#Consciousness question from someone who read #philosophy stuff on this years ago but nothing from #neuroscience. Is it generally understood to be a memory phenomenon? It seems logically that it must be (see below), but that's not the way the philosophy stuff I have read about it discussed it.
My argument is that the only thing we could be talking about if we're talking consciousness is things that have made their way into a specific memory subsystem (the ones that are accessible to our language systems), otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about it. Similarly, anything that has made its way into that memory subsystem would also be something we were conscious of. In other words, consciousness is just the set of things that go into that subsystem.
So is consciousness just the study of some particular memory subsystem and the way it interacts with other systems like language? And if we don't understand how memory works, can we understand anything about consciousness?
@neuralreckoning The global workspace array of explanations of consciousness depict it (simplification incoming) as a blending of perception and memory, with the essential caveat that there is a memory-grounded anticipatory dimension to perception itself and that excitation of memory is also (at least partially) driven by what is perceived. "Declarative" and "procedural" and affective memory can all be taken to send signals to this GW/GN[euronal]W.
@neuralreckoning not an expert but isn’t consciousness also about immediate sensations and not just memorized events? Like, I get hurt by something, I am then conscious of the pain, or even if I’m staying immobile doing nothing and trying to think of nothing.. I am conscious of breathing and sitting on the couch?
For me consciousness is just the neural activations happening in your brain that are coherent enough that they pass a threshold for you to be aware of it. Sensation, memory, action, could be anything…
@elduvelle_neuro depends what you mean by memorised events. I think it has to be something you could remember, like a shade of a colour, because if you couldn't and it was just completely transitory then you wouldn't be able to think or talk about it.
@neuralreckoning@elduvelle_neuro of course, well if the thing is transitory then it’s not memorized right? But you probably mean it has to be in your declarative memory, and not in your procedural memory? I agree, but also, I’d add sensations to the lot, even if they’re not going to be stored to memory after you’ve experienced them. At the time of experience, you might be conscious of these sensations and that’s all that matters right?
(Edit: oops, answered with my alt account)
I don't think it's enough that you could be conscious of something at the time of experience but not later. How could you think about it or describe it to someone if you were only experiencing it at the time and didn't remember any of that experience?
@neuralreckoning@elduvelle_neuro
Point1: I think that’s a pretty good categorization and fits well a lot of the experimental data no? That being said I’m sure this “multiple memory systems” framework has been updated since I learned about it. And well technically it’s declarative (episodic, semantic) vs non-declarative (procedural, reflexes, …).
What other kind of concepts did you have in mind?
Point 2: Sure, if you forget about it then you’re not conscious of it either (anymore). For me consciousness is a moment-to-moment process, so I don’t think it has to rely only on memorized info.
@elduvelle@elduvelle_neuro I don't know, I'm just always a bit suspicious of clean distinctions in neuroscience.
I'm not saying that if you forget something you're not conscious of it any more, but that every time you were talking or thinking about consciousness you weren't talking about the moment to moment process but the memory of it. So unless we hypothesise that the process of forming memories must reflect some real thing, then there's no other possible evidence to suggest the existence of the moment to moment process. Seems like a very strong assumption to make and one that seems unlikely to be true based on what we know about the brain and memory.
@neuralreckoning Hmm you might need to reformulate that for me :) maybe if we start from an example, like what you would consider a conscious process vs not a conscious process?
For example that’s not very clear to me:
“Unless we hypothetise the process of forming memories must reflect some real thing”: isn’t that a fair hypothesis? Of course memory formation has to be a real thing - synapses being formed or modified, chemical processes happening in the neurons involved in the memory. What is the alternative? Creating memories without changing our brain at all? But I’m not sure what that has to do with consciousness. Do you think that memory formation and consciousness are related somehow?
@elduvelle re memory the hypothesis I meant (sorry this was super unclear in what I wrote) would be that if we have a memory of something it must be a real thing. That's what seems unlikely to me.
@neuralreckoning oh I see, so what was the link between that and the consciousness question?
Also, if we have a memory of something, then it is real for our brain, it has changed the brain in some way. So I’d say any memory is real in that sense (even memories from dreams or hallucinations).
Does a memory always reflect a process that happened in the world outside of the individual? Definitely not.
But again - what does that have to do with consciousness?
@elduvelle sorry again for being unclear. I meant that the only reason to think there is some special thing we call consciousness is that we feel we have a memory of it. Seems like a big jump to assume it must exist. I'd be quite happy to say that consciousness is something like a false memory, for example. Would you be happy with that? I'm not sure most people would!
@neuralreckoning Interesting… I really don’t think of consciousness as a memory thing. For me consciousness = awareness. I’m sure they’re supposed to have some subtle differences though.
Oh so your post was about whether consciousness is a real thing or not! And since you’re linking consciousness to memory, and it is possible to have false memories, then you think consciousness might be false as well (did I get that right?).
Is consciousness like a false memory? I don’t think so. I just think it corresponds to some particularly synchronised activation of some of our neurons like I was saying in my first post. Those neurons can correspond to a memory, in which case you’ll become conscious of that memory, and have the associated awareness “feeling”. Or they can correspond to a sensation, in which case you’re conscious (/aware) of that sensation, even though the sensation might not be stored in memory. There’s lots of things happening in our brain at all times but what comes up to consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.
So is consciousness real? If it corresponds to a different state of the physical world (in this case: some specific activation of one’s neurons) then yes, I would say it is real. If your brain was exactly in the same state when you’re conscious of 1 thing vs another vs not conscious, then no, consciousness would not be real, but that wouldn’t be possible right - how can you be in these different states without anything changing in your brain?
Maybe instead of asking whether consciousness is “real” the question you had in mind is: is consciousness used? To that, I would say probably no - I believe the consciousness part is just some read-out of some things happening in your brain, but it doesn’t have ‘write’ permissions 😄 (I’m happy to change my mind on that, I just haven’t seen any evidence going that way).
What do most people think? I don’t know but it would be great to know! Maybe if we converge on a clear question someone should ask it as a poll!
@elduvelle I'm not really asking if it's real, I don't think. I'm wondering if it is anything more than the fact that some of our perceptions travel along pathways that allow them to be used by a variety of circuits like language, and some don't. We name the ones that do conscious, and trick ourselves into feeling there is something special about them beyond this fact that they are transferred into some sort of short term memory circuit that allows for this. That's a real distinction, just not as special as consciousness seems to us when we introspect.
Re: memory. It is definitely possible to construct the physical substrate post-learning without going through the learning itself. (In artificial neural networks, you can copy the synaptic weights. In natural neural networks, you can manipulate the synapses chemically or optogenetically.)
As a fascinating side note, dreams are real things that exist moment by moment. They are observable during the dream through fMRI. Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y., & Kamitani, Y. (2013). Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science, 340(6132), 639-642. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1234330
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