Some researchers who have devised Integrative Intelligence Theory "IIT" believe that we will never build a machine with consciousness because we have something about our brain that is special.. others hold that there is no consciousness just neurons and atoms, like the ancient Greeks who believed there were just atoms in the void.
Others believe consciousness arises in the brain such as that it's an upwelling of probability brain waves that reaches a consensus and only then does it become conscious. While I think this is too simple for a complete solution as I'll say here, I believe a more accurate use of this idea in combination with GWA General Workspace Availability may be of value in explaining the special aspect of consciousness about how long term memories are entered into the conscious workspace of short term memory. GWA involves the idea that only when information inters in a general area, of access like the monitor of your PC is it then available for use by the rest of the brain.
Note that my idea in this post about some structures in the brain and my description of consciousness has all the features of a news reporting method, this is because of the way that computers are simple and they are with finding, storing, and processing information. Even so it seems to me the main extra features other life in evolution hasn't had are about the sideways branching of the neurons of the higher areas. Our neurons are the same as the neurons of a cat we have more of them and so we have more sideways branching of the neurons of higher-level. So we are special, yes cats are special also!
First here are some of the brain areas essential to the "news reporting" description of basic computation and why I believe it's not the same as higher consciousness.
And They're Off! The "Horsefield" or Hippocampus
The Hippocampus an area of the brain named for the Latin for horsefield (the shoe must go on as they used to say in 1970 BC!)This is a basic area of the brain where new memories are formed and in my belief this is where consciousness starts. Without new memories not as much is possible.
When new memories aren't formed in the hippocampus by no new neurons with laboratory mice they act anxious and this is one reason to believe the hippocampus is a highway valuable to consciousness. As the old saying goes you can't run a mill with water that is past. When a drug is given to mice that restarts the neurogenesis in the hippocampus the signs of anxiety are reduced.
THE LEFT DORSOLATERAL PREFRONTAL CORTEX (LDLPFC)
This is an area above the left eye that lights up on and off and becomes more active in severe depression and it's also believed to be where short-term memory lives in the brain. For reasons you can see on my YouTube videos Encyclopedia Comp Video about some of these ideas I believe that in depression since the brain is more slowed down in general, the LDLPFC is anomalously
fast in severe depression because unlike the long term memory, short term memory is more limited so it's a smaller structure. It's fast in severe depression yet depression tends to be slowed down in general and the cause might be it's like the tail wagging the dog trying to start up the energy of the brain since the rest of the brain is slowed down in depression.
Since the LDLPFC is a smaller structure we might think of it rather like the spark plug of the brain, a computational engine. I think of it like a librarian in a library with an index who's researching the A to Z index which is relatively simple in order to try to load those documents which are the archival memory in the rest of the brain. To the depressed brain this might seem to be the simplest method of restarting the energy of the brain since it would have lower energy cost to operate and so it would seem to be one of the easiest ways to revive from depression if the brain was depressed as in the uncommon event of this in evolution. (While research shows disease was virtually absent in living evolution our ancient lives were truly poor in economy and
like life today it had both bad and good, not a paradise or more uncomfort than always dying at the end.. Some say life is what happens to us while making other plans. Not if our plans are good enough!) In general in severe depression the brain is slowed down so while the short term memory goes through the a to z even so there the long-term memory would seem to more difficult to load in depression.
LONG TERM MEMORY
Believe it or not, every neuron has all the memory of the entire brain as was proven in the 1920s with research with mice. When they slice the neuron smaller and smaller the mouse still has all the memory of the round wheel of cheese! Memory is stored in the entire brain..This was the basis of Karl Pribram's famous idea of the 1970s, the holographic mind. Like a hologram each part of the brain has all the entire image of the idea.
THE BOSTON BRUINS, NO THE BOSS NEURONS, I'M SERIOUS!
You don't want to argue with these although they maybe more like the world's nicest boss, and then after all you are the boss what else!
These are called the boss neurons and only about 20,000 of them are found in a healthy brain.
At first I thought, right control these boss neurons, control the brain, be your own boss, yet we read about how taxing the rich won't make enough money to spread all around to most so soaking the rich won't work where the suds won't rub off on most. Research shows there simply aren't enough rich people. The employees do most of the work not the bosses so I originally thought that this couldn't be, so that the boss neurons couldn't be that important. Instead I imagined that they would go back and forth in cycles like many processes and evolution including evolution itself where you have alternation between the the boss and the employees and cycles rather like business cycles to compute. I was thinking it might somehow be possible to speed up this back and forth evolution to train the brain like for boosting intelligence.
THE CEREBRAL CORTEX
As above and as has been proven, the cerebral cortex is where the higher levels of consciousness are found. I believe this is about the sideways branching and why I believe in contrast with IIT as above I think we'll be able to build conscious machines.
Once the memories are recorded by the hippocampus like the live reporter on site and then sent to the news office, the working memory area, there the short term memory is aware, and from the Working Memory the information is sent to the long term memory with the storage process also involving more than the action reaction pairs between the short term and long term memory. Obviously action reaction pairs alone are not conscious. A balancing beam isn't going to win a Nobel prize or write a poem about opthamology. With enough loops of back and forth it might have some aspects of consciousness but without the higher brilliant insight so many of us have, I realize you know so much!
Consider a math calculator. It has the entry area where you type in it has the short-term area where you read it it has long term memory, some of them even has higher functions like computation or spell wright! Yet it isn't conscious.
We suspect the cortex has some sort of higher aspect of computation about the long and short term memory as it goes back and forth with the brain waves between them. So this has more to do with the cortex, and I believe this is about the branching of the neurons in the cortex at an angle. Branching gives them just the right frequency to represent what the thought is.
And the cortex with the more complex sideways branching has three advantages;
Coding of the memory so it's stored well and presented to the newsroom working memory area in a more recognizable way like by trained memory or comedy methods in its highest form in the a to z. Think of a librarian reading the A-Z index laughing a lot with lots of these more memorable codes.
This would be one reason we celebrate real learning, amused and amazed by our own brilliance
Second the sideways branching allows precision of the memory, that is to say by just the right frequency of the image it represents the thing remembered with higher resolution. This is where super feats like a real artist who paints with high resolution, or the savant playing a tune or memorizing math well.
THE SOURCE in my belief is that by branching sideways, with the advantages coding and precision allow, if these are not yet conscious even while headed that way, I believe the ultimate cause of consciousness is in the same sideways branching of the cortex. The cause is in the higher power leaps the sideways branching allows. Not even refinement of sensation by the back and forth action reaction, not even lots of memory, or even coding may be a match for this.
This quantum leap area of the sideways branching allows summations at higher speed by way of leaps, ways to see what events that seem unalike have in common. In a real sense, as the branching allows the higher levels of memory, like the real memory painter or musician the opposite would seem to be the creative leap, these two sides of the branching would seem to be the action reaction pairs of the cortex. These would be two aspects of the higher consciousness and this wouldn't be coincidence since both would have the one cause, with superior coding, the sideways branching of the neurons of the cortex.
Next I want to discuss the two or three ideas about what consciousness is that are currently being considered as you see in the scientific American article CLICK HERE or see link below. The first idea is what's called GWA General Workspace Availability. The essence of this idea seems to be that as a way of operation the memory is loaded into a short term memory area and then once it's available like a workspace it's distributed to the other areas of the brain or the computer. Once available the information becomes consciousness so would seem simple if this is all there is to it so a machine like a computer could have consciousness. The rest of GWA involves the back and forth brainwaves, no not sloshing that goes on after the information is loaded to working memory! This seems to be part of GWA a sort of add on that isn't a prediction of it. Actually GWA is about consciousness in general like other life and our life also, and the general goal of my post is to say about higher consciousness, in particular can we make a conscious machine, and how the brain may be so. GWA is also based on the all or nothing neural events. If a stimulus starts and remains unconcious, because the brain wave hasn't "rocked the arena" so it isn't registered in the Working Memory the event remains unconcious. Yet with a conscious event there is more than enough of the brain wave to reach the Working memory area, and it's deja vu, reold my subscription with the old world station!
This would seem to be the major claim of GWA, and processing by other general methods like the branching wouldn't seem to follow from GWA if consciousness is both more general than Working Memory being found all around us and also something more than Working Memory if higher consciousness is also. Einstein said evidence of deeper truths are all around us if we look.
So a distinction of my idea from GWA may be about the unconscious brain waves. Rudy Rucker, author of the book "Infinity and The Mind" who asked, how real is a dream you dreamed and forgot, might remember both MRI in our own way. So if my theory, Neural Intelligence By Coding Angle NIBCA is true, even these unconscious waves Rucker may have been unaware of may have influence on our behaviour.
The second major idea now being considered is called Integrated Information Theory, IIT.
IIT holds that in essence consciousness is something special about us and this would explain why simple structures of the brain like the cerebellum or little brain (which has far more neurons that the rest of the brain yet simple wiring) don't have much influence on behaviour if they are damaged or removed, because they have more simple parallel wiring not special wiring only the higher levels will allow, something not found in other life.
Two other ideas that are being considered are that consciousness is merely a sort of upwelling of the probability wave of the neural energy and it's more of a consensus of that neural energy so that the one that's more radiant simply overpowers the other and at that point it becomes aware..
Some also believe that consciousness is just a total illusion and the there is no real ghost in the machine.
CONSIDERATIONS
First want to say that I mostly or completely discount the idea that there is no ghost in the machine and there is no computing at all or consciousness because of information theory and the definition of information and life. To me this seems to be a cheap cop out of this world like saying there is no world, or all the cosmos is 100% up!
Ideas like Integrated Information Theory IIT the second idea of the SA article seem to me to be much like the idea that we have a special place in the cosmos and that our neurons are special and only adapted to their own use and there will never be any way a machine could ever equal us no matter how humble we think we are...
Even so much of the history of science has been a story of these ideas about special status being increased, or reduced some say to more general union with the cosmos.
Many have believed that machines could never be unified with our high level of life and so the physical and spiritual part of life could not be the same.
Is mass or energy living or dead? If you dry a virus and put it in a jar for 20 years it won' t move or change, yet add water and it's alive! Is it alive or dead?
In truth there is no sharp define in wine, the world is woozy at that moment!
It's been found that in science machines can do all life can in general. It was formerly believed by many that machines could never do the things that life could do, yet one by one the machines have overpowered these limits and the final disproof that machines are distinct has seemed to be how they couldn't make copies of themselves in older beta but now with higher power printing technology machines in general can achieve all that life can.
To me the question about how consciousness exists is also about the definition of information and about life. Some who have studied the origin of life hold that it seems improbable that the molecules of life could ever have unified together just by random mass combinations in the early time of life on Earth. The chance was calculated to be trillions to one against that the molecules of life by DNA or RNA could copy. I think this depends on the definition of what the copy machine is made of. If we say that life couldn't have formed the DNA I would think that all copying is based on no more than the method that a copying machine uses. Like the definition of information any machine made of mass and energy can copy just as an old time copying machine some may remember, can copy well.
This is what we would expect if all mass and energy computes as they say in ideas about the foundation of information. And a vast part of the computation of this was yes about what things change, but also about what stays the same as in Noether's theorem. The simple definition of what stays the same is much like a chemical bond found in most of the matter of the universe. So I think of copying as in life in DNA as a formation of unions by way of the molecular events. Even a molecule bound with mass is with union and with another molecule that's in essence a basic copy machine. This would be why and how life arose so early in the history of the world.
It's become apparent to most that asking "if machines can think" a question that's been asked a lot, has had no more meaning than asking if submarines can swim.
These are reasons that I tend to discount IIT as above so instead of the other two ideas I also replace hopefully IIT with the best of those first two ideas, the first about availability and short-term memory of the consciousness and the other about the welling up idea that creates the burst into consciousness as we know it.
I think both of these ideas have limited value and are components of consciousness even so and so I want to say how I think the brain has consciousness so that the best of both of these ideas might be of value to us.
MY MECHANISM TO EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS using the brain structures I listed at the top of this post;
(Please keep in mind that the following is only a preliminary sort of draft. While it's not yet perfect I can list all the reasons why I think what is real about this is a valid enough method of looking at it to justify further consideration.)
The doorway to consciousness would seem to be above all else first the formation of new memories as in the hippocampus. This is one of the few areas in the brain where new neurons are constantly being created and in problems like depression these neurons are not being created as much.
So as we would expect if consciousness is relatively simple the foundation itself of consciousness may not be so much in the higher levels of the brain as in the base of the brain.
New memories would form in the hippocampus as a sort of unedited form of creativity that then the rest of the brain may refine by using the short-term memory area of the brain I mentioned above the LDLPFC that has been found to be where short-term memory lives in the brain.
An area where Working memory events are is also going to have huge importance in the idea of what consciousness is and where it lives. I was surprised when I read about how GWA or the upwelling ideas were believed to be a method of computation of consciousness where the theorists were possibly unaware of research that found where the short-term memory is in the brain. This area is like the switchboard idea of operators controlling the brain, when her ear ring jingles-she answers!
I believe GWA is not a real explanation of consciousness itself although it is in a broad outline the way it may work because certainly in unconsciousness we would say that a Working Memory area would be essential. In evolution when we were fighting the saber-tooth competition if we didn't know right away what to do in a way that was high speed without all of the whole lot of those memories that we have so much more than the rest of the other life in evolution, this would be essential to making it not more of celebration and not a burden about special memos of our unforgettable trip to the beach millions of years ago!
So I think the hippocampus creates the new memories and then the genius of the Working Memory is that it selects from those memories and refines them sort of like an automatic level control filter use an old audio that removes all the first level of the duds. A lot of the new memories created by the hippocampus will be random and not valuable.
While recent research seems to show the hippocampus may not cause neurogenesis, no doubt consciousness would seem to need a zone where the information goes in and this may be more passive like a pixel sensor, even so this seems essential even if it's more passive.
So much of short-term memory is just being aware of what's going on as we speak so I think the hippocampus may stream to the other Working Memory area, and consciousness is a constant interaction between the streaming from the hippocampus and also constant activity with the long term memory areas, a blend of short and long term memories, constantly being modulated encoded and enhanced by the sideways neurons of the cortex as above. And there would also be sideways branching e.g. the archival area would have a sort of "further reading" or also "recommended" method, so these memories would also hope to get the Working Memory's attention. Even so unlike with the General Work space Availability idea simply loading the memory to the Working Memory area seems no more a claim of consciousness than loading a bucket of water would be to then pump to a bunch of pipes.
While the GWA idea as I say above I think does have general merit also, by the buckets and pipes event it's not complete. And the problem with the random upwelling idea (that consciousness is just a radiance upward of brain waves of different types and the one that wins becomes conscious) seems to be lacking also because it's not exact enough. To me the upwelling idea would be like a fuzzy blob and not much with computation my solution would be, to right send in the boss neurons! Even so I think GWA has merit because it may be part of how the long-term memories are chosen by the Working Memory area.
So in this idea about consciousness the hippocampus first creates the memories which are then filtered by the Working where you can't store a lot of memories so it sends them to the long-term memory areas of the brain. Here you can see how important the mediation by the boss and higher neurons would be since they take the memory from hippocampus ultimately and store it somewhere so it's not burdening the brain with too much trivia that might otherwise often be doom or gloom as we were in evolution.
The upwelling idea seems generally of value except the boss neurons are sort of a genius and as each neuron has all the memory in the brain so the boss neurons would do something like sort of be the foundation of trained memory tricks or comedy. By this I mean I believe that consciousness may live in the Working Memory yet also live in the boss neurons and the cortex in a real sense also in the long-term storage areas of the brain. This would be by way of my observation that of course the Boss Neurons can't do all the work of the brain.
That's why I say there needs to be refinement in both the idea of upwelling and the general work space availability idea.
My belief is this upwelling and the selection by the Working Memory will take place by way of cycles going back and forth between the long-term memory and the selection of the Memory to refine and edit them by way of the mediation of the boss neurons and the sideways branching of the higher levels of the brain. Even if so my boss is a genius, so I think the higher level and boss neurons are with sideways branching to add a higher level of power so it has not just a read-only memory but a random access memory.
The sideways branching could be important both for getting more precision in ideas that one either off or on and also for the higher degrees of freedom that could be more the Hallmark of real consciousness, right send more memos at Christmas!
A creativity test will have stuff like wines were you see if you can walk the line, well actually no they have marks on the site and you fill them in with your own memos! And the creators of these say there are two things that these ideas have to have to be considered to be the most creative by those inventors;
First the method of winning the creativity trophy has to be as unusual as possible, second it also has to be something "real". And it solves a problem..
As they say much serious truth is said in jest, and so too often a measure of creativity may well be the measure of consciousness. So really the only limit for a machine with consciousness in my opinion would be it's ability to have structures stored in its neurons or whatever that are functional like in creativity. If the structure has real use and is an image of something that's real and if it is also original and solves a problem to me this is another definition of consciousness.
The boss neurons may be geniuses at mediation. By this I mean they might present to the workspace of GWA the sort of mapped out or memory method of summarizing what the long-term memories are about and as I say this genius may because of lots of cycles back and forth between the Workspace and the long-term archive memory structures of the brain. Most people will have the usual Working Memory area yet the real genius will have also ways of summarizing in that A-Z memo of the Working Memory what the essence of the access to each stored memory would be.
Another attribute of higher intelligence may be special branching and coding of our higher neurons and synapses geniuses may have more of, and while as in IIT they are indeed special to us, even so they can be copied by machines, so machines with consciousness are possible.
As I say I'll swear on my video site! Encyclopedia, Comp Video (the name derived from this site without profane words!) In my posts here also about what I call GBN General Behavioral neurology I believe that all of the brain structures are based on a simple and a complex method like that of neurons and so much else we find in computation. For example a transistor is a switch that goes from simple to complex that branches out like entropy in thermodynamics or evolution. By this idea which others have believed, genius is just common sense writ large. Noether's theorem says the more things change the more they stay the same. (This is an idea that has led to the classification of all sets in the foundations of math and much improving the physics of subatomic particles or knowledge of the symmetries by way of what changes and what stays the same. Einstein thought of Emily Noether as the greatest lady mathematician.)
My other blog page about GBN; Click Here
Here's the SA article about the two methods above that might be possible explanations of consciousness GWA and IIT; LINK
For one of my videos about GBN and pain relief click here
