Downward Causation: Useful or Misguided Idea?

[ruby sparks]

Scary.

But in a way, that's the general direction I was wibbling towards.

In a nutshell, is conscious awareness a memory? Something you don't experience 'as it's happening'?

If no memory is laid down, do you not then realise that you 'were' conscious?

Sort of similar issue with free will, in that you arguably can't know if you exercised it (or believe you did) until after the event.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Scary.

But in a way, that's the general direction I was wibbling towards.

In a nutshell, is conscious awareness a memory? Something you don't experience 'as it's happening'?

If no memory is laid down, do you not then realise that you 'were' conscious?

Sort of similar issue with free will, in that you arguably can't know if you exercised it (or believe you did) until after the event.

If you think that remembering is conscious awareness then I suspect you are much much closer to Dennett's position than you might think. I think that one is conscious, then one forgets. That's all very well except during the torture scene, whether you forget or not.

 

[DBT]

For all practical purposes, 'downward causation' is inseparable from upward causation. It is all brain activity. There is no privileged agency. Whatever the brain is doing, it's state and condition in any given moment in time, is reflected in its behavioral output, both conscious and unconscious behaviors.

 

[ruby sparks]

If you think that remembering is conscious awareness then I suspect you are much much closer to Dennett's position than you might think. I think that one is conscious, then one forgets. That's all very well except during the torture scene, whether you forget or not.

I probably am close to Dennett's views generally. I have a beef with calling a certain capacity free will but but I can't think of too many other ways I would disagree with him (inasmuch as I understand him, which is surely not completely).

Getting back to what you said about general anaesthesia, if it's the case that it works by a combination of paralysis and preventing the laying down of memories, then that would suggest that the patient is conscious (and possibly in pain) but just doesn't remember it, or flinch. Wow. I'd like to read more about that.

When REM dreaming, I understand that the body is usually or often similarly paralysed, so I get the not flinching part quite readily (and of course in that state, all the mental imagery is coming from memory). The other part is trickier. But it makes common sense (with all the usual caveats which that entails). If no memory was lain down, how would you know anything had happened? It'd be like that little pen-gizmo in the film Men in Black, with the red flash going off not just intermittently but continuously, effectively erasing everything that is experienced, as it is experienced. It would certainly seem to make the reporting of conscious experience all but impossible, and of course that's what several of the neuroscience experiments rely on. If experience unsupported by memory prevented or inhibited self-reporting too......whither conscious experience?

I think others here have alluded to similar suggestions regarding the relationship between consciousness and memory.

How this ties into so-called subliminal perception, I don't know. Assuming there is such a phenomenon, how could you tell if it was a case of (a) not remembering a conscious perception or (b) the perception merely not having 'crossed a threshold' into consciousness in the first place. The fact that in both cases, there are relevant effects on action wouldn't tell you which it was. As for blindsight, that would seem to be slightly different, because as I understand it, the damage, at least in some cases, is down to severed connections normally involved in vision.

The other (to me) puzzler is the role of attention. When some people appear to be able to have teeth extracted without experiencing pain and without having had an anaesthetic, it suggests that something can be 'switched off' (or not attended to) without the need for an injection of an inhibitor from outside the body. I guess the role of attention is possibly related to both memory and consciousness in some way and that there may be overlap between the integrated phenomena that those separate words try to refer to components of.

 

[DBT]

I think that Dennett is quite reasonable in many ways. One exception being what he defines as being free will.

 

[untermensche]

Dennett knows absolutely nothing objective about consciousness.

He spins stories that some find interesting. Humans love stories. Some can live on stories and nothing else.

None of it explains a thing about the phenomena of consciousness and how it arises or what it is.

He is in places deluded.

He uses his mind to deny it's existence and scope.

All that has happened in neuroscience over the last 30 years in terms of an explanation of consciousness is the stories have become more and more complicated. And many dogmatists have their favorite stories.

Stories built upon stories.

And not one objective model to test.

 

[Subsymbolic]

If you think that remembering is conscious awareness then I suspect you are much much closer to Dennett's position than you might think. I think that one is conscious, then one forgets. That's all very well except during the torture scene, whether you forget or not.

I probably am close to Dennett's views generally. I have a beef with calling a certain capacity free will but but I can't think of too many other ways I would disagree with him (inasmuch as I understand him, which is surely not completely).

Getting back to what you said about general anaesthesia, if it's the case that it works by a combination of paralysis and preventing the laying down of memories, then that would suggest that the patient is conscious (and possibly in pain) but just doesn't remember it, or flinch. Wow. I'd like to read more about that.

When REM dreaming, I understand that the body is usually or often similarly paralysed, so I get the not flinching part quite readily (and of course in that state, all the mental imagery is coming from memory). The other part is trickier. But it makes common sense (with all the usual caveats which that entails). If no memory was lain down, how would you know anything had happened? It'd be like that little pen-gizmo in the film Men in Black, with the red flash going off not just intermittently but continuously, effectively erasing everything that is experienced, as it is experienced. It would certainly seem to make the reporting of conscious experience all but impossible, and of course that's what several of the neuroscience experiments rely on. If experience unsupported by memory prevented or inhibited self-reporting too......whither conscious experience?

I think others here have alluded to similar suggestions regarding the relationship between consciousness and memory.

How this ties into so-called subliminal perception, I don't know. Assuming there is such a phenomenon, how could you tell if it was a case of (a) not remembering a conscious perception or (b) the perception merely not having 'crossed a threshold' into consciousness in the first place. The fact that in both cases, there are relevant effects on action wouldn't tell you which it was. As for blindsight, that would seem to be slightly different, because as I understand it, the damage, at least in some cases, is down to severed connections normally involved in vision.

The other (to me) puzzler is the role of attention. When some people appear to be able to have teeth extracted without experiencing pain and without having had an anaesthetic, it suggests that something can be 'switched off' (or not attended to) without the need for an injection of an inhibitor from outside the body. I guess the role of attention is possibly related to both memory and consciousness in some way and that there may be overlap between the integrated phenomena that those separate words try to refer to components of.

I wasn’t quite clear enough, “forget the rest” referred to the other drugs given to bridge that gap. Historically, they were not always given and nowadays, you can see the moral and philosophical problems with testing efficacy. Given that pain relief effective enough to work in extremis tends to lead to unintended issues, I am personally of the opinion that unless you have a local then you will suffer trauma, whether the trauma is conscious is another question. I suspect that it probably is but very confused and possibly dissociated.

Here’s something to start to worry you. We have remarkably effective drugs to induce paralysis and amnesia that are effective well below dangerous doses. Keeping people safely pain free and unconscious is much harder, especially during operations. As such it is far more likely that someone will be in pain and forget than be in pain and remember. And yet.

In short, if you can stop the pain signals hitting the brain all is well. As soon as you can’t then you are in far less comfortable territory. Part of the problem is that pretty well any general pain relief reduces survival rates, so you really want to give as little as possible. Which is preferable! Transient pain or death...

 

[WAB]

Wow, that's really scary, but at the same time, kind of not.

I had two teeth extracted years ago, and went under for it. I remember being told to count backwards from 100. At 98 I was in heaven, and at 97 I was gone. Sweet oblivion. No time elapsed from my perspective, and when I came to, I felt perfectly fine, with absolutely no pain and no memory of anything.

My mother, who was to drive me home, since I had been under anaesthesia, was in the waiting room, and told me later on that she could hear me moaning and groaning, obviously in pain, or discomfort of some kind. Hmm. Well, I don't remember a bit of it, and it was one of the most pain-free dental experiences I've ever had. I try to imagine myself lying there, moaning and groaning, in pain, but I can't manage it.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Question. Can you be conscious without knowing that you are?

One could argue dreams are just an instance of that. Even though dreams have a point of view, I don't think the subject I am and know I am during daytime is also there during my dreams. So, the subject there is during daytime certainly remembers, on occasions, dreams and these appears to have had a point of view, but as far as I can tell no self-knowing subject.

One possibility, though, is that the only difference is that the dream-time subject just doesn't remember it's me because it has no memory of being anybody. The rest is the same. So, it would know it is conscious but without himself feeling like being anybody he could remember.

I also had this more vivid experience I already discussed here, where there was experience but only very little. No sensation, no impressions, no ideas, no memory, only something like a slight anxiety. And certainly no subject, or at least no self-knowing subject or one with anything like a self. You could argue that experience implies a subject experiencing but in this case it seems to be a non-entity. A mere property, so to speak. No sense at all of being me, or anybody, at the time.

This is also why I take our apparent self-awareness to belong to the Cartesian theatre concocted by our brain for practical purposes selected for by evolution. I think it's a quale and we would need to understand how the brain does that trick. But to be able to do that, we would need to develop something less primitive than the bare-bones physicalism we use today. Imagination would be required here. We need to change our perspective. We need to let go of the framework we use.
EB

 

[DBT]

Dennett knows absolutely nothing objective about consciousness.

He spins stories that some find interesting. Humans love stories. Some can live on stories and nothing else.

None of it explains a thing about the phenomena of consciousness and how it arises or what it is.

He is in places deluded.

He uses his mind to deny it's existence and scope.

All that has happened in neuroscience over the last 30 years in terms of an explanation of consciousness is the stories have become more and more complicated. And many dogmatists have their favorite stories.

Stories built upon stories.

And not one objective model to test.

You still miss the point: just because we do not know how the brain actually forms conscious experience, does not mean that nothing is known or understood about brain function in relation to conscious experience, sight, sound, smell, thoughts, feelings, etc, etc.....

 

[DBT]

Question. Can you be conscious without knowing that you are?

Depends on the terms, self awareness is not an omnipresent feature of consciousness. Being absorbed in something, a book, movie, etc, we are conscious of the article, the focus of attention being on the thing of interest, but we are not necessarily self aware.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I do agree with uber that the idea of the brain creating the illusion of consciousness in order to trick itself that it's an autonomous, causative agent, is perhaps on par with the idea that God created Jesus in order to sacrifice Himself to Himself.

There's no reason to think of the brain as creating an illusion of consciousness or an illusion that you are a causative agent. The idea instead is that the brain has a specific cognitive process that effectively, causatively, supervises longer term action. Non-conscious processes keep control of the very short term actions, for your own safety so to speak, but let the conscious you plan ahead. In a way, you could say that the conscious homunculus you are has a causative effect not directly on the world out there but certainly on at least some of the unconscious processes within your own brain. It's the operation room. You have this guy moving blue and red magnetic chips on a mockup theatre board, which is nowhere near the real world, and yet this will affect somehow and somewhat what will happen on the ground, on the actual theatre of operation a few hundred miles away. That's very serious business. Unfortunately, somebody really decided to blow up Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it really happened.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

In the case of anaesthesia the better question is can you be conscious without remembering you are? Most anaesthetics today contain a paralyzing agent because flesh really does go out of its way to avoid damage as well as wibbling a bit too much. Then there's something that really knocks out the laying down of memories. Forget the rest. There's a distinct philosophical problem here: You are absolutely paralyzed with a fully working sensory nervous system. Meanwhile, your ability to lay down memories is systematically undermined. Think about this quite hard, because, unbelievably, the medical profession didn't...

Yeah, I'm completely ignorant about the details of anaesthesia but I think that being objectively knocked out for good doesn't necessarily implies being subjectively knocked out. I see being conscious as closely associated with memory, not just immediate-term memory, but I can conceive that anaesthesia may just knock out the memorising without knocking out the subjective experience. Not so good.
EB

 

[DBT]

The illusion is not of consciousness per se, but the feeling that it is you the conscious self that is in control, the Captain, the CEO of the mind, That is the illusion. An illusion that is exposed whenever something goes wrong with the brain, which is the actual producer of our experience.

 

[Speakpigeon]

If experience unsupported by memory prevented or inhibited self-reporting too......whither conscious experience?

I think others here have alluded to similar suggestions regarding the relationship between consciousness and memory.

How this ties into so-called subliminal perception, I don't know. Assuming there is such a phenomenon, how could you tell if it was a case of (a) not remembering a conscious perception or (b) the perception merely not having 'crossed a threshold' into consciousness in the first place. The fact that in both cases, there are relevant effects on action wouldn't tell you which it was. As for blindsight, that would seem to be slightly different, because as I understand it, the damage, at least in some cases, is down to severed connections normally involved in vision.

The other (to me) puzzler is the role of attention. When some people appear to be able to have teeth extracted without experiencing pain and without having had an anaesthetic, it suggests that something can be 'switched off' (or not attended to) without the need for an injection of an inhibitor from outside the body. I guess the role of attention is possibly related to both memory and consciousness in some way and that there may be overlap between the integrated phenomena that those separate words try to refer to components of.

More generally, it's unclear that the so-called unconscious part of our mind is at all unconscious. It's certainly not able to make any report on that experience through the kind of sophisticated languages we the conscious part can use, but no report doesn't mean much. I don't see why subjective experience would only be associated with the so-called conscious part of our mind. All we can say is that we don't know, i.e. we the conscious part of our mind doesn't know.
EB

 

[WAB]

Yes, DBT, but what else can the conscious self/I be, if not the brain? I know for certain you're not a dualist, but it still sounds like you're referring to two things: the brain and the you/self/I. If the "you" is not your brain, than who, or what, is it?

Humour me a wee tad, as I am probably (hopefully) going inpatient tomorrow for some extended safety and treatment, so I won't be around to bother you guys (and gals) for a while.

Keep your fingers crossed!

 

[DBT]

Yes, DBT, but what else can the conscious self/I be, if not the brain? I know for certain you're not a dualist, but it still sounds like you're referring to two things: the brain and the you/self/I. If the "you" is not your brain, than who, or what, is it?

Humour me a wee tad, as I am probably (hopefully) going inpatient tomorrow for some extended safety and treatment, so I won't be around to bother you guys (and gals) for a while.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Not two separate things, only that the brain sometimes generates or expresses the perception of self awareness in relation to its 'avatar' the conscious self, I,me, myself...and sometimes - in moments of absorption - it does not. The focus of attention having its limits and so on.

 

[ruby sparks]

Question. Can you be conscious without knowing that you are?

Depends on the terms, self awareness is not an omnipresent feature of consciousness. Being absorbed in something, a book, movie, etc, we are conscious of the article, the focus of attention being on the thing of interest, but we are not necessarily self aware.

Yes. But with that, there is still a sensation, I think, of 'being conscious', even if a sense of self is weak or absent. So you could still know that there is consciousness. I am not sure where some personality/identity disorders or severe dementia fit in, but it seems like they may also be cases where there is consciousness and no self. Groggy moments when waking and 'loss of self' during meditation might be similar, as might what it temporarily feel like after being hit over the head with a frying pan.

Other cases, such as driving for miles without realising it, seem to be different, and after you 'snap to', you can't remember either the passing time or what you did during it. That seems at least a bit more like general anaesthesia, in memory terms, even if surely different too (because your body is not paralysed).

Overall, I'd guess that both memories and attention are crucial to self, which is of course, as you say, what's involved in the 'cartesian theatre' and on any occasions where we feel we have control or 'know what we're doing'.

After a bit of googling, I read that the drug Benzodiazepine Midazolam is used in both medical procedures and experimental research to induce retrograde amnesia, which gets us back to sub's horror story about us possibly suffering while under general anaesthetic but just not remembering it.

As far as I can see, memories involved in retrograde amnesia can spontaneously re-emerge, so maybe there is the question of whether the amnesia is about them not being laid down, or not being accessed.

Whether they are being experienced, at the time, is perhaps another question, as is what they feel like at the time if they are being experienced.

I do realise I'm wandering all over the topic here.

 

[DBT]

Yes, I think that memory is the key to the subjective perception of the flow of events, time. If a series of events cannot be recalled, driving from point A to point B, for example, then there is little or no awareness of the passage of time during the journey, or afterwards .

 

[ruby sparks]

Lots of interesting stuff here:

Anesthesia awareness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia_awareness#Awareness_and_recall

"Patients were exposed during anesthesia to a list of words containing the word "pension". Postoperatively, when they were presented with the three-letter word stem PEN___ and were asked to supply the first word that came to their minds beginning with those letters, they gave the word "pension" more often than "pencil" or "peninsula" or others."