The "illusion" of consciousness

Of course consciousness is not an illusion. Whatever half-baked "Buddhists" and behaviourists might say, the fact of one's own existence is one of the few things of which each of us can be certain. Descartes was right to insist "Cogito ergo sum".

But guys like Derren Brown demonstrate an extraordinary ability to confuse and trick other people. You may wish to check a few video clips from this site if you've not caught any of his shows. Freaky stuff, really, really freaky stuff.

Looking at what he does, it seems some events are “in” our conscious stream, while other events are not. And he can manipulate things between the two states. Not, I hasten to add, by any kind of fraudulent psychic powers that dishonest religionists and con-artists claim, but by means of suggestion, psychology, and misdirection. Could it be, as Dr Susan Blackmore puts it, that there is no stream of consciousness; no movie in the brain; no picture of the world we see in front of our eyes? Could all this be just a grand illusion? ...

You might want to protest. You may be absolutely sure that you do have such a stream of conscious experiences. But perhaps you have noticed this intriguing little oddity. Imagine you are reading this ... when suddenly you realise that the clock is striking. You hadn't noticed it before, but now that you have, you know that the clock has struck four times already, and you can go on counting. What is happening here? Were the first three “dongs” really unconscious and have now been pulled out of memory and put in the stream of consciousness? If so were the contents of the stream changed retrospectively to seem as though you heard them at the time? Or what? You might think up some other elaborations to make sense of it but they are unlikely to be either simple or convincing.

A similar problem is apparent with listening to speech. You need to hear several syllables before the meaning of a sentence becomes unambiguous. So what was in the stream of consciousness after one syllable? Did it switch from gobbledegook to words half way through? It doesn't feel like that. It feels as though you heard a meaningful sentence as it went along. But that is impossible.

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We experience the world in a of uniified way, but that sensation of sitting in the middle of a sensory space turns out to be, well, misleading. Things aren't like that at all. Our consciousness experience is indeed an illusion.

Want to know more? Read her whole argument in this New Scientist article.

Anyone read any karl pribram?

Jonti said:

Of course consciousness is not an illusion. Whatever half-baked "Buddhists" and behaviourists might say, the fact of one's own existence is one of the few things of which each of us can be certain. Descartes was right to insist "Cogito ergo sum".

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As a Buddhist I'm wondering WTF you're on about. Consciousness as an illusion is part of the toolset of materialists. Of whom behaviourists have provided the best humour apart outside of Tommy Cooper.

While there is a lot of interesting science about how our brain constructs consciousness of the self and the here-now as essentially a way of interacting with the environment, I can't accept it at an emotional level. I bloody well feel conscious and that's good enough.

Of course one is conscious -- Blackmore is not disputing that, although sometimes I find it none too clear what she is saying.

In the article she seems to be accepting the existence of consciousness as a brute fact. This is a welcome development as, for a long time, some scientists have gotten away with arguing that consciousness is not scientific. That's just silly. Why should it be thought unscientific to ask how the body can produce subjective experience?

But she's not addressing that question, the so-called hard problem of consciousness. She is quite reasonably taking sentience as a given, and then looking at the nature of our conscious experience. And it turns out that in many, many ways, the way we experience the world as a unified thing present to our senses is plumb wrong. Once one knows where to look, the cracks are, somewhat disconcertingly, everywhere. In every sentence one hears, for a start.

Darren Brown seems to be skilled in weaving a subjective narrative to get an individual remembering and paying attention to the things he wants. He engages with his subjects and feeds them information and sensations for further exploration, on his terms. He manipulates a person's engagement with the world, and they end up seeing ("consciously recalling") what he wants, and then acting on it.

He shows, as Blackmore argues, that seeing is not about building pictures of the world in our heads. Heck, there's no point in having a model of the world in one's head when the real thing is right there to be consulted and measured. Seeing is much more an engagement and interaction with the world. What we "see" is the information needed for further exploration. We are conscious not of a model we've built in our heads, but of the possibilities and constraints of our being in the world.

If this is true, Blackmore suggests that scientists who search for the neural correlates of the detailed picture in our heads are barking up the wrong tree. There is no such picture. That's not what's going on in our brains at all.

Azrael23 said:

Anyone read any karl pribram?

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A long time ago.

Interesting. What she's arguing reminds me very much of later Wittgenstein.

This is going to wander off into philosophy, which I suppose is fair enough. I did wonder whether it was philosophy or science before I posted the OP.

Science has followed philosophy in thinking that the perceived world is constructed from sense data by the mind. And indeed, dissecting bodies and investigating their workings initially seemed to support this philosophical position. There are sense organs like eyes and ears that pick up real world vibes and change them into bodily signals; then nerves carry these signals to the brain. Where presumably, a picture of the world is created and, somehow, perceived. Hmmm.

But this private stuff in our heads is presumed to somehow serve as the basis for our acting in the world, and as the basis for talking with each other about the world. That implies that our shared language, the one that engages with other folk and the real world, must be based on an inner private language, one which deals with the stuff in our heads. In principle, no-one else can have access to that language.

The later works of Wittgenstein, in particular, Philosophical Investigations argued that one simply cannot have a private language -- that language is essentially an interpersonal thing, and therefore public. That being the case, there is no way to translate between one's inner apprehension of the world and the language one uses to talk with others about the world.

The implication is that the "model in the head" view of psychology is wrong. Blackmore supports this view in her New Scientist article with some intriguing experimental results.

Could someone explain the materialistic view of consciousness that finds it be an illusion - dont really understand the illusions bit. THanks.

Im finding it hard to see what the problem is.

If its jsut a problem of being aware of stuff in the subconscious then that doesnt seem too suprsising to me - we have so much infromation coming in that our brain filters stuff out, or relegates it to less forefront consciousness - much drug experience rests on this, that all of a sudden you are privy to information coming in that you had been filtering out, or asigning to subconscious.

Breathing is a subconscious activity, but we can quickly click it into conscious activity - so what? whats the illusion bit? So "a unified conscious stream [is] an illusion of richness and continuity." - so what if we get confused sometimes, or the stream becomes discontinuous, or stuff pops in and out of our heads - I jsut cant see how that makes it an illusion - it just makes ita complex process.

I think the problem is scientists are too straight and feel this "illusion of richness and continuity" much more profoundly than people with more deep fried brains! So you consciousness gets messy - deal with it!

I seem to remember Laptop's favourite book was about this topic..

niksativa said:

Could someone explain the materialistic view of consciousness that finds it be an illusion - dont really understand the illusions bit. THanks.
...

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Blackmore is saying that the way our consciousness appears to us (as a unified field) is not the way it really is, and that clever experiments can demonstrate this.

Jonti said:

Blackmore is saying that the way our consciousness appears to us (as a unified field) is not the way it really is, and that clever experiments can demonstrate this.

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I kind of follow that, but what does it really mean? How is that an illusion?

For example we perceive our bodies to be solid, but now science proves that there is more space between atoms than matter - that we are a floating mass of loose atoms - so what? Does that make our solidity an illusion?

I say no - we're solid - its just our understanding of that term that changes.

Same with our consciousness - to us it appears unified, in practice it is a complex process - the little thought experiments in the article jsut demonstrate some of the qualities of human consciousness, but don't make it all an "illusion"...

I have a feeling I'm starting form a different understanding of consciousness in the first place - Blackmore's concrete understanidng of a unified field of consciousness is perhaps getting mixed up with her ego and sense of self a little too much, making her little experiments doubt herself!

I get the feeling Im not explaining my position very well, but I still dont see why any inquiry into consciousness and the subconscious split whould lead to the use of the word illusion. Surely that would only apply if you had nothing to call a conscious mind, but somehow ended up with the impression that you did. But we do have a conscious mind, it is complex and it is scatty and can become faulty and can be altered with disease and drugs, but it does exist and it does work in its own amazing way. Or am I missing something obvious here?

niksativa said:

I kind of follow that, but what does it really mean? How is that an illusion?

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A mirage perhaps. There really is something there, it's just not what it seems.

One startling result which I'm not going to hunt down now, involved experimenters carrying out interviews on a campus, in the open air. Part way through the interview, a couple of workmen would walk between the two, carrying a large board. While the view of the subjects was obscured, the experimenter would be changed. That new interviewer would carry on the interview. Interviewees did not notice the switch.

Of course, that couldn't happen to you or I ...

It probably couldnt happen to you or I! - even in the Darren Brown big stunts he has to find aprtiuclar people suseptible to such tricks. In the one where he got people to pull a robbery, he whittled the group down and down until he found particularly susceptible people (about 4 in the end)

All this kind of thing shows is that we are dupable - we can be tricked, or that our conscious mind concentrates on a limited amount of things at a time.

It doesnt mean that consciousness is a mirage or an illusion, it just means that our awareness can be tricked - to say that this has implications about the existential nature of consciousness sounds a step too far - its says something about how our consciousness works, but not about whether it exists at all.

Also, consciousness is somehting that can be mastered- the limits of its potential are huge, particularly in controlling the body - yogi can stop their heart from beating or stop blood flowing to their legs and other such tricks - never mind increasing states of perception.

Derren Brown is all about limiting perception, but what about experiments that actually excercise our conscious mind?

niksativa said:

... its says something about how our consciousness works, but not about whether it exists at all.

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Yes. I thought that had been made clear right from the start. But no, the specific phenomena of change blindness is not to do with suggestibility at all. Forgive me for asking, but did you read Blackmore's article?

There's a demo of change blindness (java applet) you can access from this page, or go to directly here. There's a few scenes to play around with (right click on the image for a menu). Enjoy!

Very interesting thread.

I've had an email convo with susan blackmore last year. great woman . Lots of integrity.

</name droppping>

Jonti said:

Yes. I thought that had been made clear right from the start. But no, the specific phenomena of change blindness is not to do with suggestibility at all. Forgive me for asking, but did you read Blackmore's article?

There's a demo of change blindness (java applet) you can access from this page, or go to directly here. There's a few scenes to play around with (right click on the image for a menu). Enjoy!

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Yeah , I did that - so something disappears in the background - after scanning the foreground you notice it - what does it prove? NOthing special... just helps understand the process a little. But why use the word "illusion"? THats a strong word.

- I think my problem with this piece of work is the word "illusion" - there are a lot of materialists out there who want to diminish the role of consciousness in science, some who even evangelically believe in the potnetial of Artificial Inteligence as equal to human consciousness and so on, other who say that consciousness doesnt exist at all, and the use of the word illusion plays right into that.

The paper presented here does nothing to suggest illusion, for me at any rate. As I say, there are a number of things to say about consciousness at the high end of the spectrum, where the conscious mind starts breaking barriers of understanding: this is truly interesting stuff. But showing that the conscious and subconscious mind cut in and out, or that our focus is quite limited and presents only a minimum of information coming in at a time doesnt begin to really tell us about the power of a truly perceptive, enlightened conscious mind, I dont think, nor do I follow how such results can lead to the use of the word "illusion" - in fact she describes it as a "Grand Illusion".

Maybe Im just having a problem of semantics? What does illusion really mean in this context? (I have read her definition at the start of the article, but its not really scientific "To say that consciousness is an illusion is not to say that it doesn’t exist, but that it is not what it seems to be―more like a mirage or a visual illusion."). I just dont see how you can say its a mirage, anymore than all sight is a mirage. We know different creatres see things differently, and you have to have objectivity - but thats standard.

Certainly there are lots of people who walk around in half daze, especially in the modern world. Using such cases to study the nature of consciousness would give different results than with someone who spends their life developing the conscious mind-muscle, and for whom the following statement just doesnt apply, for they are continually aware of their conscious mind:

Susan Blackmore said:

Perhaps a new story is concocted whenever you bother to look. When we ask ourselves about it, it would seem as though there’s a stream of consciousness going on. When we don't bother to ask, or to look, it doesn't, but then we don't notice so it doesn't matter.

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In fact I doubt I disagree with you Jonti, you start your OP with "Of course consciousness is not an illusion." -

I think Im just a bit touchy about materialists trying to wipe out the powers of mind, thought and also organic Life from their mechanical materialist view of existence.

One more add: her whole argument is based on not being aware of everythign that happens - not noticing things change, not hearing bonging clocks etc., - but it is possible to be so aware that you can not only hear and see everything in a vivid way, but feel the mass of the planet below you and feel the distances that stretch across the universe.

Even so, and for the sake of repeating myself, I dont see how being preoocuiped with one thought at the expense of another makes consciousness a Grand Illusion, and try as I may to reread the peice I just cant see the link.

In fact the amazing thing about consciousness is that we take in all the information we are not conscious of and store it away in the deepest parts of our mind. Stanislaw Grof's experiments of deep hypnosis that have enabled subjects to recall conversations they overheard their parents having whilst in the womb point to this. All Blackmore can comment on is how much some people's conscious mind is capable of focussing on at any given time.

I think Im just a bit touchy about materialists trying to wipe out the powers of mind, thought and also organic Life from their mechanical materialist view of existence.

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Well, there's been a lot of that over the previous century, so your attitude may well be justified. On the other hand, Blackmore refers to this paper so I think you can be reassured she is not interested in explaining away consciousness. What she is getting at, I think, is that it appears as if we are sitting in a world, passively soaking up sense data, and that this view permeates philosophy, science, and psychology.

But that is not what conscious perception is like at all. Of course, if one has not been deeply immersed in the philosophical and scientific paradigm of "the world we see is a model of the Real Thing reconstructed in our heads" then it may be puzzling why she bothers to bang on about this in the first place.

Incidently, in the Java demo I linked to above, one can tweak the various paramenters. In particular, one can set the "blink" gap between the presentation of the images to zero. Then the changes are readily seen, although with a gap of 90 milliseconds, it was taking me a dozen or so attempts to spot the difference.

Agreed it is confusing to be told that one doesn't really see the world the way one appears to see it!

Jonti said:

Blackmore refers to this paper ...

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From that paper:

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
[...]
[and then]

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience

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I'd say that this Blackmore piece and assosciated experiments only really tell us something about

the focus of attention,

and maybe some sketchy things about:

the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;

I dont think there is anything that can be drawn from this that can have real meaningful insight into the so called hard problem.

On top of these easy and hard problems are finding explenations for "higher states of consciousness" and related experiences.

That's right.

Blackmore explicitly states she is not dealing with the so-called hard problem of consciousness. She takes sentience as a given, and cites some experimental results which, she feels, shed some light on the cut of the coat (the sensorium, so to speak) woven from that raw sentience.

What may naively be taken as a seamless garment, turns out to be a right old patchwork, but we habitually do not see the joins.

dp

Jonti said:

What may naively be taken as a seamless garment, turns out to be a right old patchwork, but we habitually do not see the joins.

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I guess this is what is referred to as the "Grand Illusion", because we dotn see the joins - however, I would not take the step of using this word, for some of the reasons I've tried to stab at above.

Illusions suggests something about the Hard problem as it were - here we have a problem of scientific approach, and incidentaly, this is a problem for all materialist accounts of our universe: They start by breaking things down into the components (the patchwork if you will), and then explain the whole in terms of these smallest parts, often dangerously reading to much into their small findings about the big picture.

I feel that in order to look at the big picture you have to approach it with big questions.

For example here are is a philosphical appraoch to the question of consciousness, that is not contradicted by Blackmore-type experiements, but leads to different a conclusion, and away from the use of words such as "illusion".

I've heard this acredited to a guy called Chalmers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers - but its used elsewhere by people like Wilber - it asks where is consciousness, and who is conscious? Are we? Is a lion? Is a dog? Is a fly? Is a flea? Is a single cell amoeba? Chalmers suggest that consciousness goes "all the way down" and is infact a fundamental property of the universe, and that the consciousnesses of humans are some sort of constelation and network of this property.

its explained at great depth here:
http://consc.net/papers/moving.html

More briefly here:
http://www.ditext.com/chalmers/chalm.html

Okay - the majority of scientists are more than sceptical, but materialist science isnt able to deal with the hard problem in materilist scientific terms at this time, and Blackmore's use of the word illusion kind of points to that struggle.

So consciousness is a ptachwork of processes - how does this mean that a stream of consciusness does not exist? A stream is a patchowrk of H20 molecules - just because it has componenets doesnt stop it from being whole. A seamless garment is still made up many threads - all wholes have their constituent parts, it doesnt lead that all things are ilussions becasue they have constituent parts!

Just found this -a 2 part interview/argument between Blackmore and Chalmers (havent read it yet)
Part 1
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1183559.htm
Part 2
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1184056.htm

Plus a Chalmers special:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/s919229.htm

Chalmers website has lots of links for alternative papers:
http://consc.net/chalmers/

It's probably helpful to distinguish between materialist and reductive explanations. Chalmers gives arguments in his original paper (Facing Up to the Problems of Consciousness) that consciousness is irreducible

Chalmers said:

It would be wonderful if reductive methods could explain experience, too; I hoped for a long time that they might. Unfortunately, there are systematic reasons why these methods must fail.

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But consciousness could still arise from (or, invariably be associated with) material processes. For example, perhaps a conscious body always has within it processes that create information. If this turns out to be the case ("the simplest coherent and useful theory") then the theory would be materialist, but not reductive.

It would be materialist because the theory asserts a particular sort of material process (those that create information) is associated with consciousness. But it would not be reductive, because we have been obliged to invent a new physical law ("the creation of information is accompanied by consciousness") rather than use existing physical theory to explain consciousness (as the proponents of strong AI, for example, have argued is possible).

It's probably also helpful to distinguish between an organised and structured conscousness such as that enjoyed by humans, and the primitive momentary protoconscousness which (arguably) accompanies the creation of a single bit of information. For short, we could call this primitive protoconsciousness sentience.

Thanks for the links. I don't have time right now, but I'll certainly be perusing the material when I can.

PS you double posted above

Jonti said:

It's probably helpful to distinguish between materialist and reductive explanations.

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you're right - being a bit slack with my terminlogy .

Jonti said:

It's probably also helpful to distinguish between an organised and structured conscousness such as that enjoyed by humans, and the primitive momentary protoconscousness which (arguably) accompanies the creation of a single bit of information. For short, we could call this primitive protoconsciousness sentience.

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Is it really that different or is it merely a matter of degree?

Jonti said:

Thanks for the links. I don't have time right now, but I'll certainly be perusing the material when I can.

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Me too... I need to think about it all a bit more and really work out what I think.

This section from the discussion Part 1 really seem to encapsulate Blakmore's problem with "illusion"
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1183559.htm

Susan Blackmore: What it comes down to I think is something like this. When you look at those red shirts over there you’re going oh, I’m having this ineffable weird experience of redness that can’t be explained. Now what I’ve tried to do for years and years and years is to stare into the face of experiences like that and go well am I really?

The more you stare the more it seems to kind of disintegrate and you can’t find a me or a now or a redness or anything else and I think somehow we have to get through that sort of illusion.

Paul Davies: It doesn’t make it unreal in the first place, it just means you’ve found a way of subjugating that reality.

Susan Blackmore: Maybe, or maybe I’m conning myself cause the problem’s so difficult that I’m trying to get out of it.

Natasha Mitchell: Yeah, you haven’t got out of the problem yet and you have some sense that consciousness may in fact be like a fundamental property of nature like time, like space, like gravity. How so?

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Yeah, she does get a bit carried away, I've got to admit that.

I find Buddhists who think "I-ness" is an illusion are wrong. It may be a composite, but it is real.

Seeing the green hills
my now is with me always,
and, in form, myself.

Jonti said:

I find Buddhists who think "I-ness" is an illusion are wrong. It may be a composite, but it is real.

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Yeah, I think there is a difference from transcending the ego to beleiving that all perceptions are illusionary.

I think our physical selves are the key to understanding the mysteries of the universe - we are made up of what its made of - and our brains and consciousness are hard wired into the fabric of the universe.

Budhism and other meditative religions usually have in common activities that try and kill of the ego and sense of self as much as it is possible to in human life - however they actually revel in the conscious mind and feel that the conscious realms are a "higher" realm than that of the physical world.

it is quite possible as you suggest that consciousness does have physical properties - I think that makes sense - but perhaps we can think of it in terms of some sort of specturm of energy where you have inert matter at one end and conscious energy towards the other end. Dont know what kind of a scale this is - Im just making it up as I go along!

Or if each basic unit of matter - atom, or sub atom, has some kind of reflexive ability, it is not impossible that Chalmers is right and conscoiusness of sorts goes all the way down, almost like a new element on the periodic table.

Lipton has interesting work on the conscious power of cells
http://www.brucelipton.com/article/insight-into-cellular-consciousness
which as been picked up on by the fractal evolution group
http://www.fractal.org/Bewustzijns-Besturings-Model/Fractal-Evolution.htm

Our presumption is that human consciousness is an evolved expression of cellular consciousness

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Work in this field really combines to match up with Chalmers/Wilbers proposition.

Worth reading that fractal thing for an overview of Liptons work also, a clear read - it really gets to the crunch on the "The Integration of Outputs" section, although it does get a little happy clappy at the end, but what can you do!?

Then you have people like Talbot with the Hologrpahic Model of the universe which try and imagine this relationship with ever present conscoiusness and physical reality in a new way. This is more fantastic, but not utterly impossible.
http://www.rense.com/general69/holoff.htm

I find these explorations intresting and inspiring, and feel that they are getting close to the truth of the matter (just a subconscious hunch!), even the most speculative ones.

I reckon that until reductionists satisfactoraly crack evolution (I am not convinced that all mutations are utterly "random") and come to understand conclusively the creation of life from non-organic matter the hard problems of consciousness (there are more than that of "experience", such as the higher powers of the conscious mind) will remain deeply evasive.

Even if the above links are dismissable from your stand point ( I think Lipton's work is pretty kosher) I think they are important to entertain - all the greatest sceintific breakthroughs on the hardest scientific problems required a significant paradigm shift to get to the new understanding.

Jonti said:

Of course consciousness is not an illusion. Whatever half-baked "Buddhists" and behaviourists might say, the fact of one's own existence is one of the few things of which each of us can be certain. Descartes was right to insist "Cogito ergo sum".

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No, Descartes's axiom proves only that *thought* exists. It does not follow logically from this that a unitary thinking subject also exists.

Suppose consciousness is an illusion.

Then the people who believe consciousness is an illusion would be right.

Jonti would be wrong.

As would I.

Obviously.

So the people who are right are the people who actually are conscious that consciousness is an illusion.

That consciousness of consciousness being an illusion is itself an illusion.

So, collapsing the brackets, they're actually wrong and consciousness is not an illusion.

QED.

feeling really clever now

8ball said:

Suppose consciousness is an illusion.

Then the people who believe consciousness is an illusion would be right.

Jonti would be wrong.

As would I.

Obviously.

So the people who are right are the people who actually are conscious that consciousness is an illusion.

That consciousness of consciousness being an illusion is itself an illusion.

So, collapsing the brackets, they're actually wrong and consciousness is not an illusion.

QED.

feeling really clever now

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But this is merely a verbose recapitulation of Descartes. It suffers from the same logical problem. You have proved that *consciousness* exists, but you have not proved that this consciousness exists in a self. The interesting question is not whether consciousness exists, for obviously it does, but where that conscousness resides.