In the introduction to OCBBM, Jaynes chronicles the various paradigms that have arisen during the course of modern science to explain where consciousness comes from. He takes us on a brief tour from the theory that consciousness is just a component of matter like gravity or magnetism, to the view that consciousness was grounded in the associative process we call learning, to the school of behaviorism which asserted conscious is an illusion and does not exist at all! Jaynes finishes with the theory that consciousness is a product of the reticular activating system in the brain that regulates the sleep/wake cycle and aspects of how attention is focused.
Back in the 70s when the OCBBM was published, identifying the reticular activating system as the cause of consciousness was an initial foray into trying to understand consciousness strictly in terms of neuroscience. Since then, neuroscience has flourished and using its fMRI, PET, and CG scans is generating one discovery after another. The rise of neuroscience has also accompanied the meteoric rise of computer science and the corresponding ubiquity of computer technology into the routine of every day life.
During this ride into the information age of the 21st century, computer scientists and neuroscientists have been influencing the imaginations of each other and the public. The result has been the information processing computer has become the dominant metaphor animating the public and scientific communities' conception of what cognition is. The new field of "computational neuroscience", developing mathematical models of how information flows through the brain, and its associated fields of study are now held up as the best bet for finally being able to solve the question of consciousness once and for all. And so the media and the researchers have developed the habit of thinking of sentient beings as information processing systems, and this has become the next paradigm to add to Jaynes' list. We are computers made of organic matter with components like, for example, hard disks (regions in the brain where long term memory is stored), software (how our "plastic" brains become organized via genetics and development), and computer chips (neurons and their connections).
Of course, people do not literally believe we are simply organic computers mechanically processing the data we take in through our senses. Well, maybe the hardcore determinists and behaviorists among us do. However, my point is we must be very cautious about letting today's zeitgeist sweep us up into models that only work at the level of metaphor as they relate to consciousness and ultimately limit our ability to understand the complex and enigmatic problems associated with understanding the amazing phenomenon of introspective self awareness.
Jaynes describes the phenomenon I am talking about perfectly:
"Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives. The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers until...unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes. In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness...[became] the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings. And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams. There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are."
I am in no way claiming that research in cognitive science using the tools of computational neuroscience and the like are not legitimate fields of inquiry. They are, and the worlds of neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence and others are making astounding contributions to the compendium of human knowledge.
The problem appears to me to be, as it relates to consciousness per se, that we are changing the terms of the debate to fit the metaphor we are currently excited about. Christof Koch is a neuroscientist who partnered early in his career with Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers on the structure of the DNA molecule, to try and understand where consciousness comes from and how it actually works. He has worked on developing a model for understanding consciousness called Integrated Information Theory, and has become one of the leading researchers and spokes persons for a computational approach to consciousness. He defines consciousness in a Scientific American article as "the ability to feel something, anything -- whether it's the sensation of an azure-blue sky, a tooth ache, being sad, or worrying about the deadline two weeks from now. Indeed, it may be possible that all animals share some minimal amount of sentience with people, that all animals have some feelings, however primitive." I would argue this is a definition, with the possible exception of the example of worrying about a deadline two weeks out, that actually is focused on perception and emotion-- not consciousness.
To some degree, the issue is a matter of semantics. That is, if the field of neuroscience insists on defining consciousness as encompassing the entire realm of the perceptions and reactions of sentient beings, that is their prerogative. For a concept like consciousness, where the definition is hotly debated and is far from reaching any consensus, in order to do any serious inquiry into the matter you have to begin with your best approximation of a definition in order to have a starting point to work from and a standard to judge the analysis by. However, I would say defining consciousness as boiling down to stimulus, response, and association, obscures more than it makes clear.
When we ask questions about what it means to be ethical and moral, or how to live a productive and worthwhile life, or even "Who am I?", we are challenging our ability to introspect deeply. This is what Jaynes is addressing as consciousness. Ultimately, when we want to understand what it means to be a conscious being, I think most of us are talking about this uniquely human ability we have to make meaning through an intentionally directed narrative we "see" within ourselves; or again, a "hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do", as Jaynes puts it. I realize the above description is not an operationalized, scientific definition of consciousness. In future posts I will address in more detail exactly what I understand to be Jaynes' specific formulation of consciousness. For now, I am just trying to make clear that the essential nature of the "consciousness" that means the most to us personally and has given rise to a long history of inquiry by novelist, philosophers and saints, is not what 21st century high tech research is focusing on when they talk about consciousness.
In the BBC's documentary "Human Consciousness", Koch describes how he and his team are searching for the "neural correlates of consciousness"; that is, specific groups of neurons that correspond to particular conscious experiences. One of the examples he uses is an area of the brain in one of his research subject's who, when shown a series of pictures, had that area of the brain fire only when the subject saw the 6 pictures of Jennifer Aniston that were mixed into the series.
I would argue this is not telling us anything about specifically human consciousness. What this example does tell us is that the research subject has made a strong association with Jennifer Aniston's image, probably cemented in the part of the brain Koch is looking at by repeated, strong emotional reactions that are associated to her image. That is what I would call learning, and, as Jaynes states, you don't need anything approaching a uniquely human consciousness to learn. Pavlov taught his dogs to salivate when making an association with a metronome. We all know the stereotypical process of a scientist in a lab teaching a rat to find its way through a maze. We have evidence that even insects can learn, as shown in a study on moths where the researcher discovered moths can be taught to distinguish which odors mean food. Stemming from this discovery, the intent it is to train moths to recognize biological and chemical weapons!
If you are captivated by mapping the brain and discovering which areas correlate with which specific functions, great! Many fascinating discoveries are being made that tell us about cognition in humans and other animals. However, as Jaynes puts it regarding the desire to understand the essence of human consciousness through the study of neuro-anatomy:
"...there is a delusion in such reasoning. It is one that is all too common and unspoken in our tendency to translate psychological phenomena into neuro-anatomy and chemistry. We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never — not ever — from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own."
David Chalmers, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at NYU, in his TED talk, How Do You Explain Consciousness?, echoes Jaynes by making the same distinction between the "easy problem" of how neural phenomenon are correlated to components of behavior and the "hard problem" of actual subjective, introspective consciousness:
"The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states...But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all?...I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work...the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems — how we behave, how we function — but when it comes to subjective experience...we're at a kind of impasse here. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious. On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think...radical ideas may be needed."
Chalmers, unlike many others wanting to understand consciousness, gets credit for being able to distinguish the objects of the current research in neuroscience from the phenomenon of introspective conscious experience.
The current paradigm for investigating consciousness, fueled by metaphors of computers and information processing, indeed is producing astounding discoveries related to many areas of cognitive functioning. However, I am afraid this paradigm is going to end up, like all the others covered in Jaynes' introduction to OCBBM, falling short as a framework for understanding the phenomenon of introspective consciousness. It appears to me David Chalmers is correct that we still need radical ideas. 40 years after OCBBM, it is still radical, and it is still needed.
Back in the 70s when the OCBBM was published, identifying the reticular activating system as the cause of consciousness was an initial foray into trying to understand consciousness strictly in terms of neuroscience. Since then, neuroscience has flourished and using its fMRI, PET, and CG scans is generating one discovery after another. The rise of neuroscience has also accompanied the meteoric rise of computer science and the corresponding ubiquity of computer technology into the routine of every day life.
During this ride into the information age of the 21st century, computer scientists and neuroscientists have been influencing the imaginations of each other and the public. The result has been the information processing computer has become the dominant metaphor animating the public and scientific communities' conception of what cognition is. The new field of "computational neuroscience", developing mathematical models of how information flows through the brain, and its associated fields of study are now held up as the best bet for finally being able to solve the question of consciousness once and for all. And so the media and the researchers have developed the habit of thinking of sentient beings as information processing systems, and this has become the next paradigm to add to Jaynes' list. We are computers made of organic matter with components like, for example, hard disks (regions in the brain where long term memory is stored), software (how our "plastic" brains become organized via genetics and development), and computer chips (neurons and their connections).
Of course, people do not literally believe we are simply organic computers mechanically processing the data we take in through our senses. Well, maybe the hardcore determinists and behaviorists among us do. However, my point is we must be very cautious about letting today's zeitgeist sweep us up into models that only work at the level of metaphor as they relate to consciousness and ultimately limit our ability to understand the complex and enigmatic problems associated with understanding the amazing phenomenon of introspective self awareness.
Jaynes describes the phenomenon I am talking about perfectly:
"Note how the metaphors of mind are the world it perceives. The first half of the nineteenth century was the age of the great geological discoveries in which the record of the past was written in layers of the earth’s crust. And this led to the popularization of the idea of consciousness as being in layers until...unconscious sensations, unconscious ideas, and unconscious judgments made up the majority of mental processes. In the middle of the nineteenth century chemistry succeeded geology as the fashionable science, and consciousness...[became] the compound structure that could be analyzed in the laboratory into precise elements of sensations and feelings. And as steam locomotives chugged their way into the pattern of everyday life toward the end of the nineteenth century, so they too worked their way into the consciousness of consciousness, the subconscious becoming a boiler of straining energy which demanded manifest outlets and when repressed pushed up and out into neurotic behavior and the spinning camouflaged fulfillments of going-nowhere dreams. There is not much we can do about such metaphors except to state that that is precisely what they are."
I am in no way claiming that research in cognitive science using the tools of computational neuroscience and the like are not legitimate fields of inquiry. They are, and the worlds of neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence and others are making astounding contributions to the compendium of human knowledge.
The problem appears to me to be, as it relates to consciousness per se, that we are changing the terms of the debate to fit the metaphor we are currently excited about. Christof Koch is a neuroscientist who partnered early in his career with Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers on the structure of the DNA molecule, to try and understand where consciousness comes from and how it actually works. He has worked on developing a model for understanding consciousness called Integrated Information Theory, and has become one of the leading researchers and spokes persons for a computational approach to consciousness. He defines consciousness in a Scientific American article as "the ability to feel something, anything -- whether it's the sensation of an azure-blue sky, a tooth ache, being sad, or worrying about the deadline two weeks from now. Indeed, it may be possible that all animals share some minimal amount of sentience with people, that all animals have some feelings, however primitive." I would argue this is a definition, with the possible exception of the example of worrying about a deadline two weeks out, that actually is focused on perception and emotion-- not consciousness.
To some degree, the issue is a matter of semantics. That is, if the field of neuroscience insists on defining consciousness as encompassing the entire realm of the perceptions and reactions of sentient beings, that is their prerogative. For a concept like consciousness, where the definition is hotly debated and is far from reaching any consensus, in order to do any serious inquiry into the matter you have to begin with your best approximation of a definition in order to have a starting point to work from and a standard to judge the analysis by. However, I would say defining consciousness as boiling down to stimulus, response, and association, obscures more than it makes clear.
When we ask questions about what it means to be ethical and moral, or how to live a productive and worthwhile life, or even "Who am I?", we are challenging our ability to introspect deeply. This is what Jaynes is addressing as consciousness. Ultimately, when we want to understand what it means to be a conscious being, I think most of us are talking about this uniquely human ability we have to make meaning through an intentionally directed narrative we "see" within ourselves; or again, a "hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do", as Jaynes puts it. I realize the above description is not an operationalized, scientific definition of consciousness. In future posts I will address in more detail exactly what I understand to be Jaynes' specific formulation of consciousness. For now, I am just trying to make clear that the essential nature of the "consciousness" that means the most to us personally and has given rise to a long history of inquiry by novelist, philosophers and saints, is not what 21st century high tech research is focusing on when they talk about consciousness.
In the BBC's documentary "Human Consciousness", Koch describes how he and his team are searching for the "neural correlates of consciousness"; that is, specific groups of neurons that correspond to particular conscious experiences. One of the examples he uses is an area of the brain in one of his research subject's who, when shown a series of pictures, had that area of the brain fire only when the subject saw the 6 pictures of Jennifer Aniston that were mixed into the series.
I would argue this is not telling us anything about specifically human consciousness. What this example does tell us is that the research subject has made a strong association with Jennifer Aniston's image, probably cemented in the part of the brain Koch is looking at by repeated, strong emotional reactions that are associated to her image. That is what I would call learning, and, as Jaynes states, you don't need anything approaching a uniquely human consciousness to learn. Pavlov taught his dogs to salivate when making an association with a metronome. We all know the stereotypical process of a scientist in a lab teaching a rat to find its way through a maze. We have evidence that even insects can learn, as shown in a study on moths where the researcher discovered moths can be taught to distinguish which odors mean food. Stemming from this discovery, the intent it is to train moths to recognize biological and chemical weapons!
If you are captivated by mapping the brain and discovering which areas correlate with which specific functions, great! Many fascinating discoveries are being made that tell us about cognition in humans and other animals. However, as Jaynes puts it regarding the desire to understand the essence of human consciousness through the study of neuro-anatomy:
"...there is a delusion in such reasoning. It is one that is all too common and unspoken in our tendency to translate psychological phenomena into neuro-anatomy and chemistry. We can only know in the nervous system what we have known in behavior first. Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every tickling thread of every single axon and dendrite in every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could still never — not ever — from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own."
David Chalmers, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at NYU, in his TED talk, How Do You Explain Consciousness?, echoes Jaynes by making the same distinction between the "easy problem" of how neural phenomenon are correlated to components of behavior and the "hard problem" of actual subjective, introspective consciousness:
"The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states...But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all?...I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work...the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems — how we behave, how we function — but when it comes to subjective experience...we're at a kind of impasse here. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious. On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think...radical ideas may be needed."
Chalmers, unlike many others wanting to understand consciousness, gets credit for being able to distinguish the objects of the current research in neuroscience from the phenomenon of introspective conscious experience.
The current paradigm for investigating consciousness, fueled by metaphors of computers and information processing, indeed is producing astounding discoveries related to many areas of cognitive functioning. However, I am afraid this paradigm is going to end up, like all the others covered in Jaynes' introduction to OCBBM, falling short as a framework for understanding the phenomenon of introspective consciousness. It appears to me David Chalmers is correct that we still need radical ideas. 40 years after OCBBM, it is still radical, and it is still needed.
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