Discussion August 10

[Steve]

There was a series of articles in New Scientist about existence. Maybe
we could discuss one of them at the Discussion on Wed Aug 10 at Old
Quarry branch library.

The text of the article is given below:

Where did my consciousness come from?
25 July 2011 by Anil Ananthaswamy

THINK for a moment about a time before you were born. Where were you?
Now think ahead to a time after your death. Where will you be? The
brutal answer is: nowhere. Your life is a brief foray on Earth that
started one day for no reason and will inevitably end.
But what a foray. Like the whole universe, your consciousness popped
into existence out of nothingness and has evolved into a rich and
complex entity full of wonder and mystery.
Contemplating this leads to a host of mind-boggling questions. What
are the odds of my consciousness existing at all? How can such a thing
emerge from nothingness? Is there any possibility of it surviving my
death? And what is consciousness anyway?
Answering these questions is incredibly difficult. Philosopher Thomas
Nagel once asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" Your response might
be to imagine flying around in the dark, seeing the world in the
echoes of high-frequency sounds. But that isn't the answer Nagel was
looking for. He wanted to emphasize that there is no way of knowing
what it is like for a bat to feel like a bat. That, in essence, is the
conundrum of consciousness.
Neuroscientists and philosophers fall into two broad camps. One thinks
that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and that once
we fully understand the intricate workings of neuronal activity,
consciousness will be laid bare. The other doubts it will be that
simple. They agree that consciousness emerges from the brain, but
argue that Nagel's question will always remain unanswered: knowing
every detail of a bat's brain cannot tell us what it is like to be a
bat. This is often called the "hard problem" of consciousness, and
seems scientifically intractable - for now.
Meanwhile, "there are way too many so-called easy problems to worry
about", says Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
One is to look for signatures of consciousness in brain activity, in
the hope that this takes us closer to understanding what it is.
Various brain areas have been found to be active when we are conscious
of something and quiet when we are not. For example, Stanislas Dehaene
of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Gif
sur Yvette and colleagues have identified such regions in our frontal
and parietal lobes (Nature Neuroscience, vol 8, p 1391).
Consciousness explained
This is consistent with a theory of consciousness proposed by Bernard
Baars of the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California. He
posited that most non-conscious experiences are processed in
specialized local regions of the brain such as the visual cortex. We
only become conscious of this activity when the information is
broadcast to a network of neurons called the global workspace -
perhaps the regions pinpointed by Dehaene.
But others believe the theory is not telling the whole story. "Does
global workspace theory really explain consciousness, or just the
ability to report about consciousness?" asks Seth.
Even so, the idea that consciousness seems to be an emergent property
of the brain can take us somewhere. For example, it makes the odds of
your own consciousness existing the same as the odds of your being
born at all, which is to say, very small. Just think of that next time
you suffer angst about your impending return to nothingness.
As for whether individual consciousness can continue after death, "it
is extremely unlikely that there would be any form of self-
consciousness after the physical brain decays", says philosopher
Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz,
Germany.
Extremely unlikely, but not impossible. Giuilio Tononi of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison argues that consciousness is the
outcome of how complex matter, including the brain, integrates
information. "According to Tononi's theory, if one could build a
device or a system that integrated information exactly the same way as
a living brain, it would generate the same conscious experiences,"
says Seth. Such a machine might allow your consciousness to survive
death. But it would still not know what it is like to be a bat.