(Roughly) Daily

The image above is from an engaging essay on “Why we need to figure out a theory of consciousness.” But, as Robert Lawrence Kuhn argues, in practice the issue with “the Hard Problem” might better be understood as the need to choose among, then build upon (one or a few of) the myriad theories that we have. Helpfully, Kuhn has surveyed and mapped that theoretical landscape…

Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of theories is telling. Explanations, or theories, are said to work at astonishingly divergent orders of magnitude and putative realms of reality. My purpose here must be humble: collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate. Seek insights, not answers.

Unrealistically, I’d like to get them all, at least all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct with explanations that can surmount an arbitrary hurdle of rationality or conceivability. Falsification or verification is not on the agenda. I’m less concerned about the ontological truth of explanations/theories than in identifying them and then locating them on a “Landscape” to enable categorization and assess relationships. Next, I assess implications of categories for “big questions.” Thus, this Landscape is not about how consciousness is measured or evolved or even works, but about what consciousness is and what difference it makes.

It’s the classic “mind-body problem:” How do the felt experiences in our minds relate to the neural processes in our brains? How do mental states, whether sensory, cognitive, emotional, or even noumenal (selfless) awareness, correlate with brain states? The Landscape of Consciousness explanations or theories I want to draw is as broad as possible, including those that cannot be subsumed by, and possibly not even accessed by, the scientific method. This freedom from constraint, as it were, is no excuse for wooly thinking. Standards of rationality and clarity of argument must be maintained even more tenaciously, and bases of beliefs must be specified even more clearly.

I have two main aims: (i) gather and describe the various theories and array them in some kind of meaningful structure of high-level or first-order categories (and under Materialism, subcategories); and (ii) assess their implications, with respect to four big questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); artificial intelligence (AI) consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death.

Theories overlap; some work together. Moreover, while a real-world landscape of consciousness, even simplified, would be drawn with three dimensions (at least), with multiple kinds and levels of nestings—a combinatorial explosion (and likely no closer to truth)—I satisfice with a one-dimensional toy-model. I array all the theories on a linear spectrum, simplistically and roughly, from the “most physical” on the left (at the beginning) to the “least physical” on the right (near the end). (I have two final categories after this spectrum.) The physicalism assumed in Materialism Theories of consciousness is characterized by naturalistic, science-based perspectives, while non-materialism theories have various degrees of nonphysicalist perspectives outside the ambit of current science and in some cases not subject to the scientific method of experimentation and replicability.

Please do not ascribe the relative importance of a theory to the relative size of its description. The shortest can be the strongest. It sometimes takes more words to describe lesser-known theories. For each description I feel the tension between conciseness and completeness. Moreover, several are not complete theories in themselves but ways to think about consciousness that strike me as original and perhaps insightful…

There follows are survey of the strands of thought/theory depicted here:

Absolutely fascinating: “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications,” from @RobertLawrKuhn via @RogersBacon1…

… Who also published this apposite article: “A Paradigm for AI Consciousness.”

* Max Planck

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As we examine explanations, we might send communicative birthday greetings to Camillo Golgi; he was born on this date in 1843. A biologist and pathologist, he discovered a staining technique called black reaction (sometimes called Golgi’s method or Golgi’s staining in his honor) in 1873, a major breakthrough in neuroscience. He was the first to identify axons and dendrites and their functions. He also identified the sense receptors of muscular sensations. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named for him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex.

Golgi’s investigations into the fine structure of the nervous system earned him (with the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal) the 1906 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

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