Rather than continue to talk back and forth on the basis of parts of what it is we all need to understand -- the question of the relationship of conscious/mind to the brain's neural networks -- why don't we instead discuss another theory than the ones we personally hold. I suggest as a text for discussion the article by John Searle entitled "Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness?". I suggest this paper because Searle is a thinker to be reckoned with in addressing this question, and also because I don't think any of us fully adhere to his point of view on that question.
Perhaps exploring the ways each of us can agree and disagree with Searle on certain issues will avoid the friction that arises when we react to one another's positions, and thus provide us all with more distance on our own perspectives and also lead us to recognize elements of one another's perspectives we can agree with to some extent {for there is no question that various kinds of information in the physical and biological world are involved in the operation and development of neural nets affecting and enabling consciousness}. Discussing Searle's paper would be a way to confront issues in consciousness studies that neither Searle nor any of us have dealt with sufficiently at this point.
I hope you agree that this might be a productive avenue toward dialogue on complex aspects of the relationship of consciousness/mind and brain that we all need to recognize as problems yet-to-be either resolved or at least understood in CS and our own long discussion here. Here is an extract of the relevant part of Searle's paper:
“. . . Information is one of the most confused notions in contemporary intellectual life. First of all, there is a distinction between information in the ordinary sense in which it always has a content—that is, typically, that such and such is the case or that such and such an action is to be performed. That kind of information is different from information in the sense of the mathematical “theory of information,” originally invented by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs. The mathematical theory of information is not about content, but how content is encoded and transmitted. Information according to the mathematical theory of information is a matter of bits of data where data are construed as symbols. In more traditional terms, the commonsense conception of information is semantical, but the mathematical theory of information is syntactical. The syntax encodes the semantics. This is in a broad sense of “syntax” which would include, for example, electrical charges.
Information theory has proved immensely powerful in a number of fields and may become more powerful as new ways are found to encode and transmit content, construed as symbols. Tononi and Koch want to use both types of information, they want consciousness to have content, but they want it to be measurable using the mathematics of information theory.
To explore these ideas two distinctions must be made clear. The first is between two senses of the objective and subjective distinction. This famous distinction is ambiguous between an epistemic sense (where “epistemic” means having to do with knowledge) and an ontological sense (where “ontological” means having to do with existence). In the epistemic sense, there is a difference between those claims that can be settled as a matter of truth or falsity objectively, where truth and falsity do not depend on the attitudes of makers and users of the claim. If I say that Rembrandt was born in 1606, that claim is epistemically objective. If I say that Rembrandt was the best Dutch painter ever, that is, as they say, a matter of “subjective opinion”; it is epistemically subjective.
But also there is an ontological sense of the subjective/objective distinction. In that sense, subjective entities only exist when they are experienced by a human or animal subject. Ontologically objective entities exist independently of any experience. So pains, tickles, itches, suspicions, and impressions are ontologically subjective; while mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates are ontologically objective. Part of the importance of this distinction, for this discussion, is that mental phenomena can be ontologically subjective but still admit of a science that is epistemically objective. You can have an epistemically objective science of consciousness even though it is an ontologically subjective phenomenon. Ben Libet was practicing such an epistemically objective science; so are a wide variety of scientists ranging, for example, from Antonio Damasio to Oliver Sacks.
This distinction underlies another distinction—between those features of the world that exist independently of any human attitudes and those whose existence requires such attitudes. I describe this as the difference between those features that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative. So, ontologically objective features like mountains and tectonic plates have an existence that is observer-independent; but marriage, property, money, and articles in The New York Review of Books have an observer-relative existence. Something is an item of money or a text in an intellectual journal only relative to the attitudes people take toward it. Money and articles are not intrinsic to the physics of the phenomena in question.
Why are these distinctions important? In the case of consciousness we have a domain that is ontologically subjective, but whose existence is observer-independent. So we need to find an observer-independent explanation of an observer-independent phenomenon. Why? Because all observer-relative phenomena are created by consciousness. It is only money because we think it is money. But the attitudes we use to create the observer-relative phenomena are not themselves observer-relative. Our explanation of consciousness cannot appeal to anything that is observer-relative—otherwise the explanation would be circular. Observer-relative phenomena are created by consciousness, and so cannot be used to explain consciousness.
The question then arises: What about information itself? Is its existence observerindependent or observer- relative? There are different sorts of information, or if you like, different senses of “information.” In one sense, I have information that George Washington was the first president of the United States. The existence of that information is observer-independent; I have that information regardless of what anybody thinks. It is a mental state of mine, which while it is normally unconscious can readily become conscious. Any standard textbook on American history will contain the same information. What the textbook contains, however, is observer-relative. It is only relative to interpreters that the marks on the page encode that information. With the exception of our mental thoughts—conscious or potentially conscious—all information is observer-relative. And in fact, except for giving examples of actual conscious states, all of the examples that Tononi and Koch give of information systems—computers, smart phones, digital cameras, and the Web, for example—are observer-relative.
We cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information because observer-relative information presupposes consciousness already. What about the mathematical theory of information? Will that come to the rescue? Once again, it seems to me that all such cases of “information” are observer-relative. The reason for the ubiquitousness of information in the world is not that information is a pervasive force like gravity, but that information is in the eye of the beholder, and beholders can attach information to anything they want, provided that it meets certain causal conditions. Remember, observer relativity does not imply arbitrariness, it does not imply epistemic subjectivity.
An example prominently discussed by Tononi will make this clear. He considers the case of a photodiode that turns on when the light is on and off when the light is off. So the photodiode contains two states and has minimal bits of information. Is the photodiode conscious? Tononi tells us, and Koch is committed to the same view, that yes, the photodiode is conscious. It has a minimal amount of consciousness, one bit to be exact. But now, what fact about it makes it conscious? Where does its subjectivity come from? Well, it contains the information that the light is either on or off. But the objection to that is: the information only exists relative to a conscious observer. The photodiode knows nothing about light being on or off, it just responds differentially to photon emissions. It is exactly like a mercury thermometer that expands or contracts in a way that we can use to measure the temperature in the room. The mercury in the glass knows nothing about temperature or anything else; it just expands or contracts in a way that we can use to gain information.
Same with the photodiode. The idea that the photodiode is conscious, even a tiny bit conscious, just in virtue of matching a luminance in the environment, does not seem to be worth serious consideration. I have the greatest admiration for Tononi and Koch but the idea that a photodiode becomes conscious because we can use it to get information does not seem up to their usual standards.
A favorite example in the literature is the rings in a tree stump. They contain information about the age of the tree. But what fact about them makes them information? The answer is that there is a correlation between the annual rings on the tree stump and the cycle of the seasons, and the different phases of the tree’s growth, and therefore we can use the rings to get information about the tree. The correlation is just a brute fact; it becomes information only when a conscious interpreter decides to treat the tree rings as information about the history of the tree. In short, you cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information, because the information in question requires consciousness. Information is only information relative to some consciousness that assigns the informational status.
Well, why could not the brute facts that enable us to assign informational interpretations themselves be conscious? Why are they not sufficient for consciousness? The mercury expands and contracts. The photodiode goes on or off. The tree gets another ring with each passing year. Is that supposed to be enough for consciousness? As long as we have the notion of “information” in our explanation, it might look as if we are explaining something, because, after all, there does seem to be a connection between consciousness and observer-independent information.
There is no doubt some information in every conscious state in the ordinary content sense of information. Even if I just have a pain, I have information, for example that it hurts and that I am injured. But once you recognize that all the cases given by Koch and Tononi are forms of information
relative to an observer, then it seems to me that their approach is incoherent. The matching relations themselves are not information until a conscious agent treats them as such. But that treatment cannot itself explain consciousness because it requires consciousness. It is just an example of consciousness. It is just an example of consciousness at work.
7. There are many other interesting parts of Koch’s book that I have not had the space to discuss, and as always Koch’s discussions are engaging and informative. I would not wish my misgivings to detract from the real merits of his book. But the primary intellectual ambitions of the book—namely to offer a model for explaining consciousness and to suggest a solution to the problem of free will and determinism— do not seem to me successful.”
http://virgil.gr/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/searle.pdf
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