An organism could not be conscious and fail to know this (the case with
all nonhuman animals, I suspect) or believe itself not to be conscious
(which actually happens, I believe, in some psychological order whose
name I cannot remember)? Going the other way, no organism could have a
belief (it would have to be an unconscious belief but we have lots of
those) that it was conscious of itself and its psychological states when
it was not? Both disconnects seem entirely possible to me. Indeed, the
two branches of the first scenario actually happen. (I restrict the
second as I do because having a belief at all may be enough for to have
some minimal degree of consciousness, something not nearly as complex as
consciousness of self, to be sure, but still consciousness of some kind.)

CMR:
I'm sure all this is true, but it doesn't change the basic empirical fact -
which is that as conscious beings we can know, beyond any possibility of
doubt, that we are conscious.

AB:
Anyway, even if one is certain about being conscious in some way, why
would that be a problem for our model?

CMR:
Dear me, Andrew, I rather thought I'd laid that out already, and at such a
tedious level of detail that I was expecting you to accuse me of obsessive
pedantry.  If there's some part of the argument you don't follow or don't
agree with, wouldn't it be better if you focussed on exactly what that was?

Cathy

If what I said is true, it does 'change the basic empirical fact' --
there is no such fact. That's what the possibility of a double
dissociation shows.

About our model, I know what you said, of course. I just don't
understand why you said those things. (Your last response. 'Dear me,
Andrew',  is patronizing but I will let that pass. Either I am a
candidate for village idiot or you are not justifiying your assertions.)

Andrew

--

Andrew Brook
Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Cognitive Science
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
2217 Dunton Tower, Carleton University
Ottawa ON, Canada   K1S 5B6
Ph:  613 520-3597
Fax: 613 520-3985
Web: www.carleton.ca/~abrook

Exactly so, Andrew. Conscious states need 'thousands if not millions  
of bits' of information. Thus our presentee must receive thousands or  
millions of bits. Horace Barlow famously (Perception 1972) put it at  
1000 elements. However, his model hit issues I will mention below and  
for other reasons I agree we probably need more (barcodes need some  
redundancy?). Let's say 100,000 bits.

A juicy pyramidal neuron, I am told, has a ~40,000 bit input. If it  
makes analogue use of phase, and short term retention phenomena, like  
dendritic spine twitching, it could front an experience worth a  
significantly greater number of bits, but I doubt we go that much  
beyond the preferred number - 100,000. How the heck you get the Mona  
Lisa let's put to one side because its tricky however we try. But we  
must remember that all we need is enough bits to encode; the  
presentee can turn it into what might appear to be megabytes of  
pixels, just as Word gives you a massive pdf.

The trouble with groups of cells is that they cannot have a richer  
input bitscore because nothing (no presentee) gets more bits than one  
cell. The idea that you can 'add up' the bits for a 'system' of  
several receiving/integrating units, however commonly assumed, is  
groundless.  First of all, the maths of computation simply do not  
allow that. At a more basic level, it does not make sense in any  
recognised physical view of the world - as William James pointed out  
even before computers were invented - a 'non-existent physical fact'.

And if our 100,000 bits was 100 bits in each of 1000 cells, what  
would these bits be? If it is 1 bit in each of 100,000 cells then  
what are these cells doing with just one bit? If the bit is their  
output the presentee must be the next cell along and we are back to  
where we were. It does not work. You may now see why I think it so  
important that we are clear that we mean re-presentation to a presentee.

And we do not want too much input (40,000x10,000 say). There is no  
reason to think that sentient units in a brain would be designed to  
receive signal and noise (or duplication) and filter out. It is much  
easier to envisage input as just signal - so more than 100,000 bits  
would be embarasse de richesse. Assuming biological efficiency, we  
are looking for 'just enough' and no more please.

So having one experience 'extend over a system' cannot work. For  
sure, the whole brain is blasting away and fMRI hotspots are not what  
they are cracked up to be - I could not agree more. But extension of  
experience over a large area cannot, as James's argument  
devastatingly shows, be many cells sharing one experience, unless you  
concoct some new physical processes which would require neuroscience  
to be trashed and rewritten. The only rational possibility, the one  
that fits with neuroscience, is that there are lots of copies of  
experience over a large area. Weird, but outputs from sensory relay  
cells go to thousands of places, so why not? It is generally thought  
that the brain is useful because it does millions of things at once -  
like picking 1 out of 20,000 meanings for a noise in a fraction of a  
second while trying out a dozen syntactic contexts. A single copy of  
experience would only allow one computation at a time and the brain  
does not work like that as far as we know.

So yes, there are reasons to view conscious states as not highly  
distributed representations. The key argument was writen in 1890 and  
has never been refuted. It is so simple that I doubt it will ever be  
refuted, even if James linked it to an equally simple logical error  
that threw him off the scent and forced him to claim that  
consciousness could not have a physical basis. It baffles me that it  
is not immediately understood by everyone, but then, as a say in my  
book, understanding may be almost as flimsy as David Hume suggested.  
We are all at the mercy of societies of decision-making cells with no  
overall master. Minsky just missed out that experience has to be  
where the decisions are.

Best wishes

Jo E

Refs: James, W., Principles of Psychology Chapter 6, Harvard edition  
pp178-180 and http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm  !

Indeed that's precisely where I think your formulation falls down, because
any conscious subject whose conscious states took the form of
self-representing representations, and who was capable of thinking
logically, would inevitably end up thinking this way.   The possibility of a
double dissociation would arise because of the inherent functional
separation between being conscious, and having beliefs about being
conscious.

Let's assume that you are such a person. You could argue that if it's
possible to be in state of believing that you are conscious when you are not
actually conscious (what one might call a "pseudoconscious" state) then no
conscious subject could ever be absolutely certain they were conscious,
because they could never be certain they weren't merely in a pseudoconscious
state.

Trouble is, that conclusion is just plain wrong.  It *is* possible for a
conscious subject to know for certain that they are conscious - for example,
I know that I'm conscious right now, and I can assure you there's absolutely
no possibility of doubt about it ;-)  It's just one of those bizarre facts
about consciousness that it has this remarkable property, and it's part of
what makes consciousness so hard to explain and understand.

In fact if this weren't so, there'd be no point in doing consciousness
studies at all. It would be much simpler just to assume we were all making a
mistake and consciousness didn't exist because none of us was ever really
conscious in the first place.  Then we could all go back to measuring
membrane potentials or something.

Cathy

I don't know why you say this. Just saying something over and over does
not make it true. What is the argument? I would agree that I am unlikely
to make a mistake here. But I am unlikely to make a mistake about my
name, too. I know both phenomena pretty well. It is, however, not
impossible that I could. Why do you think me and my being conscious are
different? Is it meant to be self-evident that here I have certainty?

You and I went round this mulberry bush some time ago. Looks like we're
spinning our wheels again.

Andrew

--

Andrew Brook
Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy
Director, Institute of Cognitive Science
Member, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society
2217 Dunton Tower, Carleton University
Ottawa ON, Canada   K1S 5B6
Ph:  613 520-3597
Fax: 613 520-3985
Web: www.carleton.ca/~abrook

 >But
What is this "certainty" that some of you seem so sure about? A
state/process of mind?  A state/process about a state/process of mind?
["certain about being conscious"]

Having a personal 'attitude' toward "being conscious" seems like fairly weak
evidence for much of anything other than the reported attitude itself.  [I
am having certainty...]

John Limber
Durham NH