He who invented consciousness

Artificial intelligence experts have been predicting some sort of computer brain for decades, with little to show so far. And for all the recent advances in neurobiology, we seem no closer to solving the mind-brain problem than we were a century ago.

Something seems to be missing in current theories of consciousness. The philosopher David Chalmers has speculated that consciousness may be a fundamental property of nature existing outside the known laws of physics. Conventional wisdom goes something like this: The theory is almost certainly wrong, but Penrose is brilliant. Quantum coherence occurs when a huge number of things—say, a whole system of electrons—act together in one quantum state.

And what are microtubules, you ask? Hameroff suggests that microtubules are the quantum device that Penrose had been looking for in his theory. In neurons, microtubules help control the strength of synaptic connections, and their tube-like shape might protect them from the surrounding noise of the larger neuron. How about that! Galileo was correct in his findings. The process would need to be structured, or orchestrated, in some way so we can make conscious choices.

In the Penrose-Hameroff theory of Orchestrated Objective Reduction, known as Orch-OR, these moments of conscious awareness are orchestrated by the microtubules in our brains, which—they believe—have the capacity to store and process information and memory. This is a heady brew, but unconvincing to critics. Most scientists believe the brain is too warm and wet for quantum states to have any influence on neuronal activity because quantum coherence only seems possible in highly protected and frigid environments.

Gareth, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, is the series editor of Best American Infographics and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.

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Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. Thus you begin to gain insight into why you think and act the way you do. This means you can explain yourself to yourself, and explain yourself to other people too.

But, equally important, it means you have a model for explaining other people to yourself. When you meet another person, you can assume his mind works much as yours does. So you can work out what he is likely to be thinking and how he will behave. So far, so good. We have a workable definition of consciousness in terms of introspection. What Dennett has objected to is the idea that the brain contains a projection space where a replica of the outside world is on show to an inner observer.

If this is theatre, it is indeed more like a proper human theatre, where a play is running. Imagine yourself at a performance of a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare was not concerned with copying reality. His plays are stories, dramatic mock-ups, designed to analyse, expose and explain. And indeed as he himself made plain, the stories rely on codes and shorthand. In a famous prologue to Henry V, the Chorus apologises on behalf of the actors—mere ciphers or symbols —for daring to recreate the pageant of history on stage.

He could not have known that the word cockpit would later come to mean the wheel-room of a ship and later still the control room of an aeroplane.

So picture, if you will, the cockpit of a plane. And place yourself where the pilot sits. Your job as pilot is to integrate all this information, so as to decide what to do to achieve certain goals. You must observe, then think, then act. Oh, and by the way, you also have a cockpit radio, so you can report verbally to ground control. And yet, you may be wondering what the point is. A conscious human pilot as an analogy for a conscious agent in the brain? I want to use the analogy as a further way of demystifying consciousness.

An electronic autopilot, made of nothing but circuit boards, can—and in many planes does—fulfill exactly the same function as the pilot, collating information, referencing a knowledge base, choosing the best path, and so on. And it can keep a historical record of its own activity tucked away in a black box so that it can be accessed posthumously if necessary.

But as it happens just such meta-cognitive abilities are already being incorporated into the computers of driverless cars. To navigate traffic safely, the computer must be able to anticipate how other cars are likely to behave.

How does it learn this theory? So, back to the problem of consciousness. In fact the science is well under way. So far it seems this is just what consciousness is. We get this cognitive faculty—the workspace, the integration, the theory of mind—without having so much as to mention the eeriness of consciousness.

This is good news, in its way. But bad news too. What about the eery phenomenal feel of consciousness? We defined consciousness at the outset as comprising all those mental states that are available to introspection. Does the quality in question pervade all mental states? There is no special feel associated with your having the thought, say, that today is Thursday. Rather, it seems the phenomenal quality kicks in only at a more animal level.

As I said at the opening, sensations lie at the heart of our being. No one would or could wish qualia out of existence. Indeed there will have been times for all of us when conscious experience is about little else. A science of consciousness that leaves qualia out is not just ignoring the elephant in the room, it is ignoring the elephant that is the room.

How can that be? There may be several explanations for why qualia are not been given the priority we might expect. Koch may have been half-joking. Short of invoking some supernatural agency, where are we to go? Of course not everyone has been so ready to surrender. In the coffee room, if not yet the lab, there has been ongoing debate about just what kind of thing qualia are and what to do about them. The answers that have been proposed have not always been helpful.

Yet it does seem a consensus is emerging, at least about the boundaries of the problem. Most theorists now accept that there are only two options that can be taken seriously. We can be Realists about qualia, or else we have to be Illusionists Frankish The names make the meaning of these alternatives clear.

Realists take qualia at face value. In their view, if your sensations appear to have qualities that lie beyond the scope of physical explanation, then it must be they really do have such qualities. And this is possible because the brain activity that underlies sensations already has consciousness latent in it as an additional property of matter—a property as yet unrecognised by physics, but one that you the conscious subject are somehow able to tap into.

So, according to the Realists, when you experience pain, say, you are in effect breaking through the veil of mundane physics to access a higher-order realm.

Illusionists, by contrast, will have none of this. They argue that if your sensations appear to have these marvellous non-physical properties, then this can only be because your physical brain is playing tricks on you. And this is possible because the brain is a computational engine that deals in symbols, and physically based symbols can perfectly well represent states of affairs that do not and even could not exist thank you, Shakespeare!

Realism and Illusionism. The trouble is that both these theoretical positions come at a considerable price. On the one hand, the price of Realism is that it implies that the standard physical description of the world is radically incomplete. Some people actually welcome this. Nagel thinks it would make the natural order less austere!

But others—including me—find it a lazy and inelegant solution. Some people welcome that too. Dennett clearly takes wicked delight, in discomforting what he calls the Mysterians. Still, which is right? No one yet knows for sure. Can we do better than merely hope for this? Does anyone have any idea about what kind of physical processes in the brain might possibly underlie it?

And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below. And that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image. So just think of this: you have a grid of neurons, and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid, and you get a warping of your mental experience. So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina, which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball, or, for that matter, a sheet of visual cortex.

So from the retina you go onto visual cortex. And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina. And in that image there, you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain.

You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information. And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps, can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around, which is the association cortex, where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making.

And the great beauty is that you can then go from memory, out of those association cortices, and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception. So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is.

So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making. And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information. So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images.

But what about the self? The self is really the elusive problem. And for a long time, people did not even want to touch it, because they'd say, "How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?

It's the following. We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps.

So let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this. I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self — the Me, the I in our own processing — we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day. Well it so happens that we have a singular body. We have one body, not two, not three. And so that is a beginning.

There is just one reference point, which is the body. But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior. The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu — for example, the whole management of the chemistries within our body are, in fact, extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason. If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death.

So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity. I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day. Because if you don't have that sameness, physiologically, you're going to be sick or you're going to die.

So that's one more element for this continuity. And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling. So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain.

However, there is a close, permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body. So here's how it looks. Look at the region there. There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. And it is within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body.