How Science Is Trying to Understand Consciousness

thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this episode LastPass eases the burden of remembering passwords, click the link in the description or stay until the end of the video to learn more if you've ever had a conversation with Siri or Alexa or your Google Home , so to speak. Because machines are just a couple of steps away from being fully conscious beings, things that actually experience the world, but because we only have knowledge of our own experiences, we humans are the only things we know are conscious and the fact that we do so. Let's be it is one of the most obvious things about us is part of what makes us human, yet figuring out exactly what

consciousness

is and whether or not it could arise and non-human things has perplexed us for centuries, scientists neither.

They cannot even agree on whether it is possible to study them or not. something that is very personal using the scientific method, but some say it is not only possible, it is necessary, a theory of

consciousness

could help us determine whether a given coma patient is likely to recover, it could influence the way we treat to animals and could even help us. navigate our relationship with technology, so since the 1980s researchers have been

trying

to discover consciousness from a scientific perspective; For now we are still not even close to solving it, but we have learned some things about what a theory of consciousness could be like, except First things first, we have a problem when calculating consciousness, it is that we have to define what it is, it is difficult to identify exactly what it means for most purposes, you can think of consciousness as the name for what it feels like to experience the world rather than simply interacting with it through inputs and outputs and yes, every interaction begins with An input, the things we see, smell and hear in our environment become electrical signals that travel through our brain thanks to charged atoms that enter and leave neurons, but somehow, the movement of those atoms can create the experience of listening to music or smelling a rose and that experience that is consciousness, if you don't see how it is different from a robot that responds to an input with an output, think about this, your body responds to many things. of stimuli without your conscious participation, for example, food makes your mouth water and the cold makes your hair stand on end, but you don't have to be aware of those things for them to happen, they just happen like robots, on the other hand, you are aware.

From the way things smell or feel, you are aware of what it feels like to be you, and although your subconscious brain has countless processes happening in parallel, your conscious experience is a single sequence of events, almost like a story, so what you can think of as consciousness as that is, experience or consciousness and scientists more or less agree up to that point, the question is where to go from there. The study of consciousness as something scientific rather than philosophical took off in the 1980s with Francis Crick, a neuroscientist, and yes, you. Having barely heard this name co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA after he had basically decoded life, he was ready to take on what he saw as the next great mysterious scientific consciousness and recruited a group of young researchers to get involved, But Crick and his collaborators did not set out to find the definitive explanation of consciousness; rather, as a starting point, their objective was to find the part of the brain that gave rise to it.

I mean, it wasn't universally accepted that consciousness began and ended with the brain and it still isn't today, but that was most people's initial assumption: this team called what they were looking for neural correlates of consciousness. consciousness and in recent decades they and other scientists have made some progress, for example some research suggests that conscious experience is rooted in a part of the brain called the posterior cortex, but again this is still a correlate of consciousness, not a cause, so even if they manage to narrow down what gives rise to consciousness, scientists still face the biggest question: Trying to get to the bottom of it, two main ideas have emerged about how we might study consciousness in a scientific way. , that is, with testable hypotheses and measurable results, neither is a real answer at this time, but your goal is simply to find ways to study.

This is subjective using rigorous

science

, so they may be off base, but at least they offer ways to address the problem that are scientifically testable. The oldest of those ideas is called global workspace theory, it was developed by neuroscientist Bernard Bars and has existed. somehow since 1982 suggests that there is a network of cells in your brain called the workspace that is at the root of your conscious experiences at any given moment you have all kinds of signals going around in your brain but according to this theory this space work is like the fancam of your brain, any signal that is processed by those cells is transmitted to the rest of your brain and you become aware of it.

However, this workspace is actually limited and can only hold a limited amount of information at a time, which might explain why information and ideas move in and out of your consciousness so easily, as if you were obsessed with an object. annoying sound and then you will completely forget about it as soon as someone engages you in an interesting conversation. What we don't have is any proof that this idea is correct, but there is some preliminary evidence for it, for example, in an experiment published in 2001, a team of researchers had 15 participants watch words appear on screens for 29 milliseconds each, which is enough time for a word to become legible, but in some cases, the experimenters used a technique called masking to prevent subjects from consciously registering the word they made.

By showing another image after the word, which interrupted their conscious processing. By taking images of the participants' brains, the researchers were able to see that the words remained only in the subconscious. produced a small amount of activity in the brain, while the words that the participants became aware of triggered a whole surge of activity in many different regions. This was not necessarily a test of the global workspace theory, but it did give experimenters a clear picture of the brain areas involved in subconscious and conscious processing of the same signal and in subsequent research scientists have used it. as a starting point to try to discover how messages passing through this network could be transmitted to the rest of the brain; is still far from a solution to consciousness, but this theory does some things right by suggesting that conscious processing is limited to a specific network; offers a possible explanation for why our conscious brain is only capable of having narrow streams of thought even though our brain can process them subconsciously. many things in parallel, but the most important thing is that the fact that it involved questions that were testable gives us a way to study consciousness using the scientific method.

The theory still has its sticking points, although it goes a step beyond the neural correlates of consciousness, but still. doesn't provide the definitive how and then there's also some resistance to the idea that consciousness is computational and that it simply arises because of the way the brain is wired because, if that's true, it suggests that, in theory, there's nothing that prevents machines from acquiring consciousness. that it's all a matter of having the correct wiring and that would open a whole different can of ethical worms, but it is a testable hypothesis and in

science

that counts for a lot, however, this is not the only hypothesis that exists and others take a totally different approach, for example, in 2004 the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed what he called integrated information theory or "since it is impossible to scientifically observe someone's personal conscious experience, even if we can see some of what it looks like in the brain" .

By working backwards from the few things that seem to be universally true about consciousness, which we know is subjective, meaning that you are the only person who has your conscious experience, no one else can step in and experience what the consciousness is like. world for you. Know that the experience of consciousness is unified, meaning that it cannot be divided into pieces as if it were one thing. You cannot voluntarily split your sense of self in two. Nor can it say that it decides to process only certain types of information. You don't wake up tomorrow and decide that you will only see the color blue or that you will only smell pleasant things, although I think that would be a useful skill to know.

I need these observations as starting points along with the assumption that consciousness somehow comes from our network of interconnections. neurons then proposed that consciousness comes from the amount of interconnection in a system or in his words the amount of integrated information. IIT suggests that essentially the set of all neurons working together equals more than the sum of its parts, so Connected neurons can create an experience that individuals cannot repeat, not everyone agrees with this idea and the evidence is still at an early stage. Researchers have done some preliminary experiments comparing the amount of connectivity in a brain with a person's level of consciousness, for example in one study.

Tononi and his collaborators gathered 11 volunteers and used a magnetic pulse to deliver a burst of stimulation to neurons in their brains, then used sensors on their scalps to measure the amount of activity that pulse produced, then sedated the subjects and performed the same experiments. A second time, the post produced much less activity, suggesting that there were fewer connections between neurons, so activating a group of them did not trigger the same chain reaction as it did the first time; it is not yet possible to directly measure the quantity. of connectivity in the human brain, but experiments like this can serve as a decent way to find out if there really is a link between integration and consciousness, if there is, that implies that consciousness exists on a spectrum and when this theory is developed It implies that not only could machines become conscious, but that anything with any amount of interconnected information, from a wasp to the Internet, could already be somewhat conscious, like global workspace theory.

The IIT still does not provide any kind of satisfactory answer to the problem of Consciousness and Consequences also seriously challenged the things we instinctively believe to be true about the world, so if it is true, we may have to think a little more about how we interact with things, but the idea of ​​measuring interconnectedness provides a path to explore consciousness scientifically and so on. With the global workspace theory, that's what makes this idea stand out, these hypotheses are still in progress, but if any of them turn out to be true, it could help us find out what you are aware of and what you don't like, if IIT you are right in measuring the amount of interconnection. in a brain could help doctors and scientists decide how conscious a patient is in a coma or it could help future computer scientists answer those same questions about artificial intelligence programs, on the other hand, if the brain space theory global work ends up being correct and if scientists can identify that workspace, neuromedics' fancam could look for activity in that region to see if a patient has any signs of consciousness.

So far, none of those ideas are developed enough to be useful in any practical sense, so for now there is no foolproof way to identify. consciousness and until we

understand

how it arises we probably won't be able to say what has it or doesn't, but the fact that we are conscious means that we will continue to be curious and scientists will continue to investigate as long as the problem persists. has not been resolved, thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this video. LastPass saves you from having to remember dozens or hundreds of passwords if you're constantly locked out of your accounts or resetting passwords.

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