The Mystery of Consciousness Matías J. Apablaza.

The Mistery of Consciousness

The Consciousness

The word consciousness has myriad definitions, as well as

words like “love” or “God” it varies among studie areas.
Etimologically, the word consciousness originates in the
latin word “conscientia”, what means shared knowledge,
but, what shared knowledge are we talking about? May be
it’s the knowing of our-selves as an entity, and about our
surroundings. We say that to be conscious is the opposite
to be unconscious, either being in coma or slept. Some
other people say that to be conscious is to be in contact
with external reality, but isn’t conscious a person that
thinks although he can’t receive stimuli nor communicate?
Recent studies carried by neuroscientists like Stanislas
Dehaene reveal that there is a very basic level of
consciousness even in patients in coma. Neuroscience defines as a basic or “easy consciousness” the fact
of being able to receive stimuli and act consequently (Chalmers, 2007), but here we will speak about “hard
consciousness” or phenomenal experience – the experience that we feel of being alive, the conjunction of
qualia1, what in psychology is called the “self”-.

We know that the easy consciousness originates in the physical and chemical activity of multiple
sincronized brain areas, but we don’t have any explanation for
the origin of phenomenal experience. The explanation of how
the brain processes audiovisual signals is trivial compared to
how those signals generate an experience full of qualia1, for
example what we fell when contemplating a sunset. Here is
the “explanatory gap” (Levine, 1983), our inability of
connecting brain phisiological functions, with the
phenomenal experience that we feel.
We have some hints, we know that consciousness
evolved gradually together with the development of the
prefrontal lobe. This doesn’t seems to be casual, because in
the dorsolateral section of this lobe there are allocated
functions like short term memory or the ability to plan, skills
related with the phenomenal experience, because they allow
us to think in future and past, to escape from an eternal
present. Furthermore, some brain areas involved in language
processing get activated when we speak to that inner voice characteristic of phenomenal experience.

1
Quale, singular of qualia, is the experience of feeling something, for example what it feels like to see red.
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We also know that we need the brain for being conscious,

because if the brain of someone gets damaged, the others
perceive that his consciousness gets altered or lost;
however, this analysis doesn’t invalidate the possibilitie
that consciousness survives death, because the brain
could be just a medium. Let’s imagine that consciousness
is like a radio transmission and the brain a radio receiver, if
the radio receiver gets broken, we stop perceiving the radio
transmission and we can assure that it doesn’t exist any
more, but we know that it’s still there. Furthermore, if we
modify the radio receiver (the brain), we also percieve an
alteration in the radio transmission (the consciousness). Therefore, we could assure that the transmission
is generated on the radio receiver, but we know that this is false. The brain can be a necessary condition for
the manifestation of consciousness, but, is it a sufficient condition? We will review scientific theories
supporting this analogy in the section “The Brain as a Radio”.

Today we can know through image scanning techniques and experiments like mirror self-recognition
(MSR) (Gallop, 1970) that animals, and even babies, have different levels of consciousness (for example, a
chimpance knows that it is an individual different from the others). We can also know if an individual is
awaken and perceiving the environment. However, we can’t know if they are conscious about being
conscious, nor if they are feeling the phenomenal experience. All of us feel this experience and we intuit that
our human fellows feel it too, but we can’t quantify nor perceive it with our senses, we accept this believe
dogmatically. An artifical intelligence simulating to feel the phenomenal experience, could assure us that
they are conscious of being conscious, and it could even do reflections of itself, nevertheless this would only
prove that the software is really advanced, but not necesarily conscious.

Mirror Self-recognition test (MSR)

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Neuroengineering and Artificial Intelligence

Let’s assume it, we have been studying consciousness for several

centuries and we still haven’t arrived at a model that closes the
explanatory gap. May be, this is because the phenomenal
experience isn’t something easy to study with the objective scientific
method, we can’t quantify it and if we want to study it externally, we
must rely on the subjective introspections of other subjects. Another
reason could be that our natural intelligence arrived its limits, and
therefore we can’t solve the mystery of consciousness, not without
the help of artificial intelligence and brain alteration technologies.

It’s known that artificial intelligence will overcome human intelligence someday, this future moment is
named “Singularity”. However, AI currently misses several human skills like creativity2, which is really useful
when creating hypothesis and solving problems. But, what
if we could merge the best from both worlds? What would
result from the combination of the human creativity with
the tremendous speed and reasoning skills of AI? Those
would be exobrains, brains that have been improved
altering them directly with external technologies. May be,
this integration will allow us to finally solve the mystery of
consciousness. Technologies like deep brain stimulation
and optogenetics, are making possible to build
increasingly advanced brain-machine interfaces (BCIs or
exobrains).

But, why would we want to solve the mystery of consciousness and close the explanatory gap? In
addition to answering a millenary question, this would allow us to advance in the reverse engineering of the
brain, and may be create conscious artificial intelligences, or even create electronic brains (which wouldn’t
get older) and transfer our consciousness to these devices. This hypothetical process, known in the slang of
transhumanism as “transcendence” or “mind-uploading”, would allow us to overcome our human nature and
being virtually immortals. Of course, there still are several challenges to get over for making this marvel a
reality, not only scientific and technological, but also moral and philosophical. When introducing an AI into
the brain, we may not be able to discern our own thoughts from the thoughts of the AI, wouldn’t this be a
little scaring? And when uploading our minds, would we still be us? Or what appears is another entity that
behaves equally to us, but our phenomenal experience disappears forever (we die)? What makes us to be
us?

2
The AIs that generate music, far from being creative, they just reason which would be the best combination of
musical notes by previously analysing existent songs.
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Who are we?

Maybe we would answer with our name, but if we changed it we would still be the
same person, with another name. Neither we are our body, because if we replace
an organ that isn’t the brain, or we modify our appearance, we still are the same.
Nor we are our DNA, because if we had our DNA modified, we won’t transform into
another person.
Very different is the brain, we can replace some parts of the brain with neural
prosthesis and say that we still are the same, but if the brain was replaced
completely? We wouldn’t be the same, it would be another person in our bodies.
What is from special in the brain that involves our being? If we replaced each part
of our brain being conscious, in which moment we would stop from being us and
our phenomenal experience reaches to an end?

Some people say that this change would happen when modifying the frontal, temporal or parietal lobes,
structures associated with two qualities of our being, the memories and the behaviour. There are illnesses
like the autoimmune encephalitis or the dissociative personality disorder that change our behaviour
temporally or definitely, or the Alzheimer, which changes our memories. The people that know us would
claim that we are not the same anymore, and those who are spiritual would say that we got possessed.

Furthermore, a study carried by Emiliano Bruner, revealed that the region of the brain that mostly varies
among adults is the precuneus, located in the parietal lobe. We know that the precuneus receives body
information through the somatosensory cortex, visual information through the occipital cortex, and that it
integrates that information with the autobiographic memory. As a result, we generate a mental map of
ourselves, making us to recognize as a self-entity situated in the space and the time. Therefore, we could
claim that it’s here where our phenomenal experience, our “self”, is generated.
However, if two brains from two persons were exactly equal
and they experienced the same stimuli throughout their lives,
would they be the same being? The phenomenal experience of one
would be the same that the experience of the other? Would they
take the same decisions or there is a free will? May be, we are like
a computer program, if two equal instances are executed with the
same parameters, they will act the same, or may be not, and there
is a free will after all.

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The Free Will

Many people think that everything is determined, that free will is an
illusion, as well as the sense of time. But we don’t know it, and being
ignorant, we think that we are taking decision. The prominent
neuroscientist Wolf Singer arguments that all decisions are automatic,
and that our subconscious makes us to believe that the decision came
from our “self”, through an unknown mechanism. This point of view
would be irrefutable if we were sure that we live in a deterministic
universe, and if there were evidence that absolutely all the decisions are
taken automatically. However, these conditions are currently false.

Quantum physics threatens determinism by affirming that the universe is indeterministic, because it’s
impossible to predict the position of any particle, since it’s location is naturally random. Thus, it may be
possible that the unknown ontological characteristic that allows this randomness, is precisely the free will.
Indeed, the neuroscientists Bjoern Brembs and Christof Koch think that the bases of free will are in the -
apparently spontaneous - thermodynamic processes of the brain, at the atomic scale, where the uncertainty
principle prevails. Moreover, many neuroscientists (among them Cornelius Weiller), affirm that Singer didn’t
present empirical evidences enough to support his postulates, and that the experiments carried by Benjamin
Libet aren’t conclusive due to the inconsideration of several important aspects.

Other people say that time is another dimension, and therefore

free will can’t exist. Let’s imagine that we are dragged by our backs by
a river, we can only see what we have left (the past) and where we are
(the present), what is to come (the future) is unknown for us. However,
if someone stood in the coast, he would be able to see what we have
left, where we are, and what is to come just by walking. But since we
are trapped in a subjective perspective of space-time, we can’t note
anything of these. If this was true, then everything would be determined
and there is no place for free will. However, for the happiness of the
free will defenders, there still is no proof that time is a dimension like
the others, neither that the universe is deterministic.

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The Brain as a Radio

La analogía del cerebro como radio que presenté anteriormente es una
explicación sencilla de la Teoría de la Reducción Objetiva (Orch-OR theory),
postulada por los brillantes físicos Penrose y Esta propone que la conciencia
es parte fundamental de la naturaleza, y que la biología evolucionó con un
mecanismo para orquestar dichos eventos y aliarlos a una actividad neuronal,
resultando en momentos cognitivos conscientes con un significado y por lo
tanto un control causal del comportamiento.
The analogy of the brain as a radio that I presented before is a very simple
explanation of the Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory (Orch-OR theory),
presented by the brilliant physicists Penrose and Hameroff (Penrose & Hammerof, 2013). This one proposes
that consciousness is a fundamental element of nature, and that biology evolved as a mechanism for
orchestrating consciousness events, aligning them with neuronal activity, resulting therefore in the causal
control of the behaviour. Hameroff and Penrose theorize that consciousness derives from the quantum
vibrations in the microtubules, which are polymers of proteins located in neurons that govern the neural and
synaptic functions and connect the auto-organization processes of the brain in a precise scale.
Furthermore, Hameroff has speculated (Greg, 2011) that when a person
has a near-death experience, the blood doesn’t flows to the brain and the
microtubules loose their quantum state, but the information doesn’t destroy, it
is distributed along the universe, and if the person survives, the information can
return to the microtubules. However, when the person dies completely, the
consciousness goes back to the universe, forming a new state of coherence still
unknown. Something similar to what Brahmanical beliefs claim of becoming
one with the universe.

The Orch OR theory has been hardly criticized under the claim that the brain is too hot, wet and noisy
for delicate quantum processes. However, Anirban Bandyopadhyay recently discovered (Brown, s.f.)
quantum vibrations at hot temperatures in the neuron microtubules, and this discovery has been made again
later in the MIT. Evidence has shown quantum coherence in plants photosynthesis, in the brain navigation
of birds, in our smell sense, and in the microtubules of the brain. Moreover, the laboratory work of Roderick
G. Eckenhoff (Eckenhoff, 2013), from the University of Pennsylvania, suggest that anaesthesia selectively
supresses consciousness without affecting unconscious brain activities, it actuates through the
microtubules in the neurons of the brain.

Conclusion
Having analysed multiple points of view about controversial topics like consciousness and the free
will, its clear that we haven’t arrived still to a precise conclusion. Consciousness as a phenomenal experience
used to be an object only studied by philosophy and religion, some religions define it as the soul (i.e.
Christianism) and some others as an element from the universe (Brahmanical beliefs). However, sciences
like neuroscience or physics, and even engineering, have started to study in the most objective way possible
this millenary mystery. There have been important advances in the field, and as it was said before, a lot of
new advances are believed to happen with the help of artificial intelligence and neuroengineering.
Although may be today the most popularly accepted posture in the scientific community is the
materialist and determinist - claiming that consciousness resides on the brain, that free will is an illusion and
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that death is the end of phenomenal experience -, as we saw there are several scientists that claim the
opposite, with well-constructed arguments. The importance of studying consciousness is not only for
solving a millennial mystery, but also for knowing what happens after we die, what could help us to live a
better life, or to research immortality through mind-uploading or techniques that stop cell aging. Therefore, I
think it’s very important that the main research centres finance projects in this area, and that the population
become aware about the importance of scientific study of consciousness.

Referencias
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conciencia-holografica-sugieren-vida-despues-de-la-muerte/
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