Human consciousness. Can't transfer copy?

The previous article on this topic brought to life a heated discussion in the amount of more than four hundred comments, among which, as usual, there was not a single smart one (joke). In principle, this is not surprising. The same situation, for example, with linguistics. As the brilliant and alas, the late academician Andrei Zaliznyak used to say, since each person knows his own language, and linguistics is about the language, then why not understand it, so to speak, a priori. And as we know, also the late satirist Mikhail Zadornov, with his research in the field of the Russian language, will not lie:



“And the word“ Athlete ”is formed from two words -“ god ”and“ tyry ”.



With self-awareness, consciousness, self-awareness, self, inner "I", personality - the situation is approximately the same. Since almost all of us have this inside our heads, why don’t we give birth to a couple more of clever thoughts and assumptions about this, since philosophers have been arguing on this subject for two thousand years, and scientists and psychologists are two hundred years old and all can’t get to the bottom of the truth. It’s true that there are neurobiologists-tomographers who do everything through the tomograph, but this caste is relatively young and basically they look at “where” and “what” in the head, without explaining how. True, they have their own reasons for this, to which we will return.



And since the Habr’s authors are also human, as a result, approximately once a week, this leads to the appearance of another article of the type: “Habr’s karmic curse” , “Consciousness, what it is”, “On the way to the fundamental theory of consciousness”, “How it works consciousness ”, where the insight that visited the author is retold vividly and figuratively or in a boring and stagnant language. Unfortunately, in most cases, all this boils down to endlessly circling in a painful attempt to express the term consciousness and its derivatives, through other words of Russian, English and even German. It turns out something like (this is from one such article):

Consciousness is all that you feel (based on information from sensory sensory organs), and then you experience (through perception and comprehension).

It seems that everything is right and you can’t even argue. But what's the point? Any self-respecting geek is interested in something completely different. I wonder how his geek's mind can be saved for the future? Is it possible to copy it to another medium? And then what will happen to the original?

Questions, it must be said, are quite vital. Human and even geek's life is finite, while life itself is becoming more interesting and exciting. Accordingly, I really want to get at least a carcass, at least a stuffed animal, at least a silicon chip into this future life (Kurzweil approves and really wants to).





But for this, it is also necessary to find out where, what and how.



Therefore, in order not to go into useless reasoning, I had to resort to the help of people who were reasonable and well-known in these areas, such as:

• Antonio Damasio - Director, Brain Institute (USA)
• Stanislas Dean - mathematician and neurobiologist (France)
• Vileyanur Ramachandran - the wizard of neuroscience with a needle and a hammer
• David Eagleman - Scientist Neurologist, Philosopher

I must say that earlier in the academic environment, such general excursions were not very welcome, and you would hardly have received grants on the topic of how the brain generates its subjective point of view, even as a world-famous scientist. Until the end of the nineties, only philosophers were allowed to tryndet on this subject, and their colleagues severely spread rot for it psychologists and neuro biologists. As Stanislas Dean writes:

In 1980, when I was a university student, I was surprised to find that it was impossible to pronounce the word “c” at meetings in the laboratory. Of course, we all studied consciousness in one way or another — for example, we asked the participants in an experiment to categorize what they saw or to imagine different images in the dark — however, the word itself remained a taboo and never appeared in serious scientific works. Apart from a few major exceptions, the scientific community believed that the term "consciousness" has no value for psychology. Cognitive science, which was born in those years, described mental activity exclusively from the point of view of information processing, as well as processes accompanying this at the molecular and neural level. Nobody gave definitions to consciousness, this term is outdated and nobody needed it anymore.

Now the situation, it seems, has changed in the sense that neuroscientists and psychologists do not hit each other in the head, and, having united in scientific teams and armed with advanced scientific equipment, try to solve the riddle of consciousness and at least use it is already allowed. Another thing is that their studies (those that the journal Nature allows you to publish) are still very specialized and their names sound something like: "Serotonin stimulates the formation of new mitochondria in neurons." Or a lot of work is going on purely on medical topics, such as: "Alzheimer's disease and methods of its treatment." It seems to be about the brain and about consciousness (more precisely, about its degeneration), but somehow from the wrong side. And even very well-known scientists themselves prefer to flood their works with interesting, but particulars, and they begin to argue comprehensively and about everything only in popular science books (unless, of course, they are written). Books, it’s kind of like for the people, you won’t lose reputation because of them in your circles (they won’t merge karma) . David Eagleman, he generally tensed up and started a six-part cycle about our brain and consciousness on the Air Force; but this movie is true for the most taut comrades who do not like to read his books.



And only philosophers in the manner of Daniel Dennett continue to reason about consciousness globally, whose most original thoughts, such as that “conceptually“ I ”resembles the center of gravity of a complex object - the only imaginary point at which its many vectors intersect”, are readily quoted, but the works themselves are read by the people much less willingly. But the reason is the same - the theory, even the most sophisticated one, even from Dennett does not go into practice; we can neither transfer or copy consciousness, nor create an artificial analogue. The question is why? Is it really that hard?



Some say yes, too complicated. Like, the human brain is the most complicated thing that exists in our Universe, and we still don’t know its structure. Or how do you like this thought - in order to know the work of the brain, you need to own a cognitive device, or, in fact, a brain that is much ahead of the object being studied. In short, our destiny is to deal with the brains of crayfish as much as possible, but there is nothing to do with ours. Someone is trying to stick quantum effects to consciousness, it seems that on the grounds that since quantum entanglement is something mysterious and incomprehensible, then consciousness, like the same mysterious and incomprehensible substance, is also somehow connected with all this.



But it seems that these are just pathetic excuses. For such neglected cases, mankind has long invented abstraction, and vice versa, the division into components. As if the immateriality of mental processes now also doesn’t particularly scare anyone in connection with the spread of computer literacy in the academic scientific environment. I'm not talking about technical means somehow:

• Magnetic resonance imaging
• Magnetic encephalography
• Electrodes in the brain
• Good old electroencephalography
• TMS - Transcranial Stimulation
• Needle and hammer (Dr. Vileyanur Ramachandran)

Of course, tools are a useful thing, but the very direction of scientific research should play a decisive role. So to speak - where to dig. A man, a creature like this - give him a needle, build a whole system of Chinese acupuncture, plus the theory of energy meridians and the flow of Qi through them. Well, our brain likes to derive any theoretical sequences from all that it feels through its senses. Fortunately, just the presence of good and suitable practical tools helps to return from heaven to earth and cut off, so to speak, excessive intellect.



Of course, Dr. Ramachandran and his colleagues are the easiest to do. Since he is said to be too old-fashioned for all these tomographs-encephalographs, he prefers to work the old fashioned needle and neurological hammer. Very healthy people are not interested in him, but:

I usually consider patients who have brain damage due to strokes, tumors or head injuries, resulting in problems of perception and consciousness. Also, sometimes I come across people who at first glance do not have damage or abnormalities in the brain, but who talk about their very unusual mental experiences and perceptions. In any case, the procedure remains unchanged: I interview them, observe their behavior, conduct some simple tests, if possible, examine their brain and then put forward a hypothesis that connects psychology and neurology, in other words, a hypothesis that connects behavioral oddities with violations in complex brain system

In principle, the reasoning is quite logical. Any engineer knows that one of the ways to determine a malfunction in a device is to disable suspicious blocks in turn. In humans, such experiments are not particularly welcome, so patients who selectively damage some parts of the brain themselves are to blame for this , can be a real treasure to an inquisitive scientist.



But in the direction of his technically armed colleagues, Dr. Ramachandran still looks. Because, for example, monkeys can be tortured even when the so-called mirror neurons were opened in them (monkeys) in the nineties, Ramachandran was able to draw very far-reaching conclusions from this discovery.



These mirror neurons are a very interesting thing. In the monkey’s brain, namely in the frontal lobes, there are certain nerve cells that are activated when the monkey performs a certain action. But as it turned out, in the same frontal lobes, there are neurons that are activated when the monkey sees how another primate performs the same action.

Hearing at the Rizzolatti lecture about this news, I almost jumped from my seat. These were not just command neurons, they were able to perceive the point of view of another animal. These neurons (in fact, the neural network to which they belong) for all their purposes and intentions were intended to read the mind of another monkey, to understand what it was going to do. This is necessary for social creatures such as primates.

Dr. Ramachandran jumped for a reason. He simply realized that the same mirror neurons should be in humans, as in older relatives of primates. Moreover, they and functions must perform more complex. And the doctor immediately thought, of course, about consciousness. Just kidding, not right away . But in the end, I got there too.



When scientists took up mirror neurons in earnest, it soon became clear that motor mirror neurons (that is, those that respond to actions) are not one of a kind. The same cells were found in the anterior cingulate cortex, but they were responsible for the sense of touch and pain. This has already been found out with people who underwent neurosurgical operations. Such operations are often performed when the patient is conscious. This is done so that the doctor during the operation does not cut off anything superfluous in the brain. There is a millimeter left and right and that's it, you are already a woman. Therefore, at first the necessary part of the brain is tickled with an electrode, and then they ask what, they say, did you feel? Out of the body? Okay, we are not deleting here.



Accordingly, if the doctor is a scientist, then during the operation he can extract scientific facts. And the facts turned out to be intriguing, some neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex were excited when they stroked and poked with a needle not of the patient himself, but of another person, but in his field of vision.

Just think about what that means! Each time you see someone doing something, the very same neurons that your brain would use as if you did it are activated. If you see another being poked with a needle, your pain neurons will work, as if it had been pierced by a needle. This is extremely interesting and raises some important questions. What prevents us from blindly imitating every action that we see? Or literally feel someone else's pain? In the case of motor specular neurons, one can answer that there may be frontal inhibitory sites that suppress automatic imitation when it is inappropriate. Paradoxically, this need to suppress unwanted or impulsive actions could be the main reason for the development of FREE WILL. Your left lower parietal lobe constantly evokes vivid images of the countless possibilities of action that are available in any context, and your frontal cortex suppresses them all but one.

A bit of offtopic, but if you somehow disable these frontal inhibitory sites, then theoretically you can arrange a good virtual reality.





They can be suppressed by transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS. Dress up the virtual helmet, push forward to WARCRAFT III. And if you still stimulate the area between the parietal and temporal lobes (though, electrodes are already needed here, so not everyone can do it, but epileptics rejoice), then you can achieve the additional effect of leaving the body. And since, "where our eyes and sensations are, there we are," it is theoretically possible to travel through virtual worlds and virtual bodies. We are, in fact, nothing more than “brains” in vats, according to most modern neuroscientists. Even without the use of punitive electrodes, if, for example, you are lying, and they press on your feet in a certain way, then soon it will begin to seem to you that you are no longer lying, but walking. By the way, the long-known effect was discovered by Soviet doctors and even used in practice for Soviet cosmonauts. There is nowhere to go in orbit, and a complete illusion is useful for mental health. And even TMS is not necessary.



But back to the scientific search for Dr. Ramachandran.



The obvious function of mirror neurons is that they allow you to guess the intentions of the person whose actions you see. And this is not as trivial as it might seem at first. In fact, you need to "get into his skin", to become this person in order to realize what he is going to do. Turtles are not available, in principle.



But in addition to this, our mirror neurons allow us not only to guess the intentions of another person, they give the opportunity to "guess" the intentions of ourselves!

And finally, despite the fact that the system of mirror neurons initially developed to create an internal model of the actions and intentions of other people, it could develop further, turning inward, imagining (or overrepresenting) the mind to itself.



...

And when the system of mirror neurons is thus turned inward to its own functioning, self-awareness appears.

But Dr. Ramachandran does not stop there. The real human consciousness (which none of our younger brothers certainly does not have), starting, so to speak, with the activity of mirror neurons, in the finale begins to build ideas about ideas, forming the so-called "second" brain "



more precisely:

At a very early stage of evolution, the brain developed the ability to create first-order sensory representations of surrounding objects. Such ideas can cause only a very limited number of reactions. For example, a rat’s brain creates only a first-order view of a cat as a fluffy moving object that must be avoided reflexively. However, the human brain moved further along the evolutionary path: a “second brain” arose, more precisely, a set of connections between cells, which in a sense “parasitized on the“ first one ”. This “second brain” creates meta representations (representations of representations — a higher level of abstraction), processing information received from the “first brain” into more manageable portions on which a wider range of more complex reactions can be built, including linguistic thinking and thinking by symbols. That's why, instead of a simple “furry enemy” like a rat, a cat is for us a mammal, a predator, a pet, an enemy of dogs and rats, a meowing creature with ears, a mustache and a long tail, it even reminds some of Holly Berry in a latex costume . The word "Cat" symbolizes for us a whole cloud of associations. In short, the “second brain” allocates an object with semantic meaning, creating a meta-representation that allows us to understand the concept of “cat” in a different way than a rat does.



...

We can manipulate the meta-representation of the highest level, and this is inherent only to people. They are associated with our sense of "I", allow us to conceptualize the world around us - both material and social, and self-identify with respect to it.

Ramachandran was somewhat lucky with this “second” brain because he was able to dig up a patient who, in his opinion, clearly demonstrates the “on” and “off” of this brain. The case, as they say, is really interesting. A person with damage to the cortex of the anterior part of the cingulate gyrus of the brain after a car accident lies three months in a row in a clinic. He doesn’t walk, but sleeps normally, is awake, watches his eyes with objects, and responds to pain. True, he does not make meaningful actions, does not speak, and does not recognize his dad. But as soon as dad calls him from the next room, the patient immediately becomes conscious, becomes very lively and talkative, recognizes dad and takes part in the conversation. Moreover, he can freely “switch” between these states, if only his father leaves or returns to the room.



In general, if the cortex of the front part of the cingulate gyrus is harder to damage, then a person will completely plunge into a minimal state of consciousness and will not even talk to anyone on the phone. But this patient was lucky. Although visual stimuli do not reach consciousness due to trauma (but the subconscious system works, it monitors objects), but the auditory canal acts. And accordingly, in contrast to visual, auditory stimuli activate the "second brain", which forms a meta idea of ​​who he is this patient, who his father is and so on. Since actually these ideas are connected with our sense of “I” and with our understanding of the world around us (where are we, who are our dad and mom, etc.).

But because our brain is essentially visual (a whole third of the brain is occupied only by video processes) and attaches primary importance to the processing of visual information, then without asking the patient, he switches to it and the poor fellow is again plunged into a twilight state, as soon as dad enters the room.



Immediately, the thought naturally arises, whether consciousness is in this particular front part of the cortex of the cingulate gyrus. Himself, by the way, Francis Crick (who invented DNA) was convinced that it was hiding somewhere nearby and until the last days convinced Dr. Ramachandran of this. But not convinced.



Still, even this front part, only part. An important, but still part of the larger network in which consciousness is born. So, on this, Dr. Ramachandran has slowed down. But his practical colleagues armed with modern technology go forward.



For example, comrade Stanislas Dean takes the approach of searching for the so-called "autographs of consciousness." Since conscious processes are only a small part of all processes in the brain, according to Dean, it is simply necessary to separate the signals emanating from the brain during conscious and unconscious reactions. Since this is fast (tens and hundreds of milliseconds), encephalography is better for collecting data.



Dean himself and his colleagues invented and developed many ingenious techniques that allow to register the signals of a specifically conscious process.



A typical experiment is as follows. The experimental rabbit in the face of a person is shown various images at the limit of its perception. If he notices them, then this is the work of consciousness, if not, the images spin at the entrance and do not enter the conscious experience. And no wonder, but the encephalograms are also different. And if we determine exactly which patterns are related to what:

The key idea, which opened before us the door to the previously considered inaccessible sanctuary of consciousness, was to create an experimental strategy of minimal contrast between conscious and pre-conscious perception. Over the years, through experiments, we have selected many opposites in which one state leads to conscious perception, the other does not. The terrible and terrible riddle of consciousness came down to an experimental decoding of the mechanisms by which the brain distinguishes between two samples, that is, to a much simpler problem.

Well, of course, Stanislas turned down about solving a terrible and terrible riddle, but the approach is interesting, moreover, without any metaphysical water. Again, modern equipment is used and grants are given without problems. And most importantly, his approach has already yielded very beautiful and ripe fruits of knowledge, which we will pick a little later.



His colleague, and you can say the philosophical antagonist Antonio Damasio (they always tease each other, and all because one respects Rene Descartes, and the other does not), decided to take a different path. So to speak from the basics. Started with a cell.Logically, it is alive and can even have a certain tropism - it swims for food if there is a flagellum or cilia, it shies away from danger. Whoever says that a person is not like that, let him throw a stone at me at Antonio Damasio.

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That is, in fact, this is the long-known slogan “be fruitful and multiply,” to which people then hanged many additional abstractions like patriotism and spiritual quests. Only, if God used to say it, now copyright is transferred to the cage. It is clear that Damasio cites the illustration “from the basics”, just for an example. But the main idea is this: to disassemble immediately and this is how the brain and consciousness of humanoid etta is still very complicated. It is necessary to start lower. Therefore, his next step nevertheless begins already with creatures at least possessing neurons, albeit in a small amount - with worms.





In this, he is probably right. Now, for example, if you take animals with a rank even lower for consideration, for example, jellyfish and others, then something will be completely trivial. The receptor neuron senses something in them (a tasty snack is nearby) and kicks the motor neuron. That is the whole process. But it becomes much more interesting if a third neuron - an intermediate one - is introduced between these neurons. It can transmit the signal from the receptor further, or it may not transmit - it depends on the state of many other intermediate neurons connected to it, but receiving their signals from other receptor neurons, say from those that respond to danger. As a result, it seems to be desirable to get a yummy, but it is impossible, because you are a yummy yourself. So, already in the worms such intermediate neurons are present,and later on, in more evolutionally advanced creatures, they unite in large clusters - nerve ganglia.

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And somewhere around the level of such a creature (he has not yet decided on insects) Antosha derives the concept of protosaminess. His main postulate is that the body always lies at the base of the psyche. And the psyche builds a map of the body. Where this body lies, how it is built, what it can perceive. The main goal for the body, of course, is the same - you need to eat and multiply urgently. But these neural structures that create maps of the body just create the original proto-“I” or proto-selves. True, everything is just beginning on it.

Immediate, wordless (indeed, where did the words come from) , an unembellished sensation of one's own body, connected with mere existence as such.

That’s what it is - protosamos. Many probably felt it on Saturday morning, after a reckless Friday. And accordingly, the structures from which it consists are located in the upper stem part of the brain, but below the level of the cortex (not surprisingly). Therefore, it is available (and, accordingly, the share of consciousness) to very many living beings.



Further, everything unfolds in earnest. With further evolutionary development, a basic self hatches out of protosamism, which is tied to actions. Especially on the connection of the body and the subject (for example, you on the bed and the kettle with water on the table). Here, the brain does not create a map of the body itself, but various maps of the interaction of the body with various useful and useless objects.



And finally, the turn of the autobiographical self is determined through biographical knowledge connected with the past and predicting the future. This is when you recall everything that you did yesterday, and what your “I” will be for it on Monday (or in the words of Dr. Ramachandran, you turn on the “second” brain).



Eventually:

The proto-self with the simplest sensations and the basic self is the “physical self.” The autobiographical self takes above and embraces all aspects of a person’s social personality, giving rise to a “social” and “spiritual“ I ”.

And then where is the consciousness? And how does it compare with the self? Does it flow out of self? As I finally understood, if in simple words and in Russian, then by the self Damascio understands feelings of oneself. If protosamos, then this is a feeling of oneself as a body. If basic, then already as bodies in the world (interacting with other objects). Well, the autobiographical characteristic of higher animals and humans - this is understandable, you can not repeat it.



So it turns out that his consciousness is a kind of cast from the self, it’s just that, in terminology, the self is initially more strongly attached to the “hard”, that is, to the body, and the consciousness further gravitates toward the “software”, to the neural processes themselves.



Having dealt with the self, Damasio further leaves our smaller brothers and attacks directly the consciousness, namely, the psyche endowed with consciousness (in fact, high-level neural processes). And of all the previously indicated, he uses, by and large, only the concept of cards that our brain builds and remembers for any reason, starting from a card of our own body and to cards of everything that surrounds us and even to cards of other cards, including our own own maps (continuous reflection, recursion and the “second” brain of Dr. Ramachandran).



But the main assertion of our scientist is that consciousness is connected not only with the cerebral cortex, but also thoroughly sits on the subcortical structures (in fact, they generate it). And our "I" grows from there.



In support of his point of view, Antoine brings children. But special children - with hydroencephaly. These children are doing well, only the cerebral cortex is absent. But they themselves are really well - they sleep, stay awake, laugh, if they are tickled. They are able to keep an eye on objects and even show preferences for music. According to doctors, the fact that these children show signs of mental processes is beyond doubt. And even when they have an epileptic seizure, they, like “normal” epileptics, lose consciousness (no matter how limited it is), and then “return” But they do all this purely by the subcortical structures, which is called the reptilian brain (there’s no cortex )



According to Damasio, this is a good example of the work of the basic self. And if people have it, then naturally it should be in the same reptiles. We just don’t understand when the lizard, in our opinion, is having fun. But now, if elephant turtles suddenly have sex outside the window of your room in the Seychelles, then you will immediately understand what they do, even if you do not see them. You can’t hear such a passionate lowing even at Emmanuel.





Now let's try to move a little further. In general, all the aforementioned scientists agree that:

1) the term “consciousness” is too overloaded,

2) consciousness is not an object, not a permanent property, but a process,

3) consciousness is based on a material substrate (crusts, subcrusts are already details) .

And by the way, the congestion of this term previously led to such desperate cries of the soul:

“Consciousness is the ability to perceive, think and feel; awareness. The term cannot be defined without the use of concepts that would not be intelligible (one must definitely call Zadornov’s spirit, the death of the intelligentsia is clearly visible here) in relation to what constitutes consciousness ... There is nothing worse than reading what they write about him. ”

Stuart Sutherland. Consciousness. Dictionary of Psychology, 1996

And it was not so long ago. In general, it is clear why the academic environment did not particularly like this term.

But since, thanks to scientific and technological progress, we have literally learned to look under the shard and get empirical data from there, it is high time to unload the definition of “consciousness” to the original designers of Nature's encoder and see what it refers to.



To begin with, you can remove the definition of consciousness as a general condition: "Being in consciousness and sober memory, Rodion Raskolnikov hit the old woman with an ax." It also makes no sense to dwell on the above-mentioned consciousness in Sutherland's quote, as the ability to perceive, think and feel. This is again too global a scope that includes active attention (for perception), the presence of memory, and preferably culture and language (for thinking). And, if also with the sensations, emotions and motivations that will be needed in order to feel, then in the end we will go so far that we will not be able to figure out the latest generation tomograph. It's too early. And in general, the main drawback of detailed philosophical definitions is the lack of concrete practical conclusions, and we need them.



Therefore, we need a terminological definition of consciousness from a practical point of view, and historically, of course, this is the point of view of medicine. Not even psychiatry proper, but specifically such terrestrial medicine, the help of which is required when a person with a different degree of intensity hits his head with something solid. Or when humane doctors give him anesthesia, and he doesn’t sleep and gives advice on how best to perform the operation. Or a rich topic of strokes, which do not do anything with the consciousness of the recipient. And what can we say about epileptics, with electrodes in their heads, which they themselves are unaware of, moving science forward by leaps and bounds.



It is clear that the doctors themselves do not need philosophical reasoning. They need to know what specific area of ​​the brain needs to be cut down during anesthesia so that the patient then returns back. Which part of the brain is affected by a stroke, accident, or the like can be removed, and which is better not to touch at all.



Here, medicine has a lot of things in store for inquiring minds: confused consciousness, limited consciousness (drowsiness, torpor and stupor), a minimal consciousness, a permanent vegetative state of consciousness, pseudocom, coma. For modern neurobiologists, this is simply not a field plowed for countless experiments (especially for Ramachandran).



But they started, naturally, with the consciousness of a healthy person. Specifically, staying awake or active in consciousness.



Since, of course, it is easier with him (a healthy person): he does not resist, doesn’t tear anywhere, and even lays down in a tomograph, gives even subjective, but objectively recorded indications and reactions to various experimental stimuli. Again, clinics and mental hospitals do not need to travel with equipment.





Therefore, scientists, and in particular the team of Stanislas Dean, which was already mentioned, began with this.



So, if our patient is alive, healthy and awake, then his attention can be attracted by an appropriate stimulus (call by name behind his back, suddenly show a picture on the monitor in front of him), and then observe how this stimulus will pass into his person, a conscious experience. Or it won’t pass if he doesn’t hear his name behind the general noise or the picture on the monitor flashes in no more than 50 milliseconds.



What is this conscious experience and access to it? In fact, this is the simplest and most practical definition of consciousness. This is when something external (but it may well be internal) attracts our attention, comes to the fore and turns into a mental or figurative object that we hold in our attention for some time. We can mentally “twist” this object, move from it to another object somehow associated with it (associatively or directly), which in turn will immediately come to the fore. But the previous object will either remain in short-term memory (of which we have registers, alas, no more than seven) and only then it will be erased by the following objects, or it will go into long-term memory.



And this retention and “scrolling” is conscious perception, as opposed to unconscious, because in reality we are bombarded not by one, but by a myriad of potential objects consisting of visual, auditory and other sensations, not to mention mental objects wishing to emerge for some reason from the depths of our subconscious. And in this state we are constantly, if we do not sleep and do not lie in a swoon. Something always comes to our foreground and scrolls on it. Dean, by the way, believes that self-awareness also passes in exactly the same way as awareness, for example, of light or sound. That is, we bring our “I” to the forefront in the same way and how to twist it later!

But then the question immediately arises, and how then selection from these myriads of potential objects occurs. After all, our brain simply needs to carry out a categorically rigorous selection so as not to drown in the information noise. This is exactly what happens.

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With the presence of unconscious filters it seems clear. But how do they work? It turns out differently. Some filters are sewn into us genetically over millions of years of evolution. If, for example, you are a female person and you see a snake crawling into the frame out of the corner of your eye, then, first, you will reflexively look at it, and then the neurons of the visual cortex, while still passing consciousness, will give a kick to the amygdala (responsible, among other things, for feeling of fear), which in turn activates many systems throughout your body, including the inclusion of an audible alarm. And only then you will understand that you see a snake and you are very scared. For peasants, this, however, works differently, they instinctively (that is, unconsciously) begin to fumble with their hands around, apparently in search of something heavy. A snake is meat!

Or here is a man who sells his two hundredth Landcruiser for a month already for a month. Already it seems that he doesn’t even think much about him. But for some reason, he constantly encounters this topic. And on the road they regularly come across him, and in conversations of strangers he hears about them and sees on TV. And how will it go on the Internet in general, extinguish the light (although, we apologize - this is contextual advertising). Are Australopithecus two million years ago banned by Kruzak and since then it was sewn into DNA?



On the one hand, you will go to the car market and, as they say, you will quite believe in that. But science claims that if we do something repeatedly at a conscious level: we learn to type blindly on computers or play chess, or just try to sell a corn machine for a long time, then these actions will completely descend to the level of the subconscious and wait there for their time. And earlier, we would not have paid attention to which car drove nearby, but the subconscious filter is already configured and ready to go.



Even Stanislas will confirm:

Take, for example, the acquisition of a motor skill such as typing blindly. At the first attempt, we act slowly, carefully, carefully monitoring each movement. But a few weeks go by and we type very easily, automatically, without being conscious of the layout of the keys, while we ourselves are having a conversation or thinking about some extraneous things. Studying what happens during behavior automation allows scientists to shed light on what happens during the transition from the conscious to the unconscious. It turns out that this very simple (aha, it would seem) transition is associated with the operation of an extensive network of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and especially those sections of the prefrontal cortex that are excited whenever access to conscious experience

By the way, I mentioned the game of chess for good reason. Of course, I can’t vouch for ordinary chess players, but grandmasters analyze chess positions on a subconscious level. But chess is not only motor skills, you have to think about it. And the grandmaster’s brain thinks the same way, but only the results of thoughts come to the champion’s conscious experience. That is, the grandmaster just suddenly sees that the position is dangerous. And he sees this without conscious thought, just looking around the board.



Moreover, we can even perform mathematical calculations on a subconscious level. Dean and the team conducted a lot of interesting experiments on this subject and found out that people calmly operate in the subconscious with numbers up to ten. Not a lot, but people were the most ordinary. Stanislas didn’t get to mathematicians, but, for example, the great Poincare himself (through whom our Grisha Perelman also became great) wrote this and more than once:

“At this time, I left Kahn, where I then lived to take part in a geological excursion organized by the Mining Institute. Amid the ups and downs of the road, I forgot about my mathematical work; upon arrival in Coutances we took an omnibus for a walk; and at that moment when I put my foot on the omnibus step, an idea came to my mind although my previous thoughts had nothing to do with it - that the transformations that I used to define Fuchsian functions are identical to the transformations of non-Euclidean geometry. I have not tested this idea; I did not have time for this, because, as soon as I sat in the omnibus, I resumed the conversation, nevertheless I immediately felt full confidence in the correctness of the idea. Returning to Kang, I did a check; the idea was right. ”

But according to David Eagleman, we generally spend most of our lives in such a semi-conscious zombie-like state (if we don’t learn something new). And our selective filters work and transfer third-party objects to the area of ​​conscious access only if the input signals violate expectations. If they coincide with them, then no need to raise alarm, there is no danger, we sleep further.



It’s like if we went to work by car on the same road, and now, because of road repairs, we went along the new route. For the first time, you will be very careful, but taking a ride along this path several times will safely “type” the path into your neural circuits and will drive, as they say, mechanically. The road will become familiar again and the objects falling on it will not disturb your selective filters. And such processes of “imprinting” are ongoing in our brain. We either use already debugged developments, or learn new ones and send them down to the subconscious again. And this applies to literally all aspects of our lives: studying at the university, working, meeting people and talking with people, crossing the street in the wrong place, in general, everything that we deal with in this life.



By and large, this is only a matter of spending energy and reaction time to events. If we do something consciously, then we do it slowly and spend a lot of energy (literally), but it’s worth driving that we need to the subconscious, the process becomes an order of magnitude faster and sometimes even starts to give pleasure.



And what happens to “imprinted” chains over time, especially since the brain’s resources, it seems, are not infinite. Well, those that are sewn at the genetic level will remain with you until the end of your life. Motor reflexes will remain almost as long (and the pens remember). Therefore, if you have learned to ride a bicycle and play table tennis, then you are unlikely to unlearn it. But processes of a higher order, such as playing chess and practicing mathematics, those, yes, in the absence of practice, will gradually disappear from the subconscious level. Have to learn again.





Although, of course, experiments with grandmasters and mathematicians are interesting, they are not very practical for an inquisitive researcher. It turns out too many variables in the equations of the conscious and unconscious and too few chess champions for serious statistics. Yes, and they are busy people, generally speaking. It’s better to return to simple experiments with showing simple pictures to ordinary people on the verge of perception.



But unlike earlier experiments of the seventies and eighties, this time the Dean team acquired modern magnetoencephalographs and advanced versions of the good old electroencephalographs. Compared to tomography, these devices have a much worse spatial resolution (since there are not so many sensors), but a much better temporary resolution (calmly to microseconds). Since the reactions to the stimulus are quite short-lived (like the stimulus itself), this choice was justified.



And what did the researchers see during the experiments?



Avalanche of consciousness



And they saw a clear separation of processes. Although a person does not see the picture (if it is shown for a little less than 50 ms), information about it will still go to the primary visual cortex and the area around it. But spinning there, the neural pulse pretty quickly faded in half a second. But, if the stimulus lasted longer, then at some point the activation began to grow and capture the higher visual structures of the cortex, which, among other things, are connected with the division of objects into categories. Subject suddenly “recognized” the image in the picture.



Awareness of pictures with words was even more interesting, where the waves began to walk almost throughout the cortex, naturally running into the zones responsible for understanding and shaping speech.

Records made with the help of equipment showed that the brain was rebuilt suddenly and very quickly, suddenly it began to see and realize the invisible. At the very beginning, in the primary visual area, the level of activity was the same regardless of whether the word was visible or invisible. Like any visual stimulus, conscious and unconscious words provoke the appearance of a continuous stream of brain waves in the back of the visual cortex. But after a few hundredths of a second, the nature of the activity changes dramatically. Somewhere between 200 and 300 milliseconds, if you count from the beginning of the process, brain activity decreases if the word was perceived unconsciously, and continues to spread towards the front parts of the brain if the word was realized. About 400 milliseconds later, the difference becomes simply enormous: only a consciously perceived word can cause intense activity in the left and right frontal lobes, in the anterior cingulate cortex and in the parietal cortex. The transition from the unconscious to the conscious is amazingly fast, especially when you consider that the initial stimuli in the case of conscious and unconscious perception were absolutely identical. In less than one tenth of a second, between 200-300 milliseconds from the moment the stimulus appeared, the instruments recorded a transition from an absolutely identical reaction to diametrically opposite variants of the development of the situation. It looked as if at first both words activated the visual cortex in the same way, however, in the case of conscious perception, a wave of activity grew, broke into the frontal and parietal structures and suddenly captured a significant part of the cortex. In the case of unconscious perception, on the contrary, the wave remained in the rear systems, and the consciousness not affected by it did not receive information about what happened.



However, unconscious activity did not fade away immediately. For half a second, the waves of the unconscious wandered within the left temporal lobe, in the areas responsible for understanding the meaning of the word. An unconscious interpretation occurs in the temporal lobe, but conscious perception arises only when this interpretation is distributed within the frontal and parietal lobes.

An interesting conclusion was that consciousness enters the process quite late, that is, at least 0.3 seconds, the information received wanders somewhere on the lower floors of our brain.



For some reason, the experiment of Professor Benjamin Libet immediately comes to mind, which in 1983 forced the subjects to raise their fingers “at will,” while he himself recorded their brain activity and where the same three hundred milliseconds suddenly appeared. The essence of the experiment was this: a volunteer hung with sensors was asked to lift his finger when he “wanted”, but at the same time inform the experimenter about this desire. In other words, to fix the time when he wanted to do it. The experiment then made a lot of noise, because brain activity began just three hundred milliseconds before the subject informed that he was going to raise his finger. This result aroused such interest because, they say, showed that even our simplest conscious actions are actually predetermined. That is, we think that we are making a choice, while in reality our brain (subconscious) has already made this choice.





Is there any connection with Dean’s experiments or is this 300 ms just a coincidence? It seems that there is, but in the case of a professor, an important reservation must be made. Libet introduced the “desire” factor into the experiment and immediately changed everything. The feeling of “desire”, despite its seeming simplicity (well, what’s complicated, really: you want and want), in fact, for our brain is a complex action proceeding at both the neural and physiological and chemical levels (we isolate hormones, where without them). We see a woman and we want to possess her, we see food and we want to devour her. And what do we want at the sight of Professor Libet? See what's the matter. Not so easy to figure out.



But if you think about it, then probably we don’t want to upset the professor. An authoritative person, he spent time on us, maybe he even paid money for the experiments, it will be somehow embarrassing if you never lift a finger. Therefore, we need to lift the finger not too often, but not very rarely. And now our unconscious selective filter begins to look at the professor's face (suddenly already angry), and also look for any other triggers to allow him to take the indicated action. But we ourselves do not think about it. Until suddenly we lift a finger. And here they are native three hundred milliseconds. That is, it turns out that the experiment of Professor Libet only demonstrates the work of access to conscious experience, just from a different angle.



But why is it needed then



Here, it seems, specialists have no special interpretations. Especially when approached from a global evolutionary point of view. And it’s just clearly seen from it that consciousness is the most advanced way of epigenetic (not through genes) transmission of information accumulated by an individual during its existence. But even here, to the transmission of vertical information from parents to children, a nice bonus is the horizontal transmission of information, so to speak, within the group. The meaning, of course, is the same - multiply and occupy all possible ecological niches. It would seem that some renegade, having realized himself and having understood the meaninglessness of life, will spit on this main meaning and will not multiply. Here, it seems, only harm from consciousness. Well, so what. This individual will die sooner or later, and his more mundane relatives will continue their genetic line. Natural selection in action!



Information can be obtained through a personal example and mirror neurons, as Dr. Ramachandran says, and to build further with their help new cards (heard from Damasio). But it is much more convenient, of course, to receive it as complete semantic blocks, that is, through speech. The same social overpowers, but with no such thing as lions, are regularly dishonored on the hunt (thanks to the National Geo Wild channel for providing the video), despite all their flocking skills. Up to the efficiency of at least a group of Bushmen hunters for poor lions, as before the Moon.





But even at the level of not such advanced beings as we, the consciousness growing on the basic self is very functional and useful. It initiates the learning process, which in turn is closely related to memory. The organism begins to live not only in the stream here and now, but can now remember the past (pleasant and unpleasant) and predict the future (so that there is more pleasant). But in order to remember something, this object is necessary one way or another, but to introduce conscious experience - “twist it in front of you”. It is difficult to say what the turtle is spinning in front of it, but nevertheless, some analogue of conscious experience should be in its possession.



Well, for people, of course, everything goes beyond all sorts of limits. In addition to transmitting information at the social level, they extended processes over time, creating a culture (in the most general sense of the word). Our books are everything.



And, if we still talk about computers ... Indeed, this thing (we do not yet touch on new trends, such as neural networks and other things) carries out a chain of actions, exactly the way our consciousness does when meeting a new object - step by step, with remembering their actions and the results they bring. And when we need such consistent actions - the computer is our best assistant and we can scale these actions to sky-high heights, yes, in fact, we built our modern civilization on this. Having learned the “skill”, that is, writing and debugging the code or downloading it somewhere ready-made, we then send it to the “subconscious” - now we just need to click the mouse and get the result. It’s just that now we get this result through a slow natural interface - with our eyes, but in the future, who knows, maybe the brain is directly legitimate through neuroUSB 99.0, the same result will simply “appear” in our memory. You looked at the quadratic equation for a couple of seconds and said: "and his roots are complex."



That is, consciousness is initially a purely utilitarian thing and intended for the well-being of our species, and what we personally attribute to it there ourselves (divine and spiritual) is, as they say, our problems.



So how does it work



Well, if functionally, at the level of large blocks, then this has been dealt with more or less.





Do not be alarmed, this is just the monkey's visual system



It is not possible to flicker here, because, as already mentioned, encephalography, even though magnetic, even electric, does not differ in high spatial resolution, and tomography does not have time in time, because the processes are fast.But, if you use everything together and carefully, and even use TMS to turn off small areas of the brain, as well as electrodes to stimulate them, then the scientists have long drawn up a general block diagram of the brain.







But here, precisely that of the brain. And therefore, an important reservation must be made here, but is the work of the brain equivalent in any way to the work of consciousness?Alas, neuroscientists, on this score, have no consensus. Because, on the one hand, we directly see the work of large blocks of the brain with the help of equipment and are sure that they are based on something material, it means that it is entirely in our power to simulate all this on an artificial hardware. And if we cannot repeat this, it means that we either simply do not yet know some important, but details, or the work of the brain is not equivalent to the work of consciousness . And since the Nobel, so far no one has been handed over to this, the skeptics' doubts are still justified.



The most weakling in this regard was David Eagleman. On the one hand, he, like everyone else, categorically agrees that the state of the brain key determines the state of the psyche.

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In this, of course, he is not alone. Everyone agrees that injuries, illnesses, drugs, booze can completely change the essence of a person. Change to such an extent that people close to him will literally claim that he is not him. But on the other hand, David insists that although consciousness depends on the state of the parts of the brain, it is not equivalent to its parts. The statement, in general, long ago known in the philosophical arrangement: "the whole is not equal to its components."



Accordingly, Eagleman reproaches everyone else who is trying to divide the brain into pieces and trying to understand the whole from them, in materialistic reductionism. He himself leaves a loophole, saying that science in his person simply does not have such tools so far, on the basis of the work of the brain, to gain an understanding of the work of consciousness. But in the future, they say, may appear. Because, as Arthur Clark used to say: “any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic” and we need to somehow wait for this magic over time. And now the complexity of the system that we are so colossal that it does not differ from the magic. So for now, it turns out hello to the soul, and we "only catch the glimpses of the infinity of the inner space." In short, shame and shame.



Oddly enough, Dr. Ramachandran also did not go far from this. But at least I didn’t attract magic, and thanks for that. So the quintessence of his reasoning seems to be logical and material.

The conscious “I” is not something like a “core” or a special quintessence that sits on a special throne in the center of the nervous labyrinth, but it is also not a property of the whole brain. On the contrary, it seems that a person arises from a relatively small group of brain regions that are connected into a surprisingly powerful network. Identifying these sites is very important as this will help narrow your search. In the end, we know for sure that the liver and spleen have no consciousness, only the brain possesses it. We simply take a step further and affirm that only some parts of the brain are conscious. Find out exactly which parts and what exactly take the first step to understanding consciousness.

Yes, how much can these first steps be taken? Where are the second and third?

Alas, according to Ramachandran, the state of affairs in neurobiology now is like a state of affairs in chemistry under the old man Mendeleev. We discovered basic elements, classified them into groups, how they interact - we study them. But the atomic theory is still a long way off (the doctor is not a chemist, he can be forgiven). So, we are "angels hidden in the body of animals, always striving to overcome their borders." Wonderful.



In contrast to all this, Antonio Damasio categorically states that he discovered and explained everything (joke). And all this confusion with the consciousness of an egg is not worth a damn. Physicists were surprised before that an electron is both a particle and a wave. But, nothing, they are used to it. Although it is impossible to realize with our worldly reason. In life, we have no such examples and analogies. Even Richard Feynman himself will not let you lie:

“Quantum mechanics gives a completely absurd description of Nature from the point of common sense. But it is fully consistent with the experiment. Therefore, one should accept Nature as It is - absurd. ”

I just want to add Tertulian with his “Credo quia absurdum!”.



In fact, of course, it’s not so categorical, but the main essence is just that - you can understand, and most importantly, you can understand in the framework of the paradigms of modern science. No need to attract future magic. That is, the question is not whether the answers will be found, but when they will be found. Moreover, the time frame is set quite reasonable - ten, twenty years. Meanwhile, the words "neurobiological processes generate consciousness" will become familiar as an electron and hearing will not be cut.



Accordingly, Damasio stands on a strict position about the equivalence of the state of the brain and the state of mental (or, in other words) consciousness. Another thing is that consciousness, as a thing very developed in some creatures, can provide powerful feedback on the biological structures of the brain and thus blur the overall picture. And now, they say, this "lubrication" and scares scientists like David Eagleman. Therefore, you just need to consider mental and neural activity as two sides of the same process. And do not be afraid.



And the activity of mental processes in itself, although complex (very), is nonetheless accessible for understanding.





Well, and so, how about all the same with the pressing issues of creating artificial consciousness, since we already know everything. Take your time, Antoine answers, here we map everything completely, but run the simulation on the computer, so it will arise there. Like an electron.



So you have to wait another twenty years. The main thing is not to die yourself during this time. And then there will be nothing to create artificial copies from.



What does our last hope, Stanislas Dean, tell us? But he, oddly enough, is more optimistic. He is promoting the hypothesis of a “global workspace” to the masses.

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Unlike Dr. Ramachandran, who proposes to narrow the search, Deas, on the contrary, presses on the need to expand it. So it makes sense, for example, if we narrow (sequentially turn off) the higher areas of the brain, then we will not see an abrupt change, such as consciousness and suddenly disappeared. True, such experiments in humans are not carried out (sort of), but old Alzheimer will not let you lie. With his active participation, consciousness and cognitive abilities disappear gradually.





And even at the seventh stage, there are at least miserable but remnants (the state of a newborn baby according to Dick Swaab).



So global workspace

What is included in it? And almost all areas of the cerebral cortex (not badly expanded so, yes). And this, by the way, is not surprising, we have nothing superfluous there. Everything is honed to the minimum necessary for millions of years of evolution.

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If in a simple way, then it all works as follows. For example, the parts of the cortex that are responsible for visual perception continuously “vote” on the basis of the received data (images from the retina), whether they see lines, background transitions from light to dark, and so on. The hierarchical regions located above compare this data with what is already “sewn” into memory. If there is no big mistake when comparing and the image, for example, is defined as a face, then the voting begins on those sites that are responsible for recognizing specific faces. If a discrepancy is recorded (not a face, but an oval with two holes), other areas associated, for example, with geometric shapes, begin to be excited. This is done until the error becomes minimal and we suddenly do not understand that we are seeing a page from Kepler’s treatise with a picture of an ellipse in the foci of which the Sun and the Earth are drawn. Or vice versa, the physiognomy of the astronomer himself.



And what does "suddenly understand" mean? That is the whole point. This means that only neural chains associated with an ellipse are now excited, while other chains (associated with faces) are silent. This process is not discrete, but smooth, it takes about three hundred milliseconds, for which neural chains associated with an ellipse begin to vote at a frequency of 40 hertz (gamma rhythm) as announced, forming the very brain wave from Dean’s experiments, while the rest of the chains fall silent.



But we described this the most truncated and simplest option. In fact, such a system works globally. We not only recognize images. We act in space and time. Therefore, thousands, if not tens of thousands of neural circuits, continuously “vote”. And some of them will certainly capture and give rise to a wave propagating throughout the working neural space. And in front of our mental gaze, a mental object suddenly pops up and starts spinning.



And if we relaxed in a familiar atmosphere and do not think anything? Selective filters are silent; they don’t deliver anything to our conscious experience. What then? Can’t we even get out of the couch? Despite all the naivete, the question is still interesting.



Well, firstly, sooner or later, the underlying organs, such as the stomach and bladder, will recall their existence and will enter our conscious experience in the form of images of a hamburger or toilet bowl. But even without this, so-called endogenous activity exists in our brain - the thalamus constantly inhibits the prefrontal and lumbar (again it) regions of the cortex. As a result, spontaneous activity at a high level regularly occurs, which then spreads down to sensory levels. It turns out a kind of access to conscious experience on the contrary. In simple words, if you have a spontaneous image of the solar disk, it literally means that the high-level pattern of the sun went into the underlying visual cortex and excited it in exactly the same way as it would have made a real display of the sun on the retina (do not repeat this experiment). The same thing happens with speech - we hear an inner voice, a pattern of which can spontaneously arise in the higher cortical regions, and then excite the auditory cortex, which will reproduce it as if someone would say it next to us. Naturally, normal people have inhibition mechanisms (Ramachandran calls them inhibitory) that allow us to distinguish between the inner voice and the external. But some are especially lucky with this (hello to schizophrenics) and they can enjoy other people's voices in their heads constantly.



Moreover, if endogenous activity for some reason (injury) does not occur, a person is immersed in a coma. Cunning doctors compared the facts and managed to bring to consciousness several patients lying in a coma, stimulating the cortical thalamus loop - the cortex. It is clear that all patients cannot be cured in this way, since there can be many causes of coma, but nevertheless even this particular success is surprising.



In accordance with the foregoing, it can also be suggested that comrades called Indian yogis could purposefully stop the endogenous activity of their brains through their mysterious training.







With the ultimate goal of achieving nirvana. But real nirvana (the coolest - nirvikalpa samadhi) on the physical level, alas, means death, no matter how modern glamorous yogis are indignant. A true professional has been preparing for this state for many years. And that’s all - it’s single. People around just see that a friend is lying with a blissful smile and breathing quietly. Some time. But now we know why.

A boat that has fallen into the "black waters" can no longer return. No one knows what happens to her after that. Therefore, the boat can not tell us about the ocean. Once a salt doll decided to measure the depth of the ocean. But as soon as she entered the water, she melted right away. Who will now tell us about its depth? The one who could tell has melted. Upon reaching the seventh level, the mind is destroyed, a person enters samadhi. What he then feels cannot be described in words. Some ordinary people achieve samadhi through spiritual discipline, but they do not return.

True, it is alleged that some (bodhisattvas) can return from Nirvana and carry, so to speak, the light of the teachings to others, but we are aware that some comrades and people went by water, judging by the stories, and the others looked at the mountain.



But let’s leave the backward past and return to modern individuals and their theory of neural workspace.

So, consciousness is an exchange of information that encompasses the entire brain. Effective networks have developed in the human brain, and especially in the prefrontal cortex, that transmit information over long distances. The task of these networks is to select important data and disseminate it to all brain structures. Consciousness is a developed tool that allows us to focus on a certain piece of information and maintain it in an active state within the framework of this transmitting system. Once the information is realized, it can be easily redirected to other areas in accordance with our current goals. We can give her a name, evaluate her, remember or use her in order to plan the future. On computer models of neural networks, it is clear that global neural workspaces generate the very autographs that we observe in experimental recordings of brain activity.

Wait a minute, what kind of computer models of neural networks are these? This is not what is connected with modern machine learning, and what dozens of articles come out about every day?



In general, no. Dean paired with some kind of French pretzel built just a computer simulation of his model. It cannot even be called a neural network as such, no matter what Dean himself calls it (he has neurons there in the form of equations). It does not recognize anything, it simply responds to an amplified input signal (electric current) in accordance with its hypothesis. Honestly, Dean's level of computer literacy leaves much to be desired.



Judge for yourself:

A computer program is organized rigidly, modularly: each operation is reduced to the fact that the machine receives certain data and converts it in accordance with strict rules, after which it issues strictly defined information. The speech processor can hold a piece of information (for example, a paragraph of text) for some time, and the computer as a whole cannot decide whether this piece of information is important from a global point of view, nor can it convey it to other programs. So it turns out that the computer thinks narrowly. In the work, he is close to perfection, However, information within one module, albeit arbitrarily smart, cannot be transferred to others. For the exchange of information in computer programs, there is perhaps such a rudimentary mechanism as the area of ​​data exchange, and even then this exchange takes place under the control of a reasonable deus ex machina - a person.

Some kind of kindergarten from the Faculty of Humanities.



But on the other hand, if you take only the Dean hypothesis itself (without implementation) and pass it into the hands of competent current programmers, it seems that it will be possible to achieve results and more interesting.



But still, even Stanislas Dean, despite all his optimism, is sometimes sad and asks “WHY ???”

Why does a subjective state of mind arise as a result of belated neural impulses, massive excitation of the cortex, and synchronous brain function? How do the processes in the brain, arbitrarily complex, create a mental experience? Why do neural impulses in the visual region of V4 give rise to color perception, and the same impulses in the V5 region give rise to a sense of movement? Neuroscientists have found many empirical connections between brain activity and mental life, but the conceptual gap between the brain and the mind has not diminished

Although it seems that Stanislas himself set out everything accessible in his theory of neural workspace, but the question nevertheless gnaws at him: “Well, how does it turn out like this? ". And just don’t tell him about the concept of qualia - a purely psychic experience, which he considers to be unscientific bizarre speculation.



But in the end, Dean still does not give up and offers to fill the conceptual gap between the brain and mind with a new theory. True, he does not know. But he believes that it should be mathematical. That is, it turns out all the same with the help of modern science, and not with the help of magic like that of Eagleman, which is at least a little comforting.



So what do we have in the end?



If we do not assume that we are in the nineteenth century and catch the glimpses of something majestic, then in general everything is not so bad, but on the contrary it is very promising and interesting.



Firstly, for a long time it is necessary to throw out the principle of holism or the concept of “the whole is more than its parts”, at least not to break the psyche of weak people, such as David Eagleman. The aircraft is “larger” than its constituent parts, but only because there is an external process (in the person of the creators of the aircraft) that these parts are brought together and not anyhow. A nuclear reactor is “larger than its parts” because smart people (the external process) substantiated its work theoretically, and then performed it in practice. It can be objected that a nuclear reactor can be assembled on its own, without the influence of an external force , but it is assembled anyway according to the physical laws of Mother Nature, otherwise it will not work. Another matter is where these laws come from, but here we risk going too far. Although it can be assumed that this is due to the geometric properties of the elements that make up the Universe, as many physicists now believe. For example, if your mini-universe consists of the smallest equilateral triangles (who said the strings?) , Then this will also be superimposed on the properties of macro objects. For example, constants “3” and “60” will constantly pop up. And if we make up a regular hexagon from these triangles (for which all angles are sharp), then it will be “larger” than its constituent parts — all corners will be obtuse. An example, as they say, is also stupid, but graphic.



Secondly, it is likely that the “conceptual gap between the brain and the mind” will disappear on its own as the gap between the states of a particle and a wave in the same long-suffering electron. No, of course, we are all human beings and therefore it is clear that we cannot get rid of the suspicion that the computer can only "imitate" human thinking. And the phrase “if something walks and quacks like a duck, then this is a duck” does not reassure us, because we somehow feel a certain internal subjective process in ourselves when we think, and are almost sure that this is impossible for a computer. It’s just an algorithm, a program, an imitation - in short, it’s still not “real”. This is the same as comparing our brain and encyclopedia. Both there and there information, but you see the difference! Well, in general, we see neuroscientists say languidly, and their words become less confident.



But it is thought that this is still the power of habit. Indeed, even if we take the theory of Dean’s workspace, it is quite possible to say that the neural chain that formed the wave of awareness simply causes the brain within which it is located to have a subjective sensation of thought. And that’s it.



Thirdly, in order to give objectivity to subjective sensations, so to speak (we still want to get to artificial consciousness), a new theory may really be required. And it’s likely even mathematical, as Dean suspects (mathematics is everything). Moreover, with sound reasoning, it should not be based directly on the work of neurons. This should be the next level of abstraction. Looking back at the neurons themselves, this is the same as if the future AI, which will replace humanity, will search for its soul in the registers of its processors. Hardware, of course, influences the program’s work, but in fact it only imposes some restrictions (speed of operations, data volume, available external devices, etc.), but otherwise the algorithm can frolic as it wants (Turing machine, for example, ) The same goes for neurons. The biological model imposes limitations of its level, but the functional work of the blocks that are built on it should only take these boundaries into account, but at the next level of abstraction, it can do what it wants (but actually, it wants evolution). Therefore, it is likely that the theory of the work of consciousness will be based on some new section of the theory of information. Well, and what - after all, consciousness is the exchange of information in the brain. So there is hope to do without magic.



So, can you create artificial consciousness? Well, sort of, yes. Since Nature could, are we worse? First, unpretentious at the level of protosamos Damasio, then more complicated. And then one day the car will print “hey you are bespectacled, tell me who I am?” And you will be very surprised because in her memory, such a line was not recorded anywhere.



Well, what about our biological consciousness? I don’t want to die, but the resource of the protein system is not eternal. Sooner or later, Alzheimer will get to everyone, no matter how we sew new bodies to ourselves. For the most part, neurons do not multiply, but they die periodically, and therefore the future is sad for any biological creature. It is necessary to somehow transfer or copy to a more tenacious medium. And then an ambush arises in front of us. If consciousness is an exchange of information, then how to transfer or copy the exchange of information?



No, that’s understandable - we copy the functional blocks (defined by the very new theory), kick the thalamus analogue on the finished copy to start endogenous activity, everything works, the exchange of information on the new medium has begun. You wake up from anesthesia, hardly lift your shaking head from the pillow, look at your silicon-based analog and indignantly ask: “With this iron block, everything is clear, but what about Me ???”.



A commissioning engineer standing next to the bed says: “Everything is in order when you die, this baby will completely replace you and will successfully continue your scientific activity.”



You wheeze that you are a businessman, not some lousy scientist out there and want to continue to live in person, and not in the memories of other people. Then you are offered a slightly different option. You are taken to a cryogenic factory and carefully frozen in liquid nitrogen. Then they cut off the head and, layer by layer, micrometer per micrometer, grind it to the very neck, fixing at the same time your entire connection, all the wealth of your nervous connections. Then they also transfer it to a silicon carrier and now we have two artificial heads arguing with each other about which one is real. But where did you really go?







The funny thing is that in order to be able to answer this question, you really do not need to go to the future.



Of course, you can come up with an excuse from the principle that your uniqueness has been encoded in the electrical states of the neurons themselves, and therefore it makes no sense to simply copy the connection in the future. All the same, when sewing the head, they will lose it.



But on the other hand, if you carefully cool the whole person to a temperature not much higher than zero (without liquid nitrogen, but only so that ice crystals do not form), then the activity of neurons in his brain will stop completely . Again, nobody specifically deals with this, but all kinds of climbers, skiers and just lucky people are constantly competing in this field on their own and no, no, but doctors rarely manage to bring back such a patient who came to them almost in the form of an icicle. And frogs with newts do this, in general, every winter and spring.



Therefore, nevertheless, our personal uniqueness is written precisely on the material substrate of the brain. And it can be copied, simply proceeding from the principle of materiality . But consciousness itself (in terms of conscious experience) is really encoded by the electrical impulses of neurons (this is a brain wave), and it exists only while these neurons overlap. The neurons of the working space ceased to communicate - you immediately lost consciousness. Therefore, copying the exchange of neurons with electrical impulses is an occupation and words are simply meaningless.Copy the structure, functional blocks - this is a practical and useful lesson.



So, every time we faint, we fall under general anesthesia, fall asleep without a sound dream, our consciousness (in terms of conscious experience) simply disappears. When we return, it arises anew. But based on those functional blocks that are available. And our OS is trying to download everything that is at hand, even those pathetic bits that remained if the patient had seventh Alzheimer's stage. And if the download is successful, then at the output we see a character of varying degrees of adequacy.



Therefore, returning to the question of copying, yes, every time we will receive a new personality, which will consider itself an original, and you as some kind of robber who did something with it.



But what about the original source?



And he is also new every time, but this is not surprising only because in the evening, when he went to bed, he remembered this event and therefore today connected himself with the past. And if not tied?



Dr. Ramachandran has such interesting patients. They have a problem with the transfer of information from short-term memory to long-term and they forget all events with a depth of at least five minutes. And every morning they wake up from scratch. Fortunately, the long-term memory itself has been preserved and therefore they are able to at least communicate this to Dr. Ramachandran. But if your long-term memory still falls off, then you will simply become a basic self, like Damasio. Just can not report it.



“Anyway,” the corrosive reader will say, “here I am. If my brain is replaced at night with a stranger and stuck in my skull box instead of the original one, and vice versa my brains are sent to that comrade, will I wake up in his body? There you have the transfer without copying. ”



In the body, yes, in a stranger. But in your brain. This is an exchange of bodies only (although bodies, of course, have the right to assume that it is they, on the contrary, that have exchanged brains). Nevertheless, from the usual docking of a new body to the old brain is no different.



“Good,” the inquisitive reader does not give up, “then let me in a dream change one billion neurons at a time, to new ones that do not break. And after three months I have a new brain, but I'm still the same! ”



Okay, but why wait three months? Let us give you one night, we’ll throw out all the old ones at the same time and new ones, we will shove an exact copy. After all, pay attention, in fact, it makes no difference to change one neuron, one billion, or all at once. For a year, a month or an hour. The result is the same. But wait, weren't you inside the old thrown out brains? But you cannot be both there and there. How so?



And like this. The only explanation for this paradox is that consciousness is a dynamic process and it re-emerges each time (if, of course, it can). Each time it is new both in old brains and in their fresh replacement.



And if you were copied from an old decrepit calf into a young healthy clone, but you still woke up in an old decrepit calf, then your dynamic process was simply unlucky. And if you woke up healthy, on the contrary, your process is lucky.



Here is a new philosophy. You have to get used to it.