Hello All;

Like I said, any news article about the brain is irresistible to me.
This one is pretty long;  I hope you find it as fascinating as I did.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Arizona conference grapples with mysteries of human consciousness
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright © 1996 Nando.net  Copyright © 1996 N.Y. Times News Service

TUCSON, Ariz. (Apr 15, 1996 6:47 p.m. EDT) -- Like the proverbial
blind men trying to identify by sense of touch a large, thick-hided
animal with a trunk at one end and a tail at the other, some of the
world's top scientists, philosophers and far-out thinkers gathered
here last week to contribute their different perspectives on the
elephant of consciousness.

A good time was had by all, even when the fur -- or maybe it was
elephant hide -- began to fly.

Can machines be conscious? The question elicited a spirited debate
between those who said, Of course, it's just a matter of time and
clever engineering, and others who replied: Never! It's bad enough
that you think consciousness can arise from gray lumps of tissue. It
is inconceivable that sentience could ever emerge from wholly
insentient matter.

Then there were less contentious questions. Does free will exist? Can
consciousness exist without emotions? Are animals conscious? What
happens to your conscious mind when you fall into a deep sleep?

And the most debated question of all: is consciousness something very
special and unique or is it just the natural byproduct of a complex
brain, emerging like wind from intricate weather patterns?

The conference, "Toward a Science of Consciousness," was sponsored by
the University of Arizona with support from the Fetzer Institute and
the Institute of Noetic Sciences, two organizations dedicated to
exploring the metaphysical foundations of Western science. A similar
but smaller conference was held two years ago in Tucson.

"We were deliberately eclectic in choosing speakers," said Dr. Stuart
Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the Arizona Health Sciences Center
who was a principal organizer of the event. Experts in various
disciplines can always talk among themselves, he said, "but there
needs to be an arena where everyone can mix their ideas about
consciousness together."

Thus the conference drew neuroscientists, philosophers,
mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, dream researchers,
pharmacologists, doctors, ethnologists, psychologists,
parapsychologists, scholars of religion and a variety of prophets who
claim to have solved the mystery of consciousness.

The meeting was unusual from the start. Dr. Jaron Lanier, a computer
scientist from Columbia University who is a pioneer in virtual
reality, opened the plenary session on Monday by playing a brief piano
recital. His blond dredlocks flew apace with the music. The audience
was delighted.

The goal of the meeting was simple, Hameroff said. What is the nature
of consciousness? Can we hope to understand it scientifically?

It is remarkable that such a diverse gathering could discuss the
question of consciousness in a coherent manner. But this kind of cross
pollination of ideas, where everything goes, is exactly what is
needed, said Dr. Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the California
Institute of Technology who helped organize the event. One hundred
years ago, people could not understand how life could arise out of
mere chemicals, he said. But when DNA was explained, theories of
vitalism -- that a magical force was needed to explain life --
disappeared.

The study of consciousness is like the study of physics before Newton,
said Dr. Piet Hut, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. In fact, he said, if people had
organized a conference about physics in the Middle Ages, they would
have dismissed Copernicus and Galileo as crackpots. "We shouldn't make
that mistake today," Hut said.

But before progress can be made on the question, some definitions are
in order. Consciousness has many guises.

In Tucson, the tone of discourse was set by a young philosopher from
the University of California at Santa Cruz, Dr. David Chalmers. He is
widely credited for posing the so-called hard problem of
consciousness.

To explain this concept, Chalmers first described the so-called easy
problems of consciousness, the sorts of questions being tackled in
neuroscience laboratories around the world: How does sensory
information get integrated in the brain? How do we see and reach out
for an object? How are we able to verbalize our internal states and
report what we are doing or feeling?

"These problems are not trivial," Chalmers said. "They may take 100
years or more to solve, but progress is being made."

The hard problem is this: What is the nature of subjective experience?
Why do we have vividly felt experiences of the world? Why is there
someone home inside our heads?

Thus far, nothing in physics or chemistry or biology can explain these
subjective feelings, Chalmers said. "What really happens when you see
the deep red of a sunset or hear the haunting sound of a distant oboe,
feel the agony of intense pain, the sparkle of happiness or meditative
quality of a moment lost in thought?" he asked. "It is these
phenomena, often called qualia, that pose the deep mystery of
consciousness."

In Tucson, people mounted four responses to the hard problem: it
doesn't exist, it will be answered soon enough by conventional
science, there must be something else in the universe that we do not
yet understand, and hey guys, forget it, we can never understand
consciousness.

Dr. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, is a forceful
proponent of the idea that consciousness is no big deal. "It's like
fame," Dennett said. "It doesn't exist except in the eye of the
beholder." When does fame happen, he asked? Is it when 10 people know
your name? A hundred people? A thousand?

Scientists have shown that information coming into the brain is broken
down into separate processing streams, Dennett said. But no one has
yet found any "place" where all the information comes together,
presenting a whole picture of what is being felt or seen or
experienced. The temptation, he said, is to believe that the
information is transduced by consciousness. But it is entirely
possible that the brain's networks can assume all the roles of an
inner boss. Mental contents become conscious by winning a competition
against other mental contents, Dennett said. No more is needed.
Consciousness is an epiphenomenon.

A second group of scientists agreed with Dennett but took a softer
line. When all the "easy" problems are solved, the hard problem will
disappear -- but consciousness certainly exists. "It's silly to deny
it," said Dr. Pat Churchland, a philosopher at the University of
California at San Diego.

Awareness and subjectivity are network effects involving many millions
of nerve cells in the cortex and thalamus, Dr. Churchland said. And
while the exact nature of the phenomenon cannot yet be explained, the
call for a "new physics" or some mysterious forces in nature are not
needed.

Dr. Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at New York University, agreed,
suggesting that timing effects inside the brain produce conscious
experience.

Those who believe machines can someday be conscious tended to fall
into this camp. The trick will be to make computers that are
sufficiently complex, said Dr. Danny Hillis, vice president of
research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale,
Calif. Then, like human brains, they should give rise to the emergent
properties of consciousness.

Others tried to answer a few of the easy questions. Dr. Allan Hobson,
a sleep expert at Harvard Medical School, described a neurobiological
theory of dreaming. It does not explain where consciousness "goes"
when people are asleep, he said, but finds that different chemical
states in the brain seem to produce different sorts of consciousness.

The next major group of consciousness seekers might be called modern
dualists. Agreeing with the hard problem, they feel that something
else is needed to explain people's subjective experiences. And they
have lots of ideas about what this might be.

According to Chalmers, scientists need to come up with new fundamental
laws of nature. Physicists postulate that certain properties --
gravity, space-time, electromagnetism -- are basic to any
understanding of the universe, he said.

"My approach is to think of conscious experience itself as a
fundamental property of the universe," he said. Thus the world has two
kinds of information, one physical, one experiential. The challenge is
to make theoretical connections between physical processes and
conscious experience, Chalmers said.

Another form of dualism involves the mysteries of quantum mechanics.
Dr. Roger Penrose from the University of Oxford in England argued that
consciousness is the link between the quantum world, in which a single
object can exist in two places at the same time, and the so-called
classical world of familiar objects where this cannot happen.

Moreover, with Hameroff, he has proposed a theory that the switch from
quantum to classical states occurs inside certain proteins call
microtubules. The brain's microtubules, they argue, are ideally
situated to perform this transformation, producing "occasions of
experience" that with the flow of time give rise to stream of
consciousness thought.

The notion came under vigorous attack. "Pixie dust in the synapses is
about as explanatorily powerful as quantum mechanics in the
microtubles," Churchland said. Their logic is, consciousness is deeply
mysterious, quantum mechanics is deeply mysterious, ergo the two are
the same mystery, she said.

Penrose's ideas are popular, Churchland said, because many people have
dualist hankerings. They want to believe in a soul, life after death
and the specialness of humans and their inner thoughts. They have a
negative gut reaction to the idea that neurons -- cells that can be
probed under a microscope -- are the source of the "me-ness of me,"
she said.

Finally, there are those who argued that people can never understand
consciousness. The mystery is too deep. Dr. Colin McGinn, a
philosopher from Rutgers University, said that for humans to grasp how
subjective experience arises from matter "is like slugs trying to do
Freudian psychoanalysis -- they just don't have the conceptual
equipment."

But this did not deter many from trying. During the week,
presentations were made on animal consciousness (featuring apes,
dolphins and gray parrots), free will and the spiritual nature of
consciousness.

Dr. Robert Forman, a professor of religion at Hunter College in New
York, said mystical experience had something to tell people about
consciousness. "To understand genes," he said, "we look at bacteria
like E. coli. To study memory, we analyze the memory of a sea slug.
But to probe consciousness, we need to examine the experience of
mystics, who experience their own consciousness in its simplest form."

Millions of people regard these types of experiences, feeling a
oneness with the universe, as the highest experience that the
conscious brain has to offer, Forman said.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

janet
in the Atlantic where
the first tiny leaves of the Royal Poinciana tree are unfolding

[log in to unmask]