Defining Consciousness

Consciousness: awareness

The word consciousness gets used in many different ways, but fundamentally, it is the quality of being aware of and responsive to phenomena.

It’s what Antionio D’Amasio called “the feeling of what happens,” or subjective experience.

It can also be defined as that which has perceptions, thoughts and/or feelings, or in which they occur.

As soon as we reach this definition, the word “that” in the previous sentence has a lot of work to do. What is that “that” exactly, other than being difficult to define? If we take the definition of subjective experience, we have to ask what objective experience would be in contrast, and whether our subjective experience can perceive the subjective experience of anyone else.

When people ask questions about consciousness here, it seems that they are not simply asking about whether we’re aware of some event or object. They’re asking about the “that”. The whole mind, which feels what happens, or perhaps only that part of the whole mind that feels what happens. In this meaning, it is the thing generated by a sufficiently sophisticated and intact brain, and “correlated” with its function. (Though “correlation” here does not seem to have the standard technical meaning either.)

Sometimes, in modern discourse, it is used as a replacement or synonym for the soul. Some, religiously minded, refer to it as a fragment or instance of God.

Sometimes, consciousness is suggested to be plural, to have different, possibly independent aspects. Some people differentiate, for example, between experience derived from the outside world through the senses, and that derived through introspection or examination of mental processes. Others differentiate between sense perception, introspection, general knowledge and intention. Still others split the concept into eight or ten or more categories. Others may think in scales of access to mental processes and contents—our knowledge of what we experience is smaller than what we experience, and both experience and knowledge are somewhat fluid.

Still others think that because of these intricacies, consciousness is an illusion, nonexistent, or existing only by convention (sticking a name on something that doesn’t really exist). Yet others think that consciousness is the only thing that exists or that we can prove exists, or that consciousness is the fundamental building block of the universe, and everything that is reduces to consciousness or something like it or it and a few other fundamental things.

Any or all of these definitions may be accurate; however, the problem comes with precision. Like a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for consciousness, the more precise you try to be, the less accurate you become. You’re better off with a kind of loose, intuitive definition

More: Consciousness in Wikipedia has a surprisingly clear article on the subject and various debates on the definition of consciousness.
Originally posted on Quora at https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-recent-and-accurate-definition-of-Consciousness/answer/Scott-Gosnell

EP 035 Stephen Buranyi on Scientific Journalism and the Structure of Scientific Publishing

Stephen Buranyi writes about science and the socioeconomic structure of the scientific research system in place today. We talk about the joys and sorrows of being a scientist who has escaped the academy, how to pitch ideas for articles for general audience news publications, intentional and unintentional bad data, and the incentive structures surrounding scientific publication.

My apologies for the delay effect on Stephen's end of the conversation. I like to think that it's because we were using Mr. Bell's original transatlantic cable.

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Pair with Alice Dreger on scientific & political heretics and the boundaries of gender.

Show Notes and Links

Stephen on Twitter

Stephen at The Guardian

• "The High Tech War on Science Fraud"
• "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?"
• Podcasts associated with both of these articles are available through The Guardian site.

The Metaresearch Center at Tillburg University 

Links for Later 6-14-17

1. Using topology to describe "11 dimensional structures" in the brain. Not as exciting as it sounds--they are not physical dimensions, but mathematical ones.
2. Library porn I: touring the libraries of Italy.
3. Library porn II: Thibaud Poirier's photographs of empty libraries. 
4. Mass shooting occurs at GOP baseball practice. Majority Whip Steve Scalise shot.

EP 029 B Alan Wallace

Today, I talk with B. Alan Wallace about his multiple careers as Buddhist contemplative and teacher, physicist and cognitive scientist, writer and translator. We discuss his road to becoming a monk and returning to laity, the meditative practices of Dzogchen, how to tell a good teacher (by the quality of their students), the remarkable career of Dudjom Lingpa, and how Buddhist contemplatives and neuroscientists can collaborate to effect a revolution in our understanding of the mind.

Bio

Dynamic lecturer, progressive scholar, and one of the most prolific writers and translators of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D., continually seeks innovative ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with Western science to advance the study of the mind.

Dr. Wallace, a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, has taught Buddhist theory and meditation worldwide since 1976. Having devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, he went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford.

With his unique background, Alan brings deep experience and applied skills to the challenge of integrating traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world.

Follow-up Q&A

After the interview went live, I received some additional questions from listeners that Dr. Wallace was kind enough to respond to:

1. When talking about Dudjom Lingpa you mentioned that a teacher’s level of realization is hard to determine and that you had to judge by the realization of the students. Wouldn’t that be equally hard to determine?You can tell a lot from the conduct of the students, and of course this applies to teachers as well.
2. What is the best daily practice for a beginner at meditation or someone who can only do a little each day? Shamatha is a good start, then branch out to the four immeasurables and the four applications of mindfulness.
   

Show Notes

Alan Wallace's website

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Dudjom Rinpoche

Gyatrul Rinpoche

Dudjom Lingpa

A Clear Mirror: The Visionary Biography of Dudjom Lingpa

Neurophilosophy

The "hard problem of consciousness"

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EP 019 Luca Turin on the Secrets of Scent and the Scientific Method

Luca Turin is a biophysicist and expert in the sense of smell. He is best known to the scientific community as the proponent of the vibrational theory of olfaction: that smell receptors detect the vibrational frequencies of the molecular bonds of parts of the scent molecule. This theory represents an alternative to the older shape-based theory of smell: that scent molecules bind to specific receptors that conform to the shape of the scent molecule. The debate on this topic is detailed in Turin's The Secret of Scent, and Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent.

He is also the author, with his partner Tania Sanchez, of Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, which provides a sensual and witty look at over 1,000 commercially available perfumes. He also writes perfume criticism in several locations online, including at perfumesilove.com, and is a scent molecule designer and consultant to the industry.
  

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Links and bonus materials

Links for Later 10-20-15

1. Kevin Kelly and Mark Frauenfelder list the Top 50 factual podcasts. We are not on this list. Yet.
2. A very good, foul mouthed rant about the status of brain simulation.
3. The frenzy over the puzzle book Masquerade.
4.  Mr. Robot gets introduced to the UK.

Links for Later 6-11-15

1. Electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve may help migraine, tinnitus, epilepsy, stroke...
2. The role of the default mode network in creativity. Effect of training on the DMN.
3. Did Nancy Pelosi "misread" the Democratic Caucus on trade and the TPP?
4. Brad DeLong misjudged Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman didn't.
5. On the trail of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor, before the kingdoms of life were separate.
6. Proportional map of the world's languages.
7. The stoners who became the US government's source for guns & ammo.

Links for Later 11-2-14

1. Judex: "There has been a bird."
2. "What David Fincher doesn't do"
3. The evolution of Robert Bork's Constitutional and jurisprudential theory. 
4. What is the male equivalent of "distaff"?
5. Underdressed for flying in a Speedo and inflatable ducky.
6. Tim Geithner's uncharitable opinions of everyone else during the crash.
7. Vladimir Putin gives a speech. Club Orlov applauds. Everyone else shrugs.
8. Jeff Hawkins: Why neural networks are not the road to strong AI.
9. Josh Seiden: “When you are writing, you are not a samurai. You are a waterfall or some shit”
10. Keynes was right.
11. Syllabus for an Archives, Libraries & Databases class by Shannon Mattern
12. Alchemical processes represented by birds.
13. Sharp waves organize memory/recall & possibly decision-making as well.
14. Would like to know more about this: "cells from [presumably olfactory bulb] used to regrow man's spinal cord."
15. Better headline: "You have chemoreceptors in every cell of your body. Some of these are also part of your sense of smell."

Links for Later 3-21-14

1. Supertaskers: the ~5% of people who do better when multitasking.
2. Report from the Extreme Memory Tournament.
3. An extremely good interview with Rory Sutherland about behvioral economics, and also the difference between scientists and business people with regard to evidence.

Links for Later 2-27-14

1. Sexy diagrams of glutamate receptors in the central nervous system, featuring stepwise activation by multiple subunits.
2. Hot, hot, hot! Article on ITAR fusion reactor project.
3. Dreamy description of government debt and government assets spooning.
4. Not sexy: GHCQ spied on your Yahoo! video chats, 3-11% of which involved nekkid people of one sort or another.

What the Amygdala Really Does

Maggie Koerth-Baker and Paul Whalen dispel some of the neurobabble and neo-phrenology around the amygdala, everyone's favorite almond shaped nucleus. Even though it reacts to fear, it's not just a "fear center"; it's important in attention, learning and memory, as are the rest of the basal ganglia.

Links for Later 5-9-13

1. The NSA's guide to searching the web.
2. Visualizing 0.5 seconds of high frequency trading.
3. US Dialect Map.
4. Brain boosting drugs.
5. Font guys Hoefler & Frere-Jones.
6. The astonishing life of Sadakichi Hartmann.
7. Free diving and attention deconcentration.
8. Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3, writes funny scripts. You should read them.
9. How to brand a "useless" degree.

Transparent Brains

Kwanghun Chun and members of Karl Deisseroth's lab at Stanford have developed a technique for making preserved brains transparent, so an in-situ 3-D model can be seen. The process, called Clarity, allows for multiple rounds of staining and microscopic examination to occur. More at The New York Times.