Tech Lab Consciousness

STYLE
Reader: Your Name Here
Citation: Name O. Author (year). Book title, City: Publisher. OR
Name O. Author (year). Article title, Journal, volume, pages.
Comment: 0-2 sentences (or more) about this reading.

Tech Lab Readings -- December 2007

Reader: Gail
Citation: Neural Networks (November 2007) - Special issue on Brain and Consciousness
Comment: Guest editors John G. Taylor, Walter Freeman, and A. Cleeremans.

Reader: Ogi
Citation: Stephen Grossberg (2007) - Consciousness CLEARS the mind
Comment: Grossberg's latest discussion of consciousness

Reader: Ogas
*The Hard Problem vs The Easy Problem (or Dennett vs Chalmers): A succinct essay summarizing the contemporary state of the philosophical debate over consciousness
Philosophers and almost all non-modelers are concerned with the "qualia" of consciousness. Many consider the mystery of subjective experience as a "hard problem". Others believe that it can be explained computationally. This brief essay presents this debate quite clearly. Dennett advocates a third-person (objective, scientific) approach to consciousness which he terms heterophenomenology, though he believes it is simply science as usual applied to consciousness and qualia, as opposed to those who believe in a "hard problem" of consciousness, who think that there is something about consciousness that cannot be touched by science, and who therefore advocate a "first-person" science of consciousness. (You can skip the appendix.)

Reader: Ogas
*Dan Pollen (1999) On the neural correlates of visual perception. Cereb Cortex. 1999 Jan-Feb;9(1):4-19.
Though Pollen strictly limits his model to visual consciousness, this is an intelligent application of Carpenter/Grossberg's adaptive resonances to consciousness. He even makes concrete neural and behavioral predictions. This model contains a wealth of specific details about early visual processing: a density of neural and computational detail conspicuously absent in other purported models of consciousness. However, if you want to jump right to the heart of the matter -- right into the explicit "model of consciousness" -- just read the short section entitled Proposed Functions for Adaptive Resonance Loops on page 9, and then read everything starting with Phenomenal Visual Experience, Visual Imagery, and Recursive Processing on page 12.

Reader: Sai
Citation: Thomas Metzinger (2004) - Consciousness: Selected Bibliography 1970-2004
Comment: A comprehensive 140 page bibliography of articles and books published on the topic of consciousness in the last four decades.

Reader: Rohit
Citation: John Searle (1999) - Consciousness
Comment: Searle's review on a neurobiological/neuroscience approach to studying consciousness

Reader: Ogi
Citation: Daniel Dennett (2007) - Heterophenomenology Reconsidered
Comment: Dennett's latest update on his views on consciousness (a clarification of heterophenomenology)

Reader: Santiago
Citation: Francis Crick & Christof Koch (2005) - A framework for conciousness
Comment: Although somewhat restricted to vision, seems to show interesting ideas

Reader: Santiago
Citation: Francis Crick & Christof Koch (2005) - What is the function of the claustrum?
Comment: an example of their intuitions and speculations about the neural correlates of conciousness

Reader: Sai
Citation: Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind reading
Comment: Is Consciousness a result of mirror neurons looking inward? Relevant Background: On Consciousness Evolved -- by V. S. Ramachandran

Reader: Max
Citation: Conscious Cogn. - Get paper
Comment: Neuronal phenomena associated with vigilance and consciousness: from cellular mechanisms to electroencephalographic patterns.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Wikipedia - Consciousness
Comment: Link to image at right -- by Robert Fludd, 1619.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Consciousness
Comment: Many references.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Sigmund Freud (1900). The interpretation of dreams.
Google Books
Comment: Of course!

Reader: Gail
Citation: Douglas Hofstadter (2007). I am a strange loop., New York: Basic Books.
Comment: Note Chapter 19: Consciousness = thinking.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Daniel C. Dennett (1991). Consciousness explained., Boston: Little, Brown.
Comment: Multiple Drafts model.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Suzanne Corkin (2002). What’s new with the amnesic patient H.M.? Nature Reviews - Neuroscience, 3, 153-160.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Julian Jaynes (1974). The origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Google Books

Reader: Arun
Citation: Uriah Kriegel (2006). Self-representational approaches to consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Bradford Books).
Comment: Uriah Krigel recently (in 2003) got his PhD from Brown University. Thesis title: “Conscious Content”. He is with the Center of Consciousness Studies at University of Arizona, Tucson.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Randolph Blake & Nikos K. Logothetis (2002). Visual competition. Nature reviews neuroscience, 3(January), 2-11.
Comment: Binocular rivalry as a substrate for studying consciousness.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Nikos K. Logothetis (2002). Vision: A window on consciousness. Scientific American Special Edition: The hidden mind, Vol. 12(1), 18-25.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Christof Koch (2002). The quest for consciousness: A neurobiological approach. Engelwood, Colorado: Roberts and Company.

Reader: Gail
Citation: Michael Tye (1995). Ten problems of consciousness: a representational theory of the phenomenal mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Bradford Books).
Comment: A philosopher considers the neuroscience of consciousness.

Reader: Greg
Citation: Eliezer J. Sternberg (2007) - Are You a Machine?: The Brain, the Mind, And What It Means to Be Human
Comment: I haven't gotten my hands on this yet (I'm going to pick it up from the Brookline library tomorrow), but it looks like an interesting mainstream book. I think the title speaks for itself. Sternberg gives a review of modern brain science and a discussion of the prospect of eventually understanding the brain (including consciousness) as completely as we do the heart or the stomach.

Overview -- from CN710, Spring 2006

Consciousness has traditionally been approached from two perspectives:

Philosophical perspective:
Descartes (1596-1650): "I think therefore I am" and the dualist approach to the mind-body problem.
Psychological perspective:
William James (1842-1910): Consciousness is the function of knowing.

However, recent advances in computational modeling and artifical intelligence has spawned a new era of interest in consciousness in terms of a complete reevaluation of the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem can be defined as the problem of explaining the relationship between mental processes and bodily processes. Relatedly, the existence or non-existence of "qualia" has been revisited. Qualia is defined as the character and nature of subjective experience (Why is the red that I see "this particular red"? Why am I aware of red at all?).

What can modelers like us contribute to this problem? Some philosophers would say nothing at all -- that consciousness is a hard problem which cannot be resolved merely be explaining neural correlates of consciousness: that modeling will not explain consciousness. Others believe that an accurate model of consciousness can be an accurate explanation of consciousness.

For this group discussion, we present a number of recent biologically-rooted computational models of consciousness, that attempt to explain the purpose and nature of consciousness--and, indirectly or directly, the nature of the enigmatic "qualia".

We start the core readings off with a short book chapter by John Searle, a famous contemporary philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind and language. How does Searle's Chinese Room Argument relate to our modeling work? Then, there is a short essay by the leading anti-qualia philosopher, Daniel Dennett, who lays out the current perspectives of both philosophical qualia camps. However, as modelers, do we even need to be concerned with such philosophical machinations? Can a comprehensive model brush aside any philosophical kerfuffles? Or will even the most sophisticated model still leave the "hard problem of consciousness" untouched?

Core Readings -- from CN710, Spring 2006

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Searle, John R. .Consciousness as a biological problem. The Mystery of Consciousness, chapter 1: 1-18.
John Searle is one the most famous contemporary philosphers who is known for his Chinese Room Argument (briefly introduced in this chapter) which aims to invalidate the foundation of the field of artifical intelligence. Think about how his arguments affect the modeling work that we do at CNS.

Reader: Ogas
CN710, Spring 2006
*The Hard Problem vs The Easy Problem (or Dennett vs Chalmers): A succinct essay summarizing the contemporary state of the philosophical debate over consciousness
Philosophers and almost all non-modelers are concerned with the "qualia" of consciousness. Many consider the mystery of subjective experience as a "hard problem". Others believe that it can be explained computationally. This brief essay presents this debate quite clearly. Dennett advocates a third-person (objective, scientific) approach to consciousness which he terms heterophenomenology, though he believes it is simply science as usual applied to consciousness and qualia, as opposed to those who believe in a "hard problem" of consciousness, who think that there is something about consciousness that cannot be touched by science, and who therefore advocate a "first-person" science of consciousness. (You can skip the appendix.)
Note: Dennett refers to two vision demos in the essay, but does not provide links. Here is a demo of the Ramacharan motion capture illusion. Here is a demo of change blindness (to see what's really going on, right click on the image and choose "No Gap"). We highly recommend doing at least one of the change blindness demos, as it will greatly help our discussion of qualia and consciousness by providing a concrete shared "problem" that we can all discuss.

Reader: Ogas
CN710, Spring 2006
*Dan Pollen (1999) On the neural correlates of visual perception. Cereb Cortex. 1999 Jan-Feb;9(1):4-19.
Though Pollen strictly limits his model to visual consciousness, this is an intelligent application of Carpenter/Grossberg's adaptive resonances to consciousness. He even makes concrete neural and behavioral predictions. This model contains a wealth of specific details about early visual processing: a density of neural and computational detail conspicuously absent in other purported models of consciousness. However, if you want to jump right to the heart of the matter -- right into the explicit "model of consciousness" -- just read the short section entitled Proposed Functions for Adaptive Resonance Loops on page 9, and then read everything starting with Phenomenal Visual Experience, Visual Imagery, and Recursive Processing on page 12.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience. Maia TV, Cleeremans A. Trends Cogn Sci. 2005 Aug;9(8):397-404.
A very recent and well-developed model, based largely upon Dehaene and Changeux's "global workspace" model (described in their paper in the supplementary readings).

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Baars BJ. The conscious access hypothesis: origins and recent evidence. Trends Cogn Sci. 2002; 6 :47-52
Baars came up with his "global workspace hypothesis" as a model of consciousness more than 20 years ago. It apparently never caught on outside of philosophy (where it does have some prominence), though in this paper he tries to argue that he was ahead of his time, and tries to show that recent evidence supports his model of consciousness. He also makes explicit predictions. This paper also includes many recent neurological and modeling references, distinguishing it from other consciousness papers.

Supplementary Readings-- from CN710, Spring 2006

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*There's an entire issue of NEURAL NETWORKS devoted to models of consciousness, though they are about a decade old. You can only access these papers from the BU net. Some of the more interesting papers are listed below.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
Consciousness in Neural Networks? by Edmund T. Rolls

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
Three Centuries of Category Errors in Studies of the Neural Basis of Consciousness and Intentionality by Walter J. Freeman

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Computational Models of Consciousness: An Evaluation. R. Sun. 1999
Sun appears to be a psychologist who has published many papers addressing connectionist approaches to consciousness. In this paper, he applies his own perspective on several existing computational models of consciousness (Grossberg/Carpenter are notably absent from all of his papers, though he purports to be doing a comprehensive survey of all reasonable computational models of mind). He then describes his own model of consciousness, the CLARION model, which seems to lack in specifics. This paper is definitely long, but a reasonably broad survey.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Neural Mechanisms for Consciousness by Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux
The article presenting the "neuronal workspace hypothesis", developed further in Maia and Cleeremans.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Grossberg, S. (2005). Linking attention to learning, expectation, competition, and consciousness. In L. Itti , G. Rees, and J. Tsotsos (Eds.), Neurobiology of attention . San Diego: Elsevier, pp. 652-662.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Neural networks for consciousness by J. G. Taylor. Neural Networks, Volume 10, Issue 7, Pages 1173-1343 (1 October 1997)
An explicit neural network model of consciousness. Like Sun's, it seems quite general and lacking in detail. But he seems aware of the issues involved, claiming "the race for consciousness is on."

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Accounting for the Computational Basis of Consciousness: A Connectionist Approach (1999) R. Sun
Another paper by Sun.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*O'Brien, Gerard and Opie, Jon (1999) A Connectionist Theory of Phenomenal Experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22:pp. 127-148. O'Brien, Gerard and Opie, Jon (1999) A Defence of Cartesian Materialism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59:pp. 939-963.
These guys address connectionist models of consciousness.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Searle, John Minds, Brains and Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Reprint of the 1984 Reith Lectures in which Searle summarizes his arguments about the philosophy of mind. It is a very easy read and short!

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Rosenthal, David M. The Nature of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
This is a collection of philosophical essays about consciousness. The first essays include selections from Descartes work on the mind body problem. Also there is a nice John Searle essay on page 509 in which he not only briefly discusses his ideas but also uses them to refute many counterarguments that have been generated over the years.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Farthing, G. William The Psychology of Consciousness. Englewood Cliffs:Prentice Hall.

Reader: CN710, Spring 2006
*Wallace, Benjamin and Fisher, Leslie E. Consciousness and Behavior. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.