Consciousness as 'display only' UI?

This post is not a review, but was triggered as a looked through the recent book "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking" by Matthew Hutson (2012).  On page 2, in the Introduction, Hutson reviews some types of 'magical thinking':  "Do you believe that certain events were meant to happen?  Magical thinking.  Or that you can lift your arm through the power of your conscious thoughts?  Magical thinking, even that."

As many popular books do, Hutson uses the 1983 study by Benjamin Libet which compared the timing of a readiness potential in the brain to the subject's report of a conscious decision to move their arm.  His finding was that there was a readiness potential prior to the report of a conscious decision (about a third of a second).  There have been followups that report further findings along these lines.  Hutson writes:

Libet refused to interpret his own findings as conclusive evidence against free will.  He held on to the possibility of some kind of conscious veto power that could halt or redirect an act in progress - so called free won't.  But no available evidence supports such a magical intervention.

So this led me to a few thoughts on the subject.  If one accepts the notion that consciousness is produced by the brain, then surely it must be the case that any conscious 'activity' is either preceded by or accompanied by activity in the brain.  It's not as if one's brain is an independent actor - the brain and the conscious activity is all bundled into a person, and the person makes decisions.  The decision path must involve the brain.

And we know that there is plenty going on in a person's body which is not actively controlled via consciousness - like breathing and digesting and keeping the heart beating and so forth.  Likewise we don't really consciously control ourselves when making simple movements - what muscles will be involved if I move my arm?

Is it possible that consciousness is simply like a software user interface that does not allow any action or update?  Consciousness in this model would simply register activity (thoughts) in the brain, and perhaps like moving a mouse around we can shift the focus but in fact not actually alter anything via conscious decision.  And thus any notion that consciousness can 'do something' is an illusion or 'magical intervention'?  That is certainly not my personal experience, though I recognize that plenty of consciousness can be consumed by simply going around in circles, worrying about something, or churning over possibilities.  Note also that I've never seen a brain (on its own) do much of anything.  The brain is a key organ in a person!

My personal take is that this view of consciousness as 'inactive' cannot be correct, but it's hard to really get a handle on the mechanism that conscious activity can use.  I think the area of attention and learning is the most promising place to look - since to learn something we typically have to focus attention, and we go through a period where we don't fully grasp a concept or action.  In this period we have to think carefully about each step or movement, and if we are successful at learning then finally there is a breakthrough, and we 'internalize' the learning - which makes it largely unconscious.  As an example, once we know how to serve a tennis ball, we don't have to think consciously about how to move our arms and body to do it.  But while we are learning we need all sorts of mental attention to try to get it right.  If you have no mental focus, it seems unlikely that you'll ever learn much of anything.  So what is happening when we apply mental focus - it must involve some sort of shifting of brain resources away from mechanisms that support our own churning thoughts to the area of interest.

Is the idea that we have conscious control and decision-making power somehow magical?  I would say no - a person uses consciousness to direct focus and attention, and behind the scenes all sorts of things are happening in the brain, some of which we are aware in some sense, and other things we have no awareness of.

I decided the book was not worth reading in full, but my quick skim did provoke some thinking!

Neuroscience and Economics

"The Marketplace in Your Brain" by Josh Fischman over at The Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept 24, 2012) has an interesting look at how economics may want/need to start using neuroscience findings to help explain and model decision-making.  On the economics side, there is some feeling that brain findings do not necessarily add anything to simply observing behavior, and I have to say I tend to agree.

One experiment explores the finding that people will often reject what are perceived to be 'stingy' sharing offers (even though it means they will get nothing rather than something).

Jonathan D. Cohen, a neuroscientist at Princeton, went looking for the seat of that impulse. He asked 19 people to play ultimatum games with stingy offers. Two areas of the brain were active when people considered what to do. One, near the front of the brain, is called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and is linked to deliberative thought and calculation. The other, deeper in the brain, is tied to emotions like disgust. It's called the insula. The stingier the offer, the more insula activity Cohen's team saw. When people actually rejected the offer, this activity peaked higher than did activity in the deliberative-thought area. It appears, Cohen says, that two areas are competing in some way, and that negative emotions—or the desire for justice—can trump people's rational desire to get more.

While the brain findings here perhaps are interesting, and shed light on brain function, I'm not sure it really explains the behavior at any deeper level than we can observe without them.

The article also discusses the funding angle.

Much of the NIH money comes from its institutes for drug addiction, mental health, and aging. "Most of us, to get funding, have to sell our ideas along disease lines," says Phelps. "Drug addiction is an obvious area where understanding reward-seeking behavior is important, and our work is clearly related to that."
The NIH wants to know more about choices because it's clear that many people understand what's needed to stay healthy but choose not to do it, says Lisbeth Nielsen, chief of the branch of individual and behavioral processes at the National Institute on Aging. "We're very interested in decision-making and aging," she says. "And that's not just health decisions but choices about insurance plans or how to manage your retirement savings. Are changes in choices related to the underlying neurophysiology? Or is it the environment? You won't know unless you get input from different sciences, and that's what neuroeconomics brings to us."

Again we see that often the neuroscience is driven by perceived disease rather than study of 'normal' behavior.  But it does seem worthwhile to get to a better model of human decision-making, in particular around areas where it seems like the decision-making is generally poor.

The Meaning of Mind (1996) - Thomas Szasz

The subtitle of The Meaning of Mind by Thomas Szasz is "Language, Morality and Neuroscience" - but it's important to note the Szasz was a professor of psychiatry.  This is a short book, and a dense one as well - I never read more than about 20 pages at a time.  I felt that Szasz makes some important points that I agree with, and he is also pretty damn funny at times.  His approach may also be described as arrogant.

One of his main points is to argue against the common (mis-)use of language that equates mind with brain.  At a purely linguistic level this equation seems to fall apart quickly.  As he puts it on page 92, "When a journalist wants to categorize a crime as particularly heinous, he calls it 'mindless,' not 'brainless.' The point is obvious. A brainless person cannot commit a crime, just as an eyeless person cannot see."  Further down the page,

The terms 'brain' and 'mind' belong to different conceptual categories and different modes of discourse.  The brain is a bodily organ and a part of medical discourse. The mind is a personal attribute and a part of moral discourse.  So long as we view personal conduct commonsensically, we attribute (bad) behavior to the mind or, more precisely, to the person who displays it.  However, once we view such conduct psychiatrically (and legally), we typically attribute it to the brain: We say that the bad man is mad, or that the madman is bad, because he has a brain disease.

For Szasz, the role of personal responsibility is key, and he sees both psychiatry and neuroscience as chipping away at responsibility, turning many matters into questions of the neuro chemical mix.  Szasz argues that in fact mind is more of a verb than a noun - i.e. we can't point to a thing identified as the mind, but we can talk about a person 'minding'.  If we reduce all behavior to brain activity, then there's no telling how creative people will get about claiming behavior as brain disorder, and then coming up with neuro-chemical 'solutions.' (see also this earlier post:  Did your brain make you do it?)

I agree with the point that 'mind' and 'brain' are in two different categories, and while mind (or minding) seems dependent on an operating brain (and nervous system and sensory inputs and some body!), to explore the mind is to speak about experiences, not neurons and neuro-chemicals.  I'm not sure about the mind being only part of a "moral discourse" however.  The point of this blog is that there can be scientific explorations of the experiences of mind, and how these experiences seem to create a feedback loop with the brain (i.e. from simple attention/learning to meditation and its impact on brain waves, etc.).

Thus I fully agree with this point from Szasz in his epilogue (p. 140):

I dare say there is something bizarre about the materialist-reductionist's denial of persons. To be sure, brains in craniums exist; and so do persons in societies. The material substrates of a human being - a person - are organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. The material substrates of a human artifact - say a wedding ring - are crystals, atoms, electrons in orbits, and so forth. Scientists do not claim to be able to explain the economic or emotional value of a wedding ring by identifying its material composition; nor do they insist that a physicalistic account of its structure is superior to a cultural and personal account of its meaning. Yet, many scientists, from physicists to neurophysiologists, claim that they can explain choice and responsibility by identifying its material substrate - that "life can be explained in terms of ordinary physics and chemistry."  (Editorial note: the last bit is a quote from a Nature article).

I frequently get this same sense about neuroscientists' writing - it's trying so hard to do away with any kind of dualism that it also seems to go hard reductionist about all human behavior, and I don't think it's a necessary or appropriate way to learn about minding.

Scientists read dreams

This article from Nature, "Scientists read dreams" on October 19, 2012 by Mo Costandi, reports on some findings of brain scans performed just prior to waking dreaming subjects.  Basically the researchers linked activity in various visual processing areas to the reported dream content of the dreamers.  The basic finding comes down to this:

The findings, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, Louisiana, earlier this week, suggest that dreaming and visual perception share similar neural representations in the higher order visual areas of the brain.

I think this is interesting as a confirmation of how at least some part of dreaming operates in the brain, but as lead researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan says,“Knowing more about the content of dreams and how it relates to brain activity may help us to understand the function of dreaming.” Maybe!

On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons

'On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons' is the title of a paper published in Nature back in October 2010 on a study led by CalTech's Moran Cerf, but it came to my attention via this recent BoingBoing post (about how the paper results were wildly misinterpreted).

What I found interesting about these findings is that it seems to give experimental evidence that mental concentration can in some way influence neuron behavior.  Or as the paper puts it, "At least in the MTL, thought can override the reality of the sensory input." [MTL is Medial Temporal Lobe].  The experiment involved epilepsy patients with electrodes in their brains, who then did a test in viewing pictures online.

It's not a big surprise to me that this is possible, but it's great to see some scientific verification.  And still no one really understands what exactly happens when one 'concentrates' or 'pays attention' but clearly it can result in changes to the way the brain behaves.  I continue to be most interested in just what can be achieved via methods of concentration.

But I do think this closing line is important: "Our method offers a substrate for a high-level brain–machine interface using conscious thought processes."

Here's some coverage that the paper got at the time in Time: Controlling Your World With a Single Neuron by Jeffrey Kluger.  I'm not quite sure why the focus is always on what these findings might enable for disabled people...  isn't it even more interesting what it implies for 'normal' folks?

A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning - Ray Jackendorff (2012)

I picked up A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning while in Boston at the MIT Press bookstore this spring, and it has a tangential stream that was of interest to me in relation to this blog. The book attempts to examine language, meaning and thought from a cognitive perspective.

The concept I most struggle with is the "Unconscious Meaning Hypothesis" (UMH): this says that of the three structures that make up a linguistic expression (phonology/pronunciation, syntax/grammar and semantics/meaning), "the one that most resembles the experience of thought is phonology." (p. 103). In other words, there's an emphasis on the interior pronunciation of words as the key to awareness of thinking ("we can only be aware of the content of our thoughts if they're linked with pronunciation" p. 90). Here's more on the idea, in comparison with other primates:

One difference is that we have language - the ability to convert our thoughts into communicable form by linking them to pronunciation. According to the UMH, this linking bestows on us a second difference: language enables us to be conscious of our thoughts in a way that animals can't be. But it's not through awareness of the thoughts themselves. Rather, it's through awareness of the phonological "handles" linked to the thoughts, which other animals lack. 

In short, beings without language can have thoughts, and our consciousness derives its form from the pronunciation of the inner voice, not directly from our thoughts themselves. So thought and consciousness aren't the same thing at all. (p. 109)

Jackendorff separates meaning from a "feeling of meaningfulness" - he writes "Meaning is unconscious." (p. 111).

This all feels pretty jumbled to me!  While it does seem true that a fair amount of what arises in our conscious mind is in the form of thought as language (i.e. internal chatter), I don't think that's all that's there, nor do I think there's such a disconnect from meaning, nor that all meaning is unconscious.  There is certainly the struggle to put a thought into words, but if we can detect that the linguistic expression is not conveying the meaning properly, then it seems to me that the meaning is in some way conscious.

In an earlier chapter, Jackendorff references Wittgenstein, with this quote:  "One is tempted to use the following picture: what he really 'wanted to say', what he 'meant' was already present somewhere in his mind even before we gave it expression." (p. 83, from W's Philosophical Investigations).  Whether this indicates W thought that the meaning was truly conscious or not is unclear.

However in a happenstance I came across an article on Wittgenstein today by Ray Monk, called "Ludwig Wittgenstein’s passion for looking, not thinking" which I liked.  Here's one bit:

Like Freud, Wittgenstein took very seriously indeed the idea that our dreams present us with a series of images, the interpretation of which would reveal the thoughts we have relegated to the unconscious parts of our minds. "If Freud’s theory on the interpretation of dreams has anything in it," Wittgenstein once wrote, "it shows how complicated is the way the human mind represents the facts in pictures. So complicated, so irregular is the way they are represented that we can barely call it representation any longer."

This book surely deserves a more well-thought out response, but my bottom line is that I don't really buy into the UMH.  It seems to me that we need even more clarity in our language to express meanings - and I am most intrigued by the interactions of the conscious and the unconscious.  In my view the mind includes at least portions of what we might term unconscious - for instance those things that we have learned so well that we don't have to pay conscious attention to them, like riding a bicycle.  Yet if we encounter a dangerous or confusing situation on a bicycle, suddenly we can "shift gears" and become hyper aware of minute decision-making steps to attempt to avoid catastrophe.

Subliminal - Leonard Mlodinow (2012)

Subliminal is subtitled 'How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior' and the dustjacket features some subtle text (distinguished from the background by being a bit shinier) that says 'Pssst... Hey There Yes: You, Sexy. Buy This Book Now. You Know You Want It.' This marketing ploy is a bit of a giveaway that this book is basically reviewing old tricks, not exploring new ground. The subtitle harkens back to books of the 1970s like 'Subliminal Seduction', a supposed investigation of such advertising techniques.

However - the notion of the subconscious is indeed interesting. The book mostly explores existing research on all sorts of brain/mind processing that is going on that we are not consciously aware of, yet seems to greatly influence our decision-making. Such as the finding that IPOs of companies with complicated names seem to perform worse than those of companies with easy-to-say names. Such as the subtle cues of social dominance that pervade human interactions. And so on...

Overall I'd compare this book to 'Brain Wars' - it's again a nice overview for those new to the subject, but probably not worth the time of folks who've read in the field already. The good news is that after a long period where science essentially ignored the idea of the subconscious, it is now a pretty hot area of research.

The area where I'd like to see more research on is about the process of learning which proceeds from conscious study and concentration to eventual near-unconscious mastery. How does this work? How does one feed more processing into the subconscious? Can subconscious processing be 'overridden' by conscious effort over time?

Did your brain make you do it?

Recent story from the NYT by John Monterosso and Barry Schwartz, July 27, 2012: "Did your brain make you do it?" about the concept of responsiblity. Basic stance is here:

it’s worth stressing an important point: as a general matter, it is always true that our brains "made us do it." Each of our behaviors is always associated with a brain state. If we view every new scientific finding about brain involvement in human behavior as a sign that the behavior was not under the individual’s control, the very notion of responsibility will be threatened. So it is imperative that we think clearly about when brain science frees someone from blame — and when it doesn’t.

The authors describe an experiment they carried out to gauge people's sense of causality under different scenarios.

In our experiment, we asked participants to consider various situations involving an individual who behaved in ways that caused harm, including committing acts of violence. We included information about the protagonist that might help make sense of the action in question: in some cases, that information was about a history of psychologically horrific events that the individual had experienced (e.g., suffering abuse as a child), and in some cases it was about biological characteristics or anomalies in the individual's brain (e.g., an imbalance in neurotransmitters). In the different situations, we also varied how strong the connection was between those factors and the behavior (e.g., whether most people who are abused as a child act violently, or only a few).

They found that people seemed to either blame biological causes (i.e. brain injury) or psychological causes (i.e. intentions), a way of thinking they term "naive dualism". Rather than either/or, they point toward a more probabilistic model.

A better question is "how strong was the relation between the cause (whatever it happened to be) and the effect?" If, hypothetically, only 1 percent of people with a brain malfunction (or a history of being abused) commit violence, ordinary considerations about blame would still seem relevant. But if 99 percent of them do, you might start to wonder how responsible they really are.