Re: The Hard Problem for Behaviorists

From: Curt Welch (curt_at_kcwc.com)
Date: 10/20/04 

Date: 20 Oct 2004 03:26:11 GMT

daryl@atc-nycorp.com (Daryl McCullough) wrote:
> Curt Welch says...

> Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, but that seems
> clearly false. Take one example. Someone asks you the question:
> "What's the name of that old guy who always smoked cigars, who
> played God in that movie?" You try, but you can't remember the
> name. Then, maybe minutes or hours later, a name pops in your
> head: "George Burns". What is happening between the time the
> question is asked and the time the answer pops into your
> consciousness? I would say that it is subconscious level information
> processing. But what is happening, according to your theory? We are
> not aware of how we arrive at the name George Burns.

Yes, there is much we are not aware of. What I've really learned to look
at differently just recently is where that line is drawn in relation to my
ideas about how to build an intelligent machine.

Where I see that line being draw is that our conscious awareness allows us
to sense when neurons fire, but what we can't sense, or know, is why they
fire.

So, we are aware of the fact that the name "George Burns" poped into our
brain. I'm claming that is represented by some set of neurons firing.
What we can not sense is why any of the our neurons chooses to fire whey
they fire.

When we were unable to remeber the name, it's because as we thought about
the old guy in the movie, the "Geourge Burns" set of neurons never fired.
They did fire later however and when they fired, we became consciously
aware of the name.

I think for this type of example, the most likely answer to why they fired
later was not because of any hidden processing going on, but simply beacuse
they only ever fire in response to the right type of stimulation, and as we
tried to "remember" the name, we never managed to create the correct
stimulation or context in our brain to cause them to fire. But later, when
we weren't forcing names, the correct context was set up, and it happened.

What my new way of looking at all this is suggesting is that all signal
activity in the learning part of the brain has a one to one mapping of what
we are "aware of" at the conscious level. What's hidden from us is the
true cause of all those signals. We do not sense the chemical interactions
happening in the cell which at some point causes it to fire. We only sense
the fact that it does fire.

> At an even more fundamental level, you see a photograph, and
> you think "Hey, that's Jennifer Garner!" *How* do you know it's
> Jennifer Garner?

Same thing. I believe there is a set of neurons which when they fire in
the correct pattern, it produces our "awareness" of the "Jennifer Garner"
name/person. Why we "known" something is because those neurons were
programed over time through conditioning to fire in response to various
stimuls signals. We do not directly sense the learning over time which
causes this brain activity, but we see the result. We sense the "Jennifer
Garner" name in our conscious awareness at different times.

> What process is involved in comparing the photograph
> with our memories of past photos of Jennifer Garner? We are not
> conscious of the process.

Well, it's clearly a pattern recognotion processes. But this is where my
new idea sheds some different light on this subject.

Many people have written computer programs which do pattern recognition.
They might for example take an image, analize it, and output one of N
different "answers" as to what the image is. We can think of all the
internal computation done by the algorithm as "hidden" information, and the
final output as the systems memory or response.

When we compare a program like that to our memory ability, we naturally
wonder how close in implementation that program might be to how our brain
works. And we may assume that the brain is doing a lot of internal signal
processing to produce the final answer which is hidden from us. But my new
way of looking at the brain and our conscousness is that if we are not
conscious of the processing, then it's not happening. i.e., the computer
program may sequentially compare the image to 100 different stored
reference images and for each one, calcuate a closeness match. The answer
it produces as the answer is then the answer associated with the reference
picture that produced the closesest match. My theory tells me that if the
brain worked that way, we would be conscously aware of the sequential scan
through the 100 reference pictures. But since we are not conscously aware
of anything like that happening, then that's not how the brain works.

> We can try to describe the process, but
> it is pretty much guesswork. The details of what's going on is
> simply not available to the "self" that is able to use language
> and describe things.
>
> I think that *most* information processing takes place in
> the sub- or un-conscious. Only the *results* of this processing
> is made available to our conscious mind.

Yeah, like you say below, this touches on what we mean by "information
processing".

To me, if neurons aren't firing, then there are no signals, and if there
are no signals, there is no "information processing" going on. And
according to my new ideas about what we are aware of, we are aware of all
signals in the part of the brain which creates intelligent behavior in us.

To draw a parallel to computers, I would say that our conscouse awareness
reaches the level of being able to sense all changes to the values stored
in the memory of the machine, but not sense the electrial activity inside
each gate which caused and controled the actual change. It reaches that
level simply becaase that's the level which the machine can respond to.
The machine will act one way, if the value stored in a given memory
location is 0, and act another way if it's a 1. But in fact, the value may
be represented by a voltage which ranges from 0 to 5 volts. And sometimes,
the 0 may be .1 volts, and sometimes it may be 0.12 volts. But the machine
will act the same way for both types of 0 values, so I saw that the machine
is not "aware" of the differenc between .1 and .12 volts.

Likewise, what we are "aware" of in our brain is a fuction of what the
down-stream neurons can "sense" and respond to.

> >What we are never aware of is why we do the things we do. As much as we
> >like to believe our conscious "mind" controls our actions, it does not.
> >What I'm saying is as much that our conscious mind and our actions are
> >one and the same. We witness, and explain, the behavior of our own mind
> >as much as we witness, and explain, the behavior of everything else in
> >the world. But that's all we do. We react to what we sense happening.
>
> I think I agree with the above paragraph, but I don't see how it
> is consistent with your theory that information processing only
> takes place in the conscious mind.

Probably because of how I am thinking about "information processing" in
this context.

> I think that, from the point
> of view of our conscious mind, the work of our brains is a mystery,
> subject to theories and educated guesses, like the rest of the
> natural world. We don't really have any more privileged insight
> into the workings of our own brains than we have for other natural
> processes.
>
> Maybe it's just a matter of what you call "information processing". The
> brain is definitely doing *something* that we are not consciously aware
> of, but maybe you don't consider information processing until it reaches
> the conscious mind?

Yeah, but I'm also thinking that it's the same as electrical activity in
the brain. If there's a signal, we are "aware" of it, and it's in our
"conscious mind". If there is no signal, we are are not aware of what the
neuron is doing. The neuron however will be changing it's chemical make-up
over time between the time it fires, but we are not aware of those changes,
because those changes can not be sensed by the down-stream neurons.

So, if we build a singnal processing machine, then the signals it produces
needs to be directly related to what we are consciously aware of in order
to work like the brain does. That is of course if my thesis holds any
water. And any design which produces signals which does not seem to
correlate to what we are aware of as we perform similar tasks, then it's
likely the design is not very similar to how the brain works.

Why this is exciting to me is that I just never thought about the
correlation between conscous awareness and the signals inside our head like
this before. I've always assumed that it was likely that we were not
"aware" of much of the signals flying around ourhead. I jsut assumed there
was much "hidden" signal processing going on. And in order to reverse
engineer what the brain was doing, we would need far more advanced tools
for monitoring all this "hidden" brain activity. But from this new
perspective, hey, nothing is "hidden" to us about our own brain.
Everything we are aware of is what is going on in our own brains. We don't
need any special tools to tell us what is going on in that sense because we
already have internal sensors telling us everything. 

-- 
Curt Welch                                            http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com                                        http://NewsReader.Com/

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