The bizareness of colour

When I think of the presentation of sound at the phenomenal level of experience, its phenomenological character makes sense. Sound is perceived when air vibrates the ear drum and is transduced to a neural signal and processed; and sound does indeed often have a qualitatively vibrational character, particularly when the frequency is very low. Similarly with spatio-temporal vision, the pattern of light hitting the retina is transduced into neural signal and processed leading to a spatio-temporal phenomenological world. Of course there is still some strangeness from the phyiscal to phenomenal level in these percepts; but at least there is some understandable qualatative aquaintance.

Colour is a truely bazare percept. The differences of colour are due to the differences in wavelength (vibrational energy in a sense) of light entering the visual system. Why then should colour not be phenomenally perceived as somthing like different fuzzing surfaces (like static television)? Perhaps its because of the incredible speed of the electromagnetic vibrations that means colour is just experienced as... well like it is! Or perhaps its because of colours functional role; some suggest it evolved so that we could detect fruit in the trees. Hence a vibrational sensation might be confused with movement (I'm not convinced this would matter if it was fuzzing that fast). Nonetheless it does seem a very odd sensation; blue is so different from yellow in such a strong way, yet its difference in physical stimulus is merely a few hundred nanometres of electromagnetic wavelength.

Feeding the brain

It is interesting to note that it is perhaps our brain’s close proximity (i.e. in the skull) to most of our sensory apparatus, such as our eyes and ears, that we have the intuitive and somewhat phenomenal feeling that we are in our brains. Who knows perhaps if all our sense organs were around our belly it would feel like we were feeding our brain every time we ate.

Just a silly little quirk I came up with whilst writing my dissertation.

Emtotiv headset

By Xmas people will be able to buy a headset for £150 that enables you to control virtual objects on a computer screen using the power of your mind. It works by taking input from your brain waves and sending it to the computer for processing. Here are a couple of videos of it in action. The hand movements are just for show apparantly. In the second video the Emotiv team use the same technology to control a toy UFO. It all really highlights the pace of technology's acceleration. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxMux4uEkLI&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TKhPZAhlLA&feature=related

IPlant

I recently came across a very interesting article on the IPlant currently under devlopment by Chris Harris, a researcher at the University of Sussex. It outlines the IPlane, a electrochemical chip inserted into the brain, which could enable treatment of certain mental illnesses, by directly stimulating the brain in a similar way to deep brain stimulation. For example by having it wirelessly connected to a sensor in a shoe, running triggers small bursts of dopamine, so that the user feels motivated to run. From what I understand this has actually already been tested on humans and works. Other implications include simulating serotonine areas of the brain to treat anxiety and depression, and in the more distant future directly stimulating visual and auditory areas to produce internalised visual and auditory experiences. Imagine watching a movie with yours eyes closed; pretty crazy stuff although scary for many. It also highlights some of the related ethical issues. Well worth a read.

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/harris20080112/

Mystery of consciousness

“In Western science the existence of matter is often taken for granted, while the existence of consciousness is regarded as mysterious. Consequently, the conventional ‘hard problem’ refers to the difficulty of understanding how consciousness arises from (otherwise, insentient) physical matter, or, in other versions, about the seeming irreducibility of first-person accounts of conscious experience to third-person descriptions of the brain. But in truth, the existence of matter is as mysterious as the existence of consciousness, and there are similarly hard problems in physics. Why, for example, should electricity flowing down a wire be accompanied by a magnetic field around the wire, why should electrons sometimes behave as waves and at other times as particles, and why there should be any matter in the universe at all?” Velmans (2008)

The Twisted Matrix: Dream, Simulation or Hybrid? Clark (2003)

"In normal waking the mode (defined as the ratio between the activity of the two systems) leans towards the aminergic. Whereas in REM sleep, with acetycholine dominating, experience becomes increasingly dissociative, displaying “amnesia, hallucinations, bizarre mentation, anxiety, and loss of volition control” (Hobson, p. 91). All this, we now know, is matched by a shift in regional blood flow from (in waking) dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to (in REM sleep) subcortical limbic structures.” (Clark 2003).

"In REM sleep we are, in a real sense, drugged witless by our own brains. And the cure, as Hobson and Neo would probably both agree, is simple: it is called waking up!" (Clark 2003).

“In a normal Virtual Reality simulation, you cannot bend the rules just by willing it. By the same token, video-gaming would be a whole different sport were the underlying code directly susceptible to the will of the players!" (Clark 2003).

A Temporary change in style

Since I’m not going to be writing any blogs for a while thought I might just post some interesting and thought provoking quotes from Philosophy and COG publications I come across in my studies. Here are a couple to start:

"Experience with drawing and using Venn diagrams allows us to train a neural network which subsequently allows us to manipulate imagined Venn diagrams in our heads. . . there is no reason to suppose that such training results in the installation of a different kind of computational device. It is the same old process of pattern-completion in high-dimensional representational spaces, but applied to the special domain of a specific kind of external representation.’’
~ Andy Clark (1997)

“The role of public language and text in human cognition is not limited to the preservation and communication of ideas. Instead, these external resources make available concepts, strategies and learning trajectories which are simply not available to individual, un-augmented brains.”
~ Andy Clark (1998)

"External stores such as written language cause individual memory strategies to move towards heavy reliance on such stores. As a result these stores play an indispensable role in remembering processes, and thus these stores become proper parts of cognitive processes of remembering."
~ Mark Rowland (1999)

“If the cultural inheritance of an environment-modifying human activity persists for enough generations to generate a stable selection pressure, it will be able to co-direct human genetic evolution.”
~ Kevin Laland (1999)

What philosophical insights can we draw from split brain syndrome and blindsight?

Both split brain and blindsight are two extremely bizarre conditions, which strongly suggest a certain relation of phenomenal conscious experience to the wiring of the physical brain.

Split brain syndrome occurs when a lesion to treat epilepsy between the left and right hemispheres of the brain causes the information between the two hemispheres to be stopped. This leads to the strange phenomena seen in the video link below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&eurl=

It’s hard for any of us without the syndrome to imagine what it would be like to have that experience. As Joe explains it doesn’t feel any different from before, the brain just adapts to it. It clearly shows that processes need not be conscious to work.

It’s tempting to think from the Doctors words in the conclusion that there is a central processor at the end that produces consciousness. However because it provides strong evidence for the modularity of the human brain (and for that matter probably other animal brain with similar anatomy), I would argue such a strong conclusion is misled. There are hundreds of neural networks in the human brain, each serving separate but interconnected functions. When a split occurs between two related networks the brain is unable to process information between them and this is reflected in distorted and separated phenomenal conscious experiences as shown in split brain syndrome. The final stage would not be possible with at least most of the earlier processes, and it functions in the same way as any neural network; parallel distributed processing PDP.

The brain does not have a soul, unified self or a central processor behind it. It functions using distributed and interconnected network processing, and the strange phenomenal experience related to lesions between such networks is clear evidence of this. However it does indicate that only once a certain level of processing has occurred, consciousness can emerge. This leads us nicely to “Blindsight”.

Blindsight occurs when damage in higher processing areas of the visual cortex, lead to a lack of visual phenomenal conscious experience in both or one eye (depending on whether the left or right hand side of the visual cortex is damaged.) The interesting part is that in experiments, researchers have shown that patients are able to point at a dot on a screen with something like 99.9% accuracy (clearly showing that this wasn’t luck.) without any visual conscious phenomenal experience whatsoever.

Thats pretty incredible. The experiment is clear evidence not only for the modularity of various brain functions, but also that phenomenal experience only emerges at a higher level of brain processing. Lower order visual functions (like point recognition) are possible by processing in lower order areas without the use of phenomenal experience that emerge from higher order processing. We can only draw firm conclusions from blind sight on the emergence of visual consciousness since it only demonstrates that aspect of consciousness. However it would be strange and very counter-intuitive to reason that it wouldn’t apply to at least the other 4 senses if not higher order cognition as well.

It seems to me to strongly indicate that only animals with the correct brain modules or at least the necessary complexity of neural network processing, would have any visual consciousness. Thus it is possible that many insects don’t have visual consciousness and all their functions are facilitated by lower order unconscious processing. I’m not an expert in neuroscience or the anatomy of animal brains so I’m not sure how high up the animal chain we can go here. All insects? All reptiles? All mammals but us? Perhaps if any neuroscientists reading this have the expertise they can shed some light.

This condition also has implications for AI. We might well argue, if we believe artificial consciousness is possible at all, that only AI programmed with the correct modules and complexity would have any consciousness, visual or other! This may seem obvious to many, but blindsight experiments (and split brain ones to for that matter) gives clear empirical evidence for it.

I’m not going to go any further here as I don’t have sophisticated knowledge of the neuroscience and biological anatomy of the brain, but hopefully the philosophical insights have been interesting and thought provoking.

split brain video

just found a brilliant video of a split brain experiment in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&eurl=

I may well have to right a blog on the philisophical implications of this soon. I had totally forgoton about this bizare and interesting phenomonen.

till then, heres an introduction.

Where do the boundaries of the mind end?

In the previous blog I discussed the idea that dualism was flawed and that some form of monism provided a much more satisfactory explanation of the ontology of the physical and the mental. According to this monist view, there is only one reality. Physicalists like to call it the physical and deny the mental altogether. I tend to avoid this and stick to the idea that there really is only one reality, its just when talking about it, or indeed practising Cognitive Science there are multiple levels of analysis that need to be accounted for in order to provide a satisfactory account; physical, phenomenal, functional, etc.

Now the immediate answer that most give as to where the boundaries of the mind end is that the boundaries lie within the skin. Since Turing’s work on computation and the invention of the digital computer there has been an analogy in Cognitive Science of something like, mindware is to brain as software is to hardware. In other words the workings of the human mind is like the software in a computer. The brain of course being the biological computer and its program being the mind. This of course is not to be taken too literally in a dualist sense. We are talking of studying mindware scientifically as a process that occurs in the brain not as some extra mental stuff. That aside; from this we should try to make computational models that correlate with the physical interactions in the brain. If we are successful we will have explained mindware.

There have been numerous attempts over the year to theorize and build computational models of the brain/mind, frequently with the help from AI simulations. Good old fashioned AI (GOFAI) followed Newell and Simon’s Physical Symbol System theory. The idea is a physical device that contains a set of symbols with combinable properties and a set of operations used to manipulate those symbols according to rules. The attractions of this were clear as folk psychological terms such as beliefs could be clearly implemented, actually becoming symbols in the computational models. Thus thought could be naturalized. However the biological implementation of such models was never clear and many researchers rejected it as a realistic model of human cognition.

In the 80s a new wave of computational theorists known as connectionists emerged. Their models were analogous to real human brain neural networks (although far simpler). Artificial neural networks consisted of simple nodes (like neural cells) linked in parallel interacting with higher levels via simple connection weights (like axons and dendrites). Units received input and passed their weights to higher levels (like electrochemical impulses). Today’s models have incorporated realistic temporal and biological features such as salient time delays and deliberate noise. There’s a lot to say about connectionism, and it definitely seems to provide a far more accurate model of computation in the brain, but I’ll leave it at that for the sake of this blog. No doubt with the huge growth in computer IP capacity we will see even more realistic models in the future alongside neuroscientific research.

However it seems that if we are to take a monist approach and perhaps even we don’t, the processes under study should leave the skin. The previous models mentioned above all missed a key factor in their research: “Embodiment”. Human brains are situated in a body that, with the help of a nervous system and sensory apparatus, takes in real world input and causally interacts with the external physical world. More recently then researchers have put focus on the interactions of brain, body and environment. The idea is that intelligent systems often don’t have to go through such rigours higher cognition of assessing the problem, weighing up the alternatives, working out the values, doing the calculations and then getting the answer; in order to achieve a goal. Most of the time such processes become automated in the dynamic reactions between body (from here on in this includes the brain and nervous system) and environment. Could it be possible that much of our incredibly complex behaviour is facilitated by lots and lots of very simple interactions between and within the body and the environment? Well dynamic system theorists argue so and that’s where much research is taking place currently with help from robotics and artificial life projects.

If we look at motor skills such as walking or throwing a ball it’s fairly clear to see how this is the case, and motor skill theory is no new thing. Take catching a ball; the ball comes towards the person, the visual system tracks it, sends a signal to a low level processing area of the visual cortex which unconsciously processes information and relays the signal to the arm and hand muscles which perfectly coordinate and the ball is caught. We all take such a process for granted but really it’s quite incredible how a collection of such simple processes can produce the result of a ball at 20 mph being caught out of the air. We can at least however understand how this all works in principle.

However what are the implications of such an extended theory of mind on higher cognition?

One of the most interesting I think is that when studying cognition we shouldn’t just look at brain computation, but we should take into account cognitive technology. Today we are immersed in a world of computers, mobile phones, etc. Through these cognitive tools we are able to solve tasks with incredible more efficiency than we could without. Think of the internet. Right now if you wanted to find out how to get somewhere you could open up Google and type your destination in or look it up on trainlink, or whatever. You would have the answer in a matter of seconds. 15 years ago you would have had to look up some numbers in the phone book, dialled the number on a landline probably which may or may not be near you, spoken to the operator or whatever and then that might have only been one part of your journey, etc. 150 years ago you might have to go down the road and find someone who knew how to get there, find someone else who could transport you there, etc. 1000 years ago… well you get the picture.

The idea is that as technology evolves so does our cognition and our ability to process information efficiently. It probably isn’t going to that long till we all have decent internet on our phones, thus when you’re in the middle of town and you want to know somthing you can just get your mobile out, open Google, search and there you go. The interesting question follows: Does the internet (which you now always have near immediate access to) count as part of your mind or at least your knowledge base. Most of course would answer no, just as they wouldn’t count a bit of paper with a number on it as part of your mind.

However yet further into the future there’s a good chance that people will be able to get chips in their brain that wires them up to the internet so they have immediate access at any time. It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but I don’t think it can be ruled out. It’s certainly possible in principle and as technology evolves so will society’s values and thus it may well gain acceptance. Even if it never happens, the thought experiment is still there. Does the knowledge on the internet count as yours; does your mind extend into it? It’s hard to argue no unless you say the mind is only linked to the biological brain or you believe in a soul. Such a situation would mean you had the same instant access to information on the internet as you did with your biological brain. Such an invention, to coin a Jungian term, might well lead to an “unconscious collective”, or in fact better phrased; a “Conscious Collective”. Of course it may turn out that this never happens or that its impossible, but it does raise a very interesting point on the boundaries of the mind.