepwalk through most of our lives, only 'surfacing' from time to time to take care of irregular phenomena that our auto-pilots can't deal with. It makes sense in terms of energy economy that the brain would have evolved like that. Why keep the system running full speed for mundane tasks that require only a fraction of the energy? Speaking for myself, approaching the other end of the spectrum takes some form of meditation, sitting, focused walking or Tai Chi, etc.

[apophenia]

Ahhh ... see, here you're using 'conscious of consciousness' and being 'conscious' interchangably ... conflating the two. Let's separate them by the use of 'self-conscious' and the more general 'conscious' to denote the distinct states.

Yes, I conflated the two, somewhat intentionally, as it clarified the example without having to bog down in a lot of phenomenological talk that adds nothing to the examples. I maintain that the conflation, while real, is not viciously so -- it doesn't affect the relevance and validity of the examples.

You neatly side-stepped the main example, of what it is you are remembering when you remember a time when you were engaged in something. Is your conclusion that you were conscious at the time "reasoned backward", ergo, I had an experience, therefore I had to be conscious, or was an awareness of being conscious just an embedded fact of the experience you remember. Nor did you address why we don't think of ourselves as having unconscious experience when asleep and not dreaming. Actually that's a more complex question than it first appears, as most people are schooled in the belief that we dream during REM sleep, and only "remember" the dream consciously if we are awakened during this time. The actual science shows that we have certain kinds of dream activity coincident with REM sleep, and another type of dream state during periods that lie outside of REM sleep. One type of dreaming appears geared to doing a certain type of cognitive maintenance (akin to that engaged in by an athlete or pianist when they mentally rehearse their performance), and the other deals with a different type of cognitive procedure (I don't recall the details; IIRC, there's a PBS video on the Secret of Dreams which goes into detail on it). Our brains are obviously doing productive mental work during this time, so why don't we remember it, if, as you appear to be implying that we don't have to be self/conscious of our activity to form memories of it. I'm not trying to be harsh, but I think you attempted to dismiss my examples with the equivalent of hand-waving. Why does the performance of tasks reduce our procedural awareness, yet increase our functional efficiencies? What's the mechanism, and is there really any time outside of things such as "running for the bus" and perhaps being "in the zone" in which we forget that we are aware -- even though I introduced the concept, I have strong doubts as to whether there are any experiences where awareness of being aware totally disappears. You didn't answer the basic question posed: if there are such instances, why aren't there gaps in our memory that are occupied by these times of "total immersion"? Even in the case of automatic driving, we weren't procedurally aware, but we still remember the experience. It isn't that we start driving, then we get immersed in conversation and suddenly, for unexplained reasons the car lurches to a stop, and we have to reason out that, yes, it stopped, BECAUSE our body/subconsciousness finished its task and left us to figure out that we now were where we intended to go. We are aware of having been aware, but not aware of a procedural consciousness that carried out the steps.

I don't think we're self-conscious when performing actions that require focus on external data ... our brains are processing external input and we make decisions based on that. We're conscious, but we're not usually self-conscious in our actions ... we don't drive from A to B, self-consciously thinking "I'm starting the car now, I'm putting it in gear now, I'm checking the mirrors now ...etc "

I'm not sure where you're going with this. If I understand what you mean by "self-conscious" then that is a third phenomenological aspect which may or may not be present in consciously procedural or unconsciously procedural tasks (sub-conscious might be preferable). I am aware of the cloth as it passes under the head of the sewing machine, but kind of lost in thought about something else, say an argument that I regret and can't seem to get out of my mind, and thus I am not really conscious of what I'm doing. That's one level of awareness. Then I realize that my mind has wandered and I've botched a seam, and my mind is brought back to the present. I am aware that I wasn't fully aware for a time. That's a second level of awareness. Having stopped for the moment, in the silence, I feel this strange uneasiness come over me. I turn to notice that a young child is peering through the window watching me. The dreaded "Other's look". I become self-conscious. That's a third level of awareness. Is this congruent with what you picture?

I'm open to expanding the phenomenological landscape in this direction, if this is an adequate understanding of your thinking on this matter. If not, please explain what you mean by self/consciousness, and how it conflicts with the idea that there is a layer in between there which is profitably describable as awareness of being aware.

Now I don't want to pull us in an entirely different direction without settling what is on the table, but I feel it will probably help clarify the discussion to look somewhat further down the road. First, what does it mean to engage in self-reflection? What is being reflected, and from where and to whom? The metaphor, naively understood seems to imply that consciousness can hold itself apart from itself, and one part take on a resemblance toward the other part such that we can cognize about the contents of that reflection (the resemblance which is the mirror of the thing that is the self). Now I don't mean to set a Sisyphean task before you, but your idea of self-consciousness appears to be loosely related to the concept of self-reflection -- a sister cognition, if you will. And I'm curious as to how you make sense of self-reflection, as it would seem whatever mechanism you introduce is likely going to be forced to do double duty. Just wanting to make sure our playbooks are on the same page as we explore your concept of self-consciousness here.

Anyway, moving on.

It's interesting to note also, the more practiced we become in a task, the more established the neurological pathways become, the less we need to focus on it, yet the better we generally become at performing it.

I agree that it is a fascinating phenomena. I disagree with your assessment as to a potential mechanism. I think there must be something more clever afoot here than just pathways getting stronger and more established. There's no obvious reason why increasing the strength of the connective pathways should change the level of awareness involved. This is akin to artificial neural nets, who as a result of training, reduce the "settle time" it takes to reach a stable configuration of edges in the matrix, and reduces the total number of stable edge states the network will reach upon being challenged. The fundamental operation hasn't changed though, the nodes in the net are carrying out the same operations, only the mathematical relationship between the nodes has changed. There has been a change in behavior, but not one rooted in a qualitative change in behavior. So why do neural nets in our brain undergo qualitative changes and artificial neural networks do not. Do we even know what the basis of that qualitative change is?

There's an even more telling problem however, and that is the behavior of the brain to learning under stress. If someone points a gun at your head, you wouldn't believe the clarity of your memories of the event. In particular, fear causes very rapid learning, and the lessons learned are hard to unlearn.

When I was younger, one of my sisters had a large Afghan Hound. It had some sort of problem that it began to have episodes where it would react violently and viciously with no provocation. I didn't know this, and one afternoon I was taking him for a walk, when he slipped off his lead. I reached for his collar to control him and hook the lead back up, and he turned on me. He pursued me, biting at me and attempting to overcome me all the way back to my house, where I was able to slip inside the door without him following me. Up until that point, I hadn't the slightest bit of fear of large dogs, in spite of having been bit in the face by a large German shepherd much earlier (I was only 7 or 8 at the time). However, ever since that day I have been completely unable to become at ease around large dogs. Something inside me is still terrified and fearful. It didn't take practice or "the establishment of pathways" to learn that lesson. I learned it damned good and damned quick. Now I'm probably cheating here, as I know you simply were trying to point out an interesting phenomena, and I appreciate that, but in attempting to ascribe mechanism, there ye be dragons, and we should tread lightly.

An aside ... I recall a few moments during my teens where I've felt very self-conscious and become awkward as a result ... along the lines of feeling that I'm being watched and becoming hyper-aware of my movements, and trying to move 'normally' and as a result moving abnormally, ironically like a jerky puppet. It's a somewhat uncomfortable and embarrassing state to be in, and I can imagine living with that as an ongoing condition must be difficult.

I must confess to not being able to locate a similar memory in me. Likely due to genetic factors, all the kids in my family (with the possible exception of an older brother who I didn't really grow up with), all of us were athletically gifted. I was also pretty arrogant as a kid too, so perhaps my denial at the time prevented me from acknowledging any awkwardness. For some odd reason, I can kind of relate, but I don't know how -- what am I drawing upon to empathize with your experience, I don't know.

(was pretty arrogant.... at the time..... heh.... Let's not go downn that road, s'il vous plait. )

[charlou]

I was (am) athletic too ... I'm not talking about an everyday awkwardness there, but one arising out of momentary self-consciousness.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I was (am) athletic too ... I'm not talking about an everyday awkwardness there, but one arising out of momentary self-consciousness.

I thought you were talking about early sexual experiences - the "where the fuck do all these elbows and knees belong?" moment!

Or maybe that's me...

[charlou]

I was (am) athletic too ... I'm not talking about an everyday awkwardness there, but one arising out of momentary self-consciousness.

I thought you were talking about early sexual experiences - the "where the fuck do all these elbows and knees belong?" moment!

Or maybe that's me...

Hayeah ... that is more of an everyday kinda occurence

[Atheist-Lite]

America thinks it owns the world. Enough said. Hard lesson in reality shortly.

[hiyymer]

John Searle maintains that consciousness is a matter of degrees, from unconscious to fully aware.

If you take the view as per Hawking/Mlodinow that what is really happening is that our actions are determined by our brain following the known laws of science, and not by some agent operating outside of those laws, and view consciousness as a mechanism of that brain then perhaps the perspective is a little different. The self is created in consciousness by the brain as a protagonist that is the agent of the intentionality of the life mechanism, and not a cause of what is happening. It is a brain-created representation being constantly updated as "what I decided and what I did". It is, in a sense, a window on the real existing cause of what is happening. If the organism is attending to something that involves itself (typically the social), then it creates self awareness but only in the sense of the representation of the self being what it is attending to. The capacity for the extended self awareness of the "biographical self" requires a big brain (as with all of the big brain capacity for the representation of time lines and alternatives), but it is not a different "level" of consciousness. Just a differently evolved mechanism of the life form. Calling it a different "level" only makes sense in the experience of the self being in control, and is not a scientific statement.

[apophenia]

John Searle maintains that consciousness is a matter of degrees, from unconscious to fully aware.

If you take the view as per Hawking/Mlodinow that what is really happening is that our actions are determined by our brain following the known laws of science, and not by some agent operating outside of those laws, and view consciousness as a mechanism of that brain then perhaps the perspective is a little different.

Indubitably. The other physicalists in my philosophy group like to refer to those who think that there is something metaphysically unique about the mind as being people who believe in "special sauce" -- that there's the brain, and then there's something special either attached, or emerging from brain activity. I think the idea is laughable, at least as represented by the lame assertions of Searle. (Though a neurologist at a recent discussion group I attended informed us that some of the neural activity in the brain is carried out via the glial cells; he wasn't more specific, so while I suspect the type of activity is likely analogous to that of processes adjusting the molecular levels like that of sodium and potassium in the brain soup, in truth I don't know. It's never a good idea to bolt the barn door before you've counted all the horses.)

My general view is that the brain is nothing more than a mechanism (at least when I'm not entertaining anti-realism). It is nothing more than a complex set of gears and parts, grinding and gnashing away. As such, consciousness and mind are nothing more than a specific set of gears within this clockwork orange, and that thought and awareness are not different in kind from the circuitry that processes vision or coordinates a muscular response, or even the functioning of simpler parts of "the mind" like the mammalian eye [1]. (You actually make a similar point further down, I just missed it on my first read.) I think you would be surprised, however, to learn how little neural machinery it takes to make something that acts like a mind. But, I don't want my reach to exceed my grasp here, so I'll just suggest that as a possibility, that our lack of understanding of "what" is going on leads us to over-predict the "how" of the what. It's certainly a part of tradition to ascribe miraculous powers to mind, but most of that is based on poetry and metaphysical mind floss. When we get down to what the brain is actually accomplishing for an animal, the needed functions become much simpler. (I had a recent exchange wherein I debated whether natural languages were "expressive" or not, and my point was that a lot of what we ascribe as "the power of language" is largely a result of its systematic vagueness and ambiguity [a vein the post-modernists mined at length], and that determining language's meanings is reminiscent of the metaphor of trying to nail jello to a wall; language works as much as a consequence of what it doesn't say or do, as much as what it does. If mind mirrors the slippery properties of language, it's entirely possible that the power of mind rests on the simple ability of vagueness and ambiguity to stretch and conform to a functional landscape, without any comprehensive and discrete description of that landscape.)

The self is created in consciousness by the brain as a protagonist that is the agent of the intentionality of the life mechanism, and not a cause of what is happening. It is a brain-created representation being constantly updated as "what I decided and what I did". It is, in a sense, a window on the real existing cause of what is happening. If the organism is attending to something that involves itself (typically the social), then it creates self awareness but only in the sense of the representation of the self being what it is attending to. The capacity for the extended self awareness of the "biographical self" requires a big brain (as with all of the big brain capacity for the representation of time lines and alternatives), but it is not a different "level" of consciousness. Just a differently evolved mechanism of the life form. Calling it a different "level" only makes sense in the experience of the self being in control, and is not a scientific statement.

A fellow philosopher used to chide our group that the idea that such things as understanding and awareness may exist, but that what he disagreed with was the interpretation of what they were --that he felt the models that were being proposed were bad. And while I'm still not sure of his entire point, I think he was drawing attention to a very real problem wherein, being interested in how the mind works, we are immediately drawn to spinning elaborate metaphysical and physicalist dross to explain and concretize the phenomena, when we not only don't have good evidence for specific mechanisms at this high level, we don't even have a good idea of the "what" that it is we're trying to explain. To quote Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. "

[1]: I have a thought (oops!), an idea, that thoughts and visual imagination (picturing something in your mind) may in some sense be an evolutionary hijacking of the neural circuitry that processes language and vision, respectively. It's a very economic solution, that nature simply co-opted pre-existing circuits for processing auditory and visual stimuli, and added some new connections. And it explains quite well the seldom asked question of why our internal world mirrors the modalities in which our perceptual world is experienced. Why are thoughts like sentences at all, instead of something completely different?

Anyway. I appreciate your input. I think we are on the same page, but it's always fun to scribble in the margins.

"What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

[charlou]

apophenia, do you acknowledge or discount sensory input as being fundamental to the brain's ability to function in its environment?

[apophenia]

apophenia, do you acknowledge or discount sensory input as being fundamental to the brain's ability to function in its environment?

It's not entirely clear to me what you mean by this. I don't know what you mean by fundamental here. I view the brain/mind as a function or map for transforming affective perception and transforming that input, in combination with state information (knowledge about "world" both internal and "external") and transforming that combined information into bodily responses and changes in state information (we use perceptions both to determine actions but also to update our mental model of the world, and our internal mental world -- for example, your example of self-conscious awkwardness is a case in which perceptions both internal and out led to changes of state, changes of world, that modified the nature of further somatic output and proprioception and kinesthetic awareness -- were you actually moving awkwardly, or did the idea of feeling awkward modify incoming sensory data in line with your "model of world" which included your being awkward at that time?)

In point of fact, my thinking these days is oriented around a neural network model based on biomimetic properties which, with some mis-characterization, can be said to abstract features of the world from sensory input, and rather than updating a lineal "world structure", creates "temporal smears" in which the dynamic character of world and perception is encoded as a data structue having the properties of vagueness and abstraction built into its core.

I think in one analogous sense, it is like the data on a music cd; music cd's error correction is not aimed at providing a reliable recovery of the exact information, as doing so would result in an all or nothing effect that, when it failed, it would fail completely, leaving gaps; music cd-roms' error correction is designed such that, even in the presence of gaps, the missing music is interpolated so you may hear distortions, but less often gaps. The properties of a temporal smear are similar, like a moving average, missing a few data points isn't going to seriously degrade the accuracy of the moving average, and since it's a moving average, any gaps are quickly shifted out of the data.

(There was an interesting electronic device in the early history of computing, which was used for memory before they had magnetic memory cores or transistors, the device used in some early memories was a tube of mercury, horizontally long, and when a wave or pulse is introduced at one end of the tube, that wave propagates through the mercury, down the tube at a constant rate; this was transformed into memory by taking a sensor at the end opposite the pulse originator, and taking the pulses perceived at that end, and re-inserting them at the beginning of the tube; thus the tube formed a closed loop of mercury with transducers on both ends completing the loop electrically; now the temporal smear might be thought of analogously as the "state" of the mercury in the tube, only instead of feeding back on itself, it is continually accepting input at one end, and have the information contributed to the "state" by that input expiring or extinguishing when it gets to the other end.)