Review of: Christof Koch’s presentation on IIT and the nature of consciousness more generally.

Observations

We didn’t get very far through the video (20 min) because we kept stopping to discuss and getting sidetracked. Lots of interesting food for thought though.

Motion Induced Blindness was an interesting phenomenon. Could we relate that to our ongoing debate - “is it a fundamental experience to see different colours, apart from the associations we have for each colour?” - would changing the colours of the vanishing dots cause them to reappear? We test this here.

What Christof says are the data for consciousness, that any potential theory must predict/explain:

  • Consciousness is associated with our central nervous system (not enteric nervous system or immune system, despite their complexity)
    • Transcranial stimulation of our brain seems to have a causal effect on our conscious state
    • Whereas our enteric nervous system seems to have only an indirect effect on our conscious state (eg. feeling nauseous), but through associated changes in brain activity
    • We don’t have conscious access to our immune system or enteric nervous system state?
  • Consciousness doesn’t require behaviour - dreams are still conscious experiences
  • Consciousness doesn’t need (strong) emotions - flat affect
  • Consciousness doesn’t need language - children and aphasic people
  • Consciousness doesn’t need self-consciousness/self-awareness
    • Depends how we define it, but if we limit it to introspection, there are conscious experiences like being in “flow state” where we are conscious, but not really conscious of our own consciousness: eg. riding a bicycle quickly through traffic, being engrossed in playing sport
    • Here it feels somewhat like our actions happening without directed thought, like watching a movie?
  • Consciousness doesn’t need long term memory - eg. patient HM
  • Consciousness can occur in just one cerebral hemisphere - Split brain experiments (Roger Sperry)
  • Specific brain regions are associated with specific aspects of consciousness - eg. damage visual cortex, reduced visual experience

Attention =/= Consciousness:

  • Continuous flash suppression - attending to an “invisible” object improves performance on a later visual recognition task, but the subject is never conscious of the attended object.
  • More specifically, visual attention and visual awareness are distinct, and can be independently manipulated in experiments.

Random Musings

Are some conscious states inherently more “desirable” than others?

Why are men repelled by naked men, but women aren’t repelled by naked women (in this work)? Is it a societal effect, or biologically hardcoded?