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Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The Second Tucson Discussions and Debates
This book's fifteen sections demonstrate the broad range of fields now focusing on consciousness. The sections include philosophy, cognitive science, medicine, neurobiology, neural correlates, vision, sleep and dreaming, anesthesia, molecular biology and evolution, quantum theory, spacetime, hierarchical organization, and experiential approaches.
What is consciousness? Recent attempts to answer this question have motivated two interdisciplinary conferences sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The first volume of Toward a Science of Consciousness is now considered a resource book for the emerging field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the second conference, held in April 1996. The book's fifteen sections demonstrate the broad range of fields now focusing on consciousness. The sections include philosophy, cognitive science, medicine, neurobiology, neural correlates, vision, sleep and dreaming, anesthesia, molecular biology and evolution, quantum theory, spacetime, hierarchial organization, and experiential approaches. Each section is preceded by an overview and commentary.
The participants include Bernard Baars, Ned Block, David J. Chalmers, Patricia S. Churchland, Daniel C. Dennett, Jeffrey Gray, Daniel Hillis, J. Allan Hobson, Stephen LaBerge, Jaron Lanier, Daniel S. Levine, Nikos K. Logothetis, Gary E. Schwartz, John R. Searle, Roger N. Shepard, Henry P. Stapp, Petra Stoerig, Charles T. Tart, John Taylor, Francisco J. Varela, Max Velmans, Roger Walsh, and Lawrence Weiskantz.
What is consciousness? Recent attempts to answer this question have motivated two interdisciplinary conferences sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The first volume of Toward a Science of Consciousness is now considered a resource book for the emerging field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the second conference, held in April 1996. The book's fifteen sections demonstrate the broad range of fields now focusing on consciousness. The sections include philosophy, cognitive science, medicine, neurobiology, neural correlates, vision, sleep and dreaming, anesthesia, molecular biology and evolution, quantum theory, spacetime, hierarchial organization, and experiential approaches. Each section is preceded by an overview and commentary.
The participants include Bernard Baars, Ned Block, David J. Chalmers, Patricia S. Churchland, Daniel C. Dennett, Jeffrey Gray, Daniel Hillis, J. Allan Hobson, Stephen LaBerge, Jaron Lanier, Daniel S. Levine, Nikos K. Logothetis, Gary E. Schwartz, John R. Searle, Roger N. Shepard, Henry P. Stapp, Petra Stoerig, Charles T. Tart, John Taylor, Francisco J. Varela, Max Velmans, Roger Walsh, and Lawrence Weiskantz.
- GenresPhilosophy
Hardcover
First published March 25, 1998
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About the author
Stuart R. Hameroff
8 books37 followersDr. Stuart R. Hameroff, M.D. (Hahnemann Medical College, 1973?; B.S., Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, University of Pittsburgh), is Emeritus Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology and director for the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He is also the lead organizer of the Science of Consciousness conference and, with Sir Roger Penrose, formulated the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model of consciousness.
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June 23, 2024
THE SECOND IN THIS SERIES OF CONFERENCES AND PAPERS
The Introduction to this 1996 book states, “What is consciousness? Although we have as yet you clear answer to this vexing question, recent attempts to find one have motivated two interdisciplinary conferences… This book is a selection of invited papers from the second … (affectionately called ‘Tucson II’) which was held at Tucson in April 1996… Where is the common ground for such a cooperative effort? The questions currently being addressed in consciousness studies fall very roughly along an axis defined by responses to the ‘hard problem,’ which was defined by philosopher David Chalmers as a challenge to reductionist neuroscience. Can the intimate experiences of consciousness be fully explained by firing patterns of the brain’s neurons? Are feelings, sensations… direct consequences of neural synaptic connections and network firing patterns? Is even complete understanding of all the brain’s mechanism… sufficient to comprehend consciousness? Reductionists like philosopher Daniel Dennett insist that consciousness arises wholly and directly from neural activities… Chalmers, on the other hand, believes consciousness may be an irreducible, fundamental property of the universe…”
“[T]he scientific program committee for Tucson II was significantly expanded … The augmented committee defined five major categories into which papers, talks, and sessions would be organized: (1) Philosophy, (2) Cognitive science, (3) Neuroscience, (4) Mathematics and Physics, and (5) Phenomenology and Culture.”
John Searle observes, “The neurosciences have now advanced to the point that we can address… the problem of consciousness as a scientific problem like any other. However, there are a number of philosophical obstacles to this project… The solution to the easy problem can be given … [as] consciousness and all mental phenomena are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain … [and] are higher level features of the brain… The more difficult problem is to explain in detail how it actually works in the brain. I believe that a solution to the second problem would be the most important scientific discovery of the present era… ‘How exactly do the lower-level neuronal firings at synapses cause all of the enormous variety of our conscious (subjective, sentient, aware) experiences?’… the special features of brains… must be essential to the causal explanation of consciousness.” (Pg. 15)
He clarifies, “consciousness … should not be confused with ATTENTION because in this sense of consciousness there are many things one is conscious of that one may not pay attention to, such as the feeling of the shirt on one’s back… consciousness… should not be confused with self-consciousness… in which the subject is aware of himself or herself, is a very special form of consciousness, perhaps peculiar to humans and the higher animals. Forms of consciousness such as feeling pain do not necessarily involve consciousness of a self as a self.” (Pg. 18)
He points out, “The fact that consciousness is both a higher-level and a mental feature is no argument that it is epiphenomenal, any more than any other higher-level biological feature is epiphenomenal… consciousness might turn out to be epiphenomenal, but no valid, a priori, philosophical argument that shows it must turn out that way has yet been given.” (Pg. 23)
Max Velmans notes, “reductionist arguments come in many forms, but they all claim that the phenomenology of consciousness is misleading and people’s trust in it to be naïve. Commonly, reductionists try to show that if one can find the neural causes of correlates of consciousness in the brain, this discovery will establish consciousness itself to be a brain state… I suggest that such arguments are based on a fairly obvious fallacy. To be nothing more than a brain state consciousness must be ONTOLOGICALLY IDENTICAL to a brain state. However, correlation and causation are very different from ontological identity.” (Pg. 48)
David Chalmers states, “it is widely believed that the hardest questions about consciousness concern phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience… [I have distinguished] between the ‘easy’ problems of explaining how various cognitive and behavioral functions (e.g., discrimination, integration, self-monitoring, verbal report) are performed, and the ‘hard’ problem of explaining why these processes are accompanied by conscious experience. Unlike the easy problems, the hard problem does not appear to be a problem about how functions are performed, which suggests that different methods are needed for its solution.” (Pg. 80)
Daniel Dennett argues, “the alternative is the idea that the network ITSELF… could assume all the roles of the inner Boss and thus harbor consciousness. That idea at first seems preposterous o many people… To me it is not. When people declare to me that they cannot conceive of consciousness as simply the activity of such a functional network, I tell them to try harder… What you are… IS this organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences that your body has developed. You ‘automatically’ know about these things going on in your body because, if you did not, it would not be your body! The acts and events you can tell us about, and the reasons for them, are yours because you made them---and they made you.” (Pg. 106)
Patricia Churchland states, “Carving the explanatory space of mind-brain phenomena along the Hard and the Easy line, as Chalmers proposes, poses the danger of inventing an explanatory chasm where there really exists just a broad field of ignorance… it provokes the intuition that only a real humdinger of a solution will suit the Hard Problem… I confess I cannot actually see that. I do not know anywhere near enough to see how to solve either the problem of sensorimotor control or the problem of consciousness. I certainly cannot see enough to know that one problem does, and the other does not, require a ‘Humdinger’ solution.” (Pg. 112-113)
But Stuart R. Hameroff responds to Churchland, “I am obliged to inform her, however, that there is much more to neurons than meets her eye. Dendritic processing, gap junctions, probabilistic vesicle release, glial processing, and classical cytoskeletal dynamics clearly indicate that the neuron-as-switch concept is hopelessly naïve. Add to this complexity the possibilities of quantum coherence in microtubules, actin gelation cycles, gap-junction quantum tunneling, and quantum-gravity self-collapse rearranging funda-mental space-time. And add one more certainty: neurons are alive! Until proven otherwise, consciousness if f process peculiar to living systems. We cannot sweep the question of life under the carpet.” (Pg. 210)
Colin G. Beer asks, “What of the aspects of human mental life that humans might share with other animals? So far, attempts to use communication as a window into animal mentality have revealed cognitive capacities once thought exclusive to humans, but the attempts have yet to provide any clear access to what it is like to be a creature of another sort in the subjectivity of its being. No doubt attempts to find a linguistic point of entry… will continue. But if language is neither a necessary condition for consciousness, nor sufficient to reveal consciousness, cognitive ethology will have to go on trying other ways of putting the question of animal awareness … In the meantime, consideration of this question will have to be included in any fully realized science of consciousness.” (Pg. 529)
Henry P. Stapp points out, “The epiphenomenal character of consciousness implied by classical
Mechanics cannot be reconciled with the naturalistic notion that consciousness evolved because of the survival advantage it conferred: epiphenomenal properties confer no survival advantage. Hence if the classical principles were taken to govern the dynamical process of nature, then the presence in human beings of highly developed consciousness would be a double mystery: the basic dynamical principles would neither entail the existence of the phenomenal realities that populate our experiential realms, nor, given their existence, allow any natural dynamical explanation of how they could have evolved to this high state from simpler forms.” (Pg. 598)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying consciousness (particularly from a philosophical perspective, or those interested in the “hard problem”).
The Introduction to this 1996 book states, “What is consciousness? Although we have as yet you clear answer to this vexing question, recent attempts to find one have motivated two interdisciplinary conferences… This book is a selection of invited papers from the second … (affectionately called ‘Tucson II’) which was held at Tucson in April 1996… Where is the common ground for such a cooperative effort? The questions currently being addressed in consciousness studies fall very roughly along an axis defined by responses to the ‘hard problem,’ which was defined by philosopher David Chalmers as a challenge to reductionist neuroscience. Can the intimate experiences of consciousness be fully explained by firing patterns of the brain’s neurons? Are feelings, sensations… direct consequences of neural synaptic connections and network firing patterns? Is even complete understanding of all the brain’s mechanism… sufficient to comprehend consciousness? Reductionists like philosopher Daniel Dennett insist that consciousness arises wholly and directly from neural activities… Chalmers, on the other hand, believes consciousness may be an irreducible, fundamental property of the universe…”
“[T]he scientific program committee for Tucson II was significantly expanded … The augmented committee defined five major categories into which papers, talks, and sessions would be organized: (1) Philosophy, (2) Cognitive science, (3) Neuroscience, (4) Mathematics and Physics, and (5) Phenomenology and Culture.”
John Searle observes, “The neurosciences have now advanced to the point that we can address… the problem of consciousness as a scientific problem like any other. However, there are a number of philosophical obstacles to this project… The solution to the easy problem can be given … [as] consciousness and all mental phenomena are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain … [and] are higher level features of the brain… The more difficult problem is to explain in detail how it actually works in the brain. I believe that a solution to the second problem would be the most important scientific discovery of the present era… ‘How exactly do the lower-level neuronal firings at synapses cause all of the enormous variety of our conscious (subjective, sentient, aware) experiences?’… the special features of brains… must be essential to the causal explanation of consciousness.” (Pg. 15)
He clarifies, “consciousness … should not be confused with ATTENTION because in this sense of consciousness there are many things one is conscious of that one may not pay attention to, such as the feeling of the shirt on one’s back… consciousness… should not be confused with self-consciousness… in which the subject is aware of himself or herself, is a very special form of consciousness, perhaps peculiar to humans and the higher animals. Forms of consciousness such as feeling pain do not necessarily involve consciousness of a self as a self.” (Pg. 18)
He points out, “The fact that consciousness is both a higher-level and a mental feature is no argument that it is epiphenomenal, any more than any other higher-level biological feature is epiphenomenal… consciousness might turn out to be epiphenomenal, but no valid, a priori, philosophical argument that shows it must turn out that way has yet been given.” (Pg. 23)
Max Velmans notes, “reductionist arguments come in many forms, but they all claim that the phenomenology of consciousness is misleading and people’s trust in it to be naïve. Commonly, reductionists try to show that if one can find the neural causes of correlates of consciousness in the brain, this discovery will establish consciousness itself to be a brain state… I suggest that such arguments are based on a fairly obvious fallacy. To be nothing more than a brain state consciousness must be ONTOLOGICALLY IDENTICAL to a brain state. However, correlation and causation are very different from ontological identity.” (Pg. 48)
David Chalmers states, “it is widely believed that the hardest questions about consciousness concern phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience… [I have distinguished] between the ‘easy’ problems of explaining how various cognitive and behavioral functions (e.g., discrimination, integration, self-monitoring, verbal report) are performed, and the ‘hard’ problem of explaining why these processes are accompanied by conscious experience. Unlike the easy problems, the hard problem does not appear to be a problem about how functions are performed, which suggests that different methods are needed for its solution.” (Pg. 80)
Daniel Dennett argues, “the alternative is the idea that the network ITSELF… could assume all the roles of the inner Boss and thus harbor consciousness. That idea at first seems preposterous o many people… To me it is not. When people declare to me that they cannot conceive of consciousness as simply the activity of such a functional network, I tell them to try harder… What you are… IS this organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences that your body has developed. You ‘automatically’ know about these things going on in your body because, if you did not, it would not be your body! The acts and events you can tell us about, and the reasons for them, are yours because you made them---and they made you.” (Pg. 106)
Patricia Churchland states, “Carving the explanatory space of mind-brain phenomena along the Hard and the Easy line, as Chalmers proposes, poses the danger of inventing an explanatory chasm where there really exists just a broad field of ignorance… it provokes the intuition that only a real humdinger of a solution will suit the Hard Problem… I confess I cannot actually see that. I do not know anywhere near enough to see how to solve either the problem of sensorimotor control or the problem of consciousness. I certainly cannot see enough to know that one problem does, and the other does not, require a ‘Humdinger’ solution.” (Pg. 112-113)
But Stuart R. Hameroff responds to Churchland, “I am obliged to inform her, however, that there is much more to neurons than meets her eye. Dendritic processing, gap junctions, probabilistic vesicle release, glial processing, and classical cytoskeletal dynamics clearly indicate that the neuron-as-switch concept is hopelessly naïve. Add to this complexity the possibilities of quantum coherence in microtubules, actin gelation cycles, gap-junction quantum tunneling, and quantum-gravity self-collapse rearranging funda-mental space-time. And add one more certainty: neurons are alive! Until proven otherwise, consciousness if f process peculiar to living systems. We cannot sweep the question of life under the carpet.” (Pg. 210)
Colin G. Beer asks, “What of the aspects of human mental life that humans might share with other animals? So far, attempts to use communication as a window into animal mentality have revealed cognitive capacities once thought exclusive to humans, but the attempts have yet to provide any clear access to what it is like to be a creature of another sort in the subjectivity of its being. No doubt attempts to find a linguistic point of entry… will continue. But if language is neither a necessary condition for consciousness, nor sufficient to reveal consciousness, cognitive ethology will have to go on trying other ways of putting the question of animal awareness … In the meantime, consideration of this question will have to be included in any fully realized science of consciousness.” (Pg. 529)
Henry P. Stapp points out, “The epiphenomenal character of consciousness implied by classical
Mechanics cannot be reconciled with the naturalistic notion that consciousness evolved because of the survival advantage it conferred: epiphenomenal properties confer no survival advantage. Hence if the classical principles were taken to govern the dynamical process of nature, then the presence in human beings of highly developed consciousness would be a double mystery: the basic dynamical principles would neither entail the existence of the phenomenal realities that populate our experiential realms, nor, given their existence, allow any natural dynamical explanation of how they could have evolved to this high state from simpler forms.” (Pg. 598)
This book will be “must reading” for anyone studying consciousness (particularly from a philosophical perspective, or those interested in the “hard problem”).
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