Humans really don't know what they're doing?

[DBT]

If it is the brain that generates conscious activity, as the evidence supports, anything that effects the brain alters conscious activity in related ways.

That is a given. And has been a given for a long time.

You are babbling into the darkness.

Yes, some kind of activity is creating consciousness. And that activity has to be within certain parameters for consciousness to effectively operate. If the activity is altered in some way the abilities of consciousness are altered.

But the abilities of consciousness are there when the brain is functioning "normally".

Like the ability to understand and express ideas.

The ability to understand and express ideas?

You appear to want it both ways, that consciousness is a brain activity and - inexplicably - that consciousness has autonomy from brain activity.

Very strange.

 

[untermensche]

If it is the brain that generates conscious activity, as the evidence supports, anything that effects the brain alters conscious activity in related ways.

That is a given. And has been a given for a long time.

You are babbling into the darkness.

Yes, some kind of activity is creating consciousness. And that activity has to be within certain parameters for consciousness to effectively operate. If the activity is altered in some way the abilities of consciousness are altered.

But the abilities of consciousness are there when the brain is functioning "normally".

Like the ability to understand and express ideas.

The ability to understand and express ideas?

You appear to want it both ways, that consciousness is a brain activity and - inexplicably - that consciousness has autonomy from brain activity.

Very strange.

It is possible the consciousness is an autonomous decision making device created by some kind of unknown activity.

You are claiming the brain uses activity of some kind to make decisions. You have already granted it is possible for brain activity to make decisions.

Consciousness, the mind, a delicate thing that needs the proper conditions, is just a sub-activity making decisions that can effect other parts of the brain. Nothing miraculous.

Since we don't have the slightest clue what activity is creating consciousness we don't have the slightest clue what it is objectively.

So we can't say what it can and cannot do.

 

[DBT]

Unknown activity? Even while electrical and chemical changes to detectable and known electrical and chemical brain activity can be carried out at any time with predictable results....

 

[untermensche]

Unknown activity? Even while electrical and chemical changes to detectable and known electrical and chemical brain activity can be carried out at any time with predictable results....

There is no known electrical or chemical effect that results in consciousness.

Cutting off the blood has predictable results too.

 

[Speakpigeon]

It's been a while since I last looked closely at Libet's experiments (including the one in question) so I'd have to remind myself of exactly how he attempted to address the various timing issues and how they might tot up.

For now, I will just,

(a) point out just for clarity that I said, 'far from conclusive' which is, um, quite a way from, "the idea that science seems to have shown conclusively, although possibly with lots of caveats for now, that human beings cannot possibly be consciously deciding of their actions", which is not quite the way I would put it and which Libet never went near either, as far as I know,

(b) restate that I think which 'comes first or causes' in this scenario is currently an open question, imo, and

(c) leave this on the thread, it at least being more recent than Libet:

https://vimeo.com/90101368

Two things, I guess.

First, watching the video, it's really, really very, very hard not to see it as suggesting decisions are made unconsciously, in effect well before we get a chance to become conscious of them. So, I take your point that nobody seems prepared to phrase this in such a blunt way, but then I'd like a more convincing stance. For example, what about expressing explicitly, in good English, what the video seems to show, according to you, and then, you're free to explain, if need be, how and why what it says shouldn't really be taken literally.

Yeah, I know, hard work. Still, everybody is welcome to it. Just join the fun!

Second... Wait, second is a good point, but I'll leave it at that for now. I wouldn't want you guys to try multitasking.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Here's the real thing:

http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ccs/DennettKinsbourne1992TimeObserver.htm

Thanks for the link. I'll try to comment on it, bit by bit.

Here's one:

It is tempting to suppose that there must be some place in the brain where "it all comes together" in a multi-modal representation or display that is definitive of the content of conscious experience in at least this sense: the temporal properties of the events that occur in that particular locus of representation determine the temporal properties--of sequence, simultaneity, and real-time onset, for instance--of the subjective "stream of consciousness." This is the error of thinking we intend to expose. "Where does it all come together?" The answer, we propose, is Nowhere .

We clearly tend to focus our conscious attention on specific perception modes and on small regions or aspects of what we perceive, shifting our attention fast between them repeatedly. Yet, we’re still conscious of some of it if we’re conscious at all.

So, we don’t need that "it all come together", except presumably, broadly inside the brain. We don’t need that it all come together within the conscious part of our brain. What we need is to explain how the conscious focus is selected or produced, and what would be the use of that piece of perception information being conscious if consciousness doesn’t play some causal role in whatever we do.

You don't need to reply to that right now. I'll try to go through the thing and maybe I'll have to shift my interpretation and position.

And it may take time to come together.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ccs/DennettKinsbourne1992TimeObserver.htm

Here's another one:

Some of the contentful states distributed around in the brain soon die out, leaving no traces. Others do leave traces, on subsequent verbal reports of experience and memory, on "semantic readiness" and other varieties of perceptual set, on emotional state, behavioral proclivities, and so forth. Some of these effects--for instance, influences on subsequent verbal reports--are at least symptomatic of consciousness. But there is no one place in the brain through which all these causal trains must pass in order to deposit their contents "in consciousness"

In effect, there has to be. There just needs to be at least one last brain site where whatever representations are consciously experienced are finalised. Consciousness isn't some magical event.

And another:

The brain must be able to "bind" or "correlate" and "compare" various separately discriminated contents, but the processes that accomplish these unifications are themselves distributed, not gathered at some central decision point, and as a result, the "point of view of the observer" is spatially smeared.

Not quite, no. Unconscious processes are probably massive compared to conscious ones and are, I would agree, obviously distributed around different brain sites. We can also safely assume they do most of the necessary work to present contents to the conscious brain site and to make the connection between different pieces of contents, including between the conscious and unconscious ones. Yet, I fail to see why we should expect that no processing would take place within the conscious brain site. And more generally, why this conscious process would be causally irrelevant to what people actually do.

OK, so, it's going to be a slog. It'll take time. A lot of what he says he really just irrelevant. That's because of the angle chosen. He's really criticising the views of idiots. Never a good idea.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

once Descartes' ghostly res cogitans is discarded, there is no longer a role for a centralized gateway, or indeed for any functional center to the brain. The brain itself is Headquarters, the place where the ultimate observer is, but it is a mistake to believe that the brain has any deeper headquarters, any inner sanctum arrival at which is the necessary or sufficient condition for conscious experience.

Yes.

Still, I don’t believe that many people, particularly scientists, would still entertain this idea of a consciousness headquarter within the brain. There has to be a site, possibly different sites, but there’s no specific reason to see it as something like a headquarter.

And I don't see how evolution could have produced a conscious headquarter, and I say this knowing full well it did produce the brain, itself a headquarter.
EB

 

[DBT]

Unknown activity? Even while electrical and chemical changes to detectable and known electrical and chemical brain activity can be carried out at any time with predictable results....

There is no known electrical or chemical effect that results in consciousness.

Cutting off the blood has predictable results too.

Yet decisions can be predicted based on the detectable electrical activity in the brain prior to report. That is, before the subject presses the button. Before you go into timing again, the decision is being predicted before the subject does anything, a prediction based purely on the patterns being displayed on the fMRI screen.

 

[Speakpigeon]

The philosopher Nelson Goodman had asked Kolers whether the phi phenomenon would persist if the two illuminated spots were different in color, and if so, what would happen to the color of "the" spot as "it" moved? Would the illusion of motion disappear, to be replaced by two separately flashing spots? Would the illusory "moving" spot gradually change from one color to another, tracing a trajectory around the color wheel? The answer, when Kolers and von Grnau performed the experiments, was striking: the spot seems to begin moving and then to change color abruptly in the middle of its illusory passage toward the second location. Goodman wonders: "how are we able . . .to fill in the spot at the intervening place-times along a path running from the first to the second flash before that second flash occurs?"

Clearly, that’s an excellent indication that conscious experience is preceded by unconscious constructive processes that can overwrite basic perception contents to provide a unified and operational interpretation of the environment to the subject. In this particular case, it is the current state of the immediate environment of the subject, but the mechanism can be assumed to go beyond that. The result is inevitably a simplification compared to the actual environment, but, as shown here, the processes involved seem to opt for the most likely situation.

So, we're learning a lot here about the unconscious processes that come before conscious experience and how the contents of subjective experience are elaborated and selected by unconscious processes distributed throughout the brain. Good work. Unfortunately, it is also clear we're not going to learn anything on how subjective experience itself is possible. Subjective experience is two things: the experience itself and what is experienced, i.e. qualia, i.e. the conscious contents of the mind. These two things may be one thing with two aspects or properties. But these two aspects won't be explained by what Dennett is talking about. It's just a different subject. Dennett is talking here about the unconscious processes necessary to produce contents before they become conscious. He is clearly not going to explain what conscious experience consists of or how qualia would be at all possible in an all-physical world.
EB

 

[untermensche]

Unknown activity? Even while electrical and chemical changes to detectable and known electrical and chemical brain activity can be carried out at any time with predictable results....

There is no known electrical or chemical effect that results in consciousness.

Cutting off the blood has predictable results too.

Yet decisions can be predicted based on the detectable electrical activity in the brain prior to report. That is, before the subject presses the button. Before you go into timing again, the decision is being predicted before the subject does anything, a prediction based purely on the patterns being displayed on the fMRI screen.

If you tell somebody to move at a certain time have you actually predicted anything when they do move?

A prediction would be to tell a person to plan to move but allow them to randomly refrain from moving at the last second. The prediction would be to know whether they were going to move or not.

That would be a real prediction about the will.

Knowing what hand a person is planning to move because they were asked to move at a certain time is not much of a prediction. You knew ahead of time they were going to move. Automatically you will get 50% of your guesses right.

I think that decisions go through a process. There are subconscious processes that prepare for potential decisions but the final decision is many times made by the consciousness. Many times the consciousness simply follows the decision made by subconscious processes but it also has the power to override those decisions.

But if you are sitting there and randomly decide to move your arm that is totally a decision of consciousness.

If you move on command subconscious processes now come into play because you know ahead of time a specific decision is needed and imminent.

 

[DBT]

Yet decisions can be predicted based on the detectable electrical activity in the brain prior to report. That is, before the subject presses the button. Before you go into timing again, the decision is being predicted before the subject does anything, a prediction based purely on the patterns being displayed on the fMRI screen.

If you tell somebody to move at a certain time have you actually predicted anything when they do move?
.

That's not the point. The point being that the decision is predicted before the subject signals the option taken. This being done on the basis of brain activity patterns on an fMRI screen. What the subject chooses is after the fact, after the researchers have made the predicted option.

 

[ruby sparks]

The subjects were not asked to move at a certain time.

 

[untermensche]

The subjects were not asked to move at a certain time.

They were forced to plan for a movement.

Spontaneous movement was not looked at.

It has never been looked at.

 

[ruby sparks]

But you said they were asked to move at a certain time.

 

[untermensche]

But you did say they were asked to move at a certain time.

In some studies they are.

The point is the movement is not spontaneous.

 

[ruby sparks]

In some studies they are.

And those were the ones you were talking about.

 

[untermensche]

In some studies they are.

And those were the ones you were talking about.

OK.

The point was the movement was not spontaneous.

When a command comes from the external world that is not spontaneous movement.

 

[ruby sparks]

The point was the movement was not spontaneous.

The point was that they were asked to move at a certain time.

 

[ruby sparks]

Knowing what hand a person is planning to move because they were asked to move at a certain time is not much of a prediction. You knew ahead of time they were going to move. Automatically you will get 50% of your guesses right.

John-Dylan Haynes claims to consistently do better than 50%.