The patient, most doctors agreed, was a lost cause. Occasionally she'd open her eyes; yawn or grunt; or even cry -- but these were mindless reflexes, the doctors said. The patient was vegetative, they explained: awake, technically, yes -- but unaware; dead to the world. It was time, they said, to consider removing her life support.
That is, until researchers learned to read her mind.
As they watched the patient's brain activity on an fMRI scanner, Drs. Adrian Owen and Steven Laureys asked her to imagine playing tennis -- and her brain's motor cortex lit up, clear as day. "Now imagine wandering through your home," they told her. Her spatial awareness centers burst into action.
"Now," they said, "think 'tennis' for 'yes,' and 'rooms in your home' for 'no'." They ran her through a "true or false" quiz. She got every question right.
She was one of the lucky ones. In study after study, Owen and Laureys -- and other researchers -- have discovered clear signs of active consciousness in dozens of vegetative patients. A 2009 study found that 40 percent of patients diagnosed as vegetative are at least somewhat conscious.
"Somewhat conscious?" What exactly does that mean? What's it like to have just "some" consciousness?
These are crucial questions not only for thousands of misdiagnosed patients, but for anyone who's ever gone in search of his or her True Self. Consciousness, these studies show, isn't a single discrete entity so much as a concert performance -- not so much a "ghost in the machine" as a whole armada of ghosts haunting an intricate network of machinery.
The Self has proven to be, if anything, an even more elusive quarry. Take, for example, cases of split-brain patients -- those whose left cerebral hemisphere has been surgically severed from the right. In these patients, each side of the brain develops its own personality, its own desires -- even its own beliefs. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has studied patients in which one hemisphere claimed to be female; the other, male -- and in which one hemisphere professed belief in God, while the other stood firm in its atheism.
In other words, Self and consciousness aren't quite the same thing -- a Self isn't the consciousness itself -- it's that which is conscious. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has said, "A conscious mind is a mind with a Self in it." But as these split-brain patients demonstrate, a brain's conscious experience isn't always limited to a single Self.
Meanwhile, here your own Self sits, insistent as ever upon the blindingly self-evident fact of its own existence; its own centrality in your reality. Sure, you're sometimes conflicted; confused -- of "two minds" about a life-altering decision -- but in your brain, all those combating feelings somehow form of a single unified whole -- a center holds amidst the flurries of memories and instincts and internal chatter. Through all of it, somehow, You are always there.
Ah, but there's the rub: You are the only one who can know that.
Here's what I mean. If you want to track down consciousness in the brain, it's actually not all that hard -- just compare brain scans of anesthetized, sleeping and vegetative patients with those of people who are awake and aware. All you need for wakeful awareness, it turns out, is a neural network between parts of the prefrontal cortex, parts of the parietal cortex, and the thalamus. That's the bare minimum; without that network, you can't be awake and aware of your environment.
Even without that network, though, the brain still feels physical pain. Even the most minimally conscious brains produce emotions. And as far as anyone can tell, there's no objective threshold where it suddenly becomes clear that this pain; these emotions; are being experienced by someone. That question can only be answered from the inside.
Oh, there are plenty of clinical tests for wakeful awareness. The CRS-R can check that you're responsive to visual cues. Failing that, fMRI scans can prove that somewhere in there, ghosts still haunt the machinery. But none of this can tell us what, if anything, it feels like to be minimally conscious -- or, for that matter, just what it is that experiences this minimal consciousness.
A growing number of scientists argue that the question doesn't make much sense - that all we're really talking about here is awareness, and awareness of awareness.
But what has become of the Self -- of that which is aware? Is it, after all, just consciousness reflecting inward -- or is it a specific, mensurate, real and quantifiable entity? Is it a ghost that can be caught?
As flawed as many scientists say that question is, it still lies at the heart of our interactions not only with vegetative patients but with each other; with animals; with infants and the unborn. Every time we crush a cockroach, or throw a homeless man some change -- every time we make the distinction between a "person" and a "thing" -- the question is always the same: "Is there someone in there?"
The neuroscientist Sebastian Seung has said that the only truly interesting problem in science is immortality. I beg to differ. The problem of Self -- of what, precisely, it is that craves immortality -- seems pretty damn interesting to me.
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A frog brain is about a quarter gram in weight. So that's a quarter of a cubic centimeter in volume, i.e. roughly 5mmx5mmx10mm size. Let's say we want to scan this with 100nm resolution (which is a comfortable resolution for fluorescent dye stained tissues in confocal laser-microscopy). So that's about 50,000x50,000x100,000=2.5e14 voxels and it should be just enough to resolve individual axons. With some compression we probably end up on the order of 2.5e14 bytes for processing. That's a mere 250TB of data... no more than a hundred hard drives.
Actually... that's not bad. With proper algorithms and a supercomputer, it should be possible with today's technology to scan a complete amphibian or reptile brain. Maybe some small birds or a even a mouse. A couple years down the road we could do rats. And within a couple of decades we may be able to map a complete human brain (one would, of course, start with small pieces).
Would this bring the dead back? No. The electrical information would be gone. But we may be able to learn, on the microscopic level, how brains are really organized.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist as he grows up." Picasso
The other aspect of non-cerebral consciousness is that it is the source of the psyche of the individual and which connects to the psychic elements of everyone in the world or "collective unconscious" (Jungian term). The third aspect is that it is the catalyst or initiator of the synthesis processing in the brain (right side) that results in extra-sensory perception, synthetic visions, new ideas, artistic expressions etc.
"(Primary) Consciousness is distinct from the organism that it animates although it must undergo its vicissitudes". Will Durant
"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." Jonathan Swift
Feel free to quote me on that.
:-)
Feel free to quote me on that :-) )
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar......
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper....Eliot
I have not yet found an explanation that satisfies me. The closest I have come so far is to realize that while I "am" something that can be called a self, that does not mean that I "have" something that can be called a self. That may seem like splitting hairs, but think about it: When I indicate "myself," it makes a big difference if I intend only to take ownership of whatever attribute I associate with that, rather than pretending that there is some homuncleus, a mini-me, inside my body someplace. I am not a container, or not just a container.
If we can freely substitute "mind" for self and consciousness, my favorite reference comes from Wittgenstein who puts it in Culture and Value, p 11, as.“It is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind.” OK--"full of hot air" jokes are not permitted
"Mind" can also be a very slippery word; for instance, I'd consider my unconscious motivations and desires to be parts of my mind, and parts of my Self, but not parts of my consciousness. The more we split hairs, the more elusive precise definitions seem to be. As "SwiftJonathan" has indicated in some of his comments below, that's very likely because we're asking wrong questions drawn from a fundamentally flawed categorization scheme. I think he may have a point...but I still love debating this stuff.
It's always a good idea to keep that angle closely in sight, otherwise intellectual effort easily turns into intellectual self-stimulation.
:-)
"But none of this can tell us what, if anything, it feels like to be minimally conscious -- or, for that matter, just what it is that experiences this minimal consciousness."
Really? You can't remember any more how you felt when you were a little kid? When you didn't know much about the world and shadows at night were scary? When everything was pure emotion and nothing was mitigated by rational thought?
Well, I have news for you. I can. And I can remember that every day since then was like a long, hard climb into the light. I can tell that, when I will become so old that my brain will begin to disintegrate, every day will be a fight to descend back into the darkness of consciousness without rational thought.
Per your second point, a vegetative or minimally conscious state is functionally quite distinct from early-childhood consciousness: The first involves impaired connectivity of the frontoparietal attention network (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21566197) while the second is distinguished by a tendency toward short-range rather than distant functional coupling on the part of all major networks, which otherwise behave healthily (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5997/1358.abstract). I don't see how the two conditions would result in remotely similar subjective experiences.
Your last sentence, by the way, is intriguing. It sounds as if you're almost eager to be enveloped in that "darkness of consciousness without rational thought."
At the definition of "conscious", of course.
I can ask you to prove to me that you are conscious and you won't be able to prove to me that you are, neither philosophically, nor with the falsifiability requirements of science.
Consciousness is an individual experience, just like the color "red". I know what red is to me, and due to our similarity I ASSUME that it is the same for you. It is no different with consciousness.
I assume that what I mean by "being conscious" is the same as what you mean. That's a trivially non-falsifiable assumption. But while the color red happens to be, at least, linked to more or less well defined spectral properties of light, a stimulus which can be tested in multiple species, consciousness is not.
Therefor you may want to ask yourself whether a term like consciousness makes actual sense. It very well may not? Neither philosophically nor scientifically.
How would you know? You can not ask impaired patients for their experience, which, of course, would again be different from that of a lobster. What makes you willing to draw a parallel line between a functional scan and the experience?
Normal 7 to 38 year old people, on the other hand, are usually supposed to have the very same level of consciousness. What I was talking about are extremely early childhood experiences. As I have pointed out in other places, I was a conscious atheist by about age 8, so obviously, I had very little trouble rationalizing the world at age 7, wouldn't you say?
Would you like some early childhood memories about mathematics with that?
"It sounds as if you're almost eager to be enveloped in that "darkness of consciousness without rational thought.""
I was telling you about an important personal experience of mine. I can not stop you from misinterpreting that.
:-)
I find the prospect of being locked in my mind without access to the outside world as truly truly terrifying.
That said, I await the day that we completely reverse engineer the human brain and build computers with enough computing power to move consciousness into a new neural network. People fear prospects like this will be the end of humanity but I believe our humanity will out live our biology.
I would actually argue that our humanity has more to do with how we overcome our shortcomings.
As for being free, I can't argue for against that as there are way too many other factors at play. I would argue that a society that allows people to never medically die would have a lot less freedom in it's interactions with each other as people would want to try ever harder to avoid accidental death. Then again, if you can back yourself up every few milliseconds...Within 20-30 years or so we will have completely reverse engineered the brain and will have built more efficient organs to do almost all of our bodily tasks. As we continue to add more hardware like artificial hearts, an artificial pancreas for diabetics, artificial eyes for the blind, artificial hips for the arthritic, white blood cells to defend against disease, red blood cells...Computers went from buildings to rooms to desktops to lap tops to hand-helds to things we wear and eventually to things we inject. At what point are we no longer human?
Arguments derived from the introspection are bound, by their very recursiveness, to lead to vague metaphysical interpretations of this kind.
In the light of our modern understanding of biological evolution by natural selection their is no longer any "problem of self"
Consciousness,self-awareness, call it what you will, is a function of the machine (organism), not the components which give rise to that function.
It is necessary for most creatures to be aware of their external environment for navigation to such things as food, shelter, and reproduction.
Sensory awareness of the environment, particularly in higher vertebrates, necessarily involves an awareness of self as part of that environment.
The extraordinarily high capability for imagination (the ability to form and morph neural models of the environment) that is characteristic of our species even allows introspection - consideration of some of our own thought processes.
The trap which leads to metaphysical meanderings.
It really is as simple as that.
But many still prefer to go chasing moonbeams rather than facing up to prosaic reality and will be seduced by the comfortable woolliness of ever decreasing circles.
Considerations such as these are expanded upon in "The Goldilocks Effect: What Has Serendipity Ever Done For Us?", a free download in e-book formats from my "Unusual Perspectives" website
Though this viewpoint has found some support in the neuroscience community, and is also supported by some philosophers of mind (most notably Dennett and Churchland), others disagree that the issue is "really as simple as that." For example, Baars and Chalmers have both discussed the inadequacies of a strictly functionalist approach - for one thing, that it fails to address the question of the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic phenomena... in other words, the question of precisely *why* (not just *how*) certain functional states in the brain give rise to certain subjective experiences.
To use an analogy Chalmers uses: We know that apples fall and planets orbit because gravity influences the shape of space-time. Someday, we'll be able to say that (for instance) heightened amygdala activation leads to unpleasant feelings because of [Law X].
I'm not talking about qualia - I'm talking about a concrete physical law that explains, with mathematical precision, how neural states are related to subjective states.
Until we have such an explanation, I don't think there's any particular "prosaic reality" for us to face up to.
As for the data you are showing... the way it was created is methodologically equivalent to trying to guess the API of a computer's operating system by measuring the temperature of the CPU while someone is playing a Youtube video or crunching pi to a million digits. It's just no sufficient to learn about the things you are interested in.
Will we, one day, have a better idea how the brain works? Absolutely. But it will require having instrumentation connected to the electrical activity of thousands, if not millions of places in the brain, at once, measuring potentials at the sub-ms timing level with SNRs>10. And once we will have that methodology, I can predict that pretty much nothing of your speculation about the function will survive. But that's just a constant experience in the history of science.
Can what you want be done? Absolutely. Just not with any of the methods we have right now and it really makes no sense, whatsoever, to force pet hypotheses onto data sets that do not, can not, contain any relevant information about them.
My mission is to raise exciting questions while remaining as scientifically sound as possible - and in this case, I botched the second half of that mission. I regret the mistake, and I'll do my best not to make similar ones in the future.
My mission is to stimulate exciting conversations about scientifically sound research - and in this case, I didn't live up to the second part of that mission. I apologize for that, and I'll do my best to avoid similar missteps in the future. Thank you for helping me improve.