I think it was in the first chapters of the book Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991) where I first heard about this idea. Basically, some authors argue that the brain is a machine designed to generate hallucinations or illusions. Perception is not only driven by bottom-up flow, that is, exclusively by senses. On the contrary, there is a strong top-down component that is driven by expectations (and is in charge of verifying hypotheses). Obviously, bottom-up and top-down flows have to be combined and gracefully integrated. The synthesis of consciousness could be the combination of these two major processes: hypothesis generation and hypothesis confirmation.
I've read your brief description of the idea, but it does not make sense to me. The reason it does not make sense is that I am able to see my thoughts and can tell from what I see that they are not a hallucination. The seeing of my thoughts may be like a hallucination, but the thoughts themselves are not. (It is God that enables me to see my thoughts, in case you were wondering).
Yours Sincerely, Christopher Jenyns, B. A.
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Raúl
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Re:Consciousness as Hallucination - 2007/07/02 19:32Hi Christopher, I think the idea of describing consciousness as an hallucination comes from the way we perceive and the fact that many times our senses tell us lies. The underlying claim is that we are actually unable to see real world as it is. We are unable to perceive reality. The use of senses in order to perceive reality is an impossible task, as the use of the sensory mechanisms involve the application of a filter that alter the perceived reality. Anyway, the stronger bias is not in the senses but in our brain. The brain is designed to see what it needs to see for survival, not to see reality. I think that is the reason why Dennett says that consciousness is like an hallucination.
Another interesting and related topic is dreaming. Dreams are also hallucinations, and the only different between dreaming hallucinations and awake hallucinations is that the latter are adaptive to the environment.
I agree with you that thoughts themselves are not hallucinations. The hallucination-like process is the seeing of the thoughts as you say, i.e. conscious experience. What enable us to see our thoughts? I don’t think we have a plausible scientific answer yet. From a religious point of view, consciousness is undoubtedly a key aspect of spirituality. But, do you think there is room for a scientific account for it?Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Consciousness as Hallucination - 2007/07/04 21:14I think that I understand the theory a bit better now. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the answers to my questions on the other post about this theory are something like: What do you mean by saying that consciousness is a hallucination? You mean that the "universe" which the conscious mind builds itself up from and defines itself with is a sort of "delusion" due to the way in which our senses lie to us. There is an actual universe, one which the senses and thoughts are strongly correlated to, yet the perceptions themselves are only approximations and illusions of the true reality. So, in a way, the thoughts are of a nonexistent thing and have a nonexistent effect - making it a hallucination. Along with the senses deceiving us, we understand, and thus think, about only those things we are either used to or evolutionarily adapted to thinking about. Though the raw data from our cornea has its own inaccuracies and limitations, the true difficulty lies with the brain itself. We see not just the pixels of light and color, but we also see and (mis)judge depth, we see separate and non-unified objects instead of the uniform sheet of light we really are observing, we see a complete field of view, though our eyes are constantly darting around. The same holds true for all of the other senses as well, along with thoughts in of themselves. Is it hallucinating itself? It is, in a sense, hallucinating itself and everything else. Although it is, in one way, real - it thinks, therefore it is - it is not really the sort of entity it hallucinates itself to be. What sort of reality does it have, then? The thoughts themselves have a true reality, but all else that is perceived is only real in the way patterns are "real", computations are "real", and illusions are "real".
Is that the essential idea of the theory? I have the feeling that I am still missing a key concept, but I cannot figure out what I am overlooking.
By the way, you say that the only different between dreaming hallucinations and awake hallucinations is that the latter are adaptive to the environment.. I know that this is more of metaphysics, but how is one to judge that dreams don't adapt to the environment, simply a different one than that we normally perceive? In a theory like this one, where it is so deeply entrenched in metaphysics, both the problems of consciousness and the problems of metaphysics abound, posing many challenges to orthodox belief. What metaphysical/epistemological scheme do you think best suits this theory?
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Raúl
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Re:Consciousness as Hallucination - 2007/07/06 12:16I think you have described the theory quite well. To be honest, I don't think I can develop it further in a rigorous way. I am not an expert in metaphysics… However, from a mere evolutive point of view, it seems to make sense. As you say, we only see (and we only think about) those things that are evolutionarily adapted. This raises the following question:
Is thinking about consciousness (what we are doing here) an evolutionarily adapted process?
The immediate answer is no, as there is no reason why this process should mean an advantage for survival. Then, we have to look at the origin of consciousness and these kinds of thoughts (let’s say high order thoughts – i.e. thoughts about thoughts) to find out why and how they appeared on earth. One hypothesis is that the higher form of consciousness that humans have is actually not required for survival. That is the reason why other animals don’t have it, they just don’t need it. But, why human need it? Or we just didn’t need it for survival but it appeared as a side effect.
Well, some authors establish a causal link between society and consciousness. The arousal of complex social interactions could have been the seed of consciousness. Having consciousness is indeed an advantage if you are part of a complex society. At least, you need to be able to have some empathy. Being able to have a model of other’s mind (inter-subjectivity) allowed us to develop social strategies. I think this is the root of the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis (see [1]).
About what you say that dreaming hallucinations are also adaptive. I completely agree. I would say that awaking hallucination is adaptive to both external and internal environment, while dreaming hallucinations or delusions are much more focused on internal environment, i.e. our inner beliefs and desires.
The issue of reality is quite controversial for me. I think it depends of what you consider reality. In the domain of consciousness studies I think the key point is in the fact that qualia (subjective experience) cannot be observed by others. Therefore, its reality cannot be proved. That is not to say that qualia are not real, but from a scientific point of view it is undoubtedly a great challenge. How could you scientifically deal with something that cannot be objectively observed? As a solution for this, Dennett proposes the heterophenomenology as a tool for the scientific study of consciousness. I believe that other authors, like Thomas Methinger propose other approaches…
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Raúl
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Re:Consciousness as Hallucination - 2007/07/06 12:21As per the issue raised by Christopher, there is indeed a relationship between God and both the study of consciousness and machine consciousness. About the latter, have a look to the ideas proposed by Anne Foerst [1].
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Raúl
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Re:Consciousness as Hallucination - 2007/07/09 19:34Another related topic is the illusion of being in charge, i.e. the illusion of agency.
Libet’s experiments show that [1]:
[…] neural activity that begins an action starts up around a third of second before the agent’s conscious decision to act.” […]
Usually, neuroscientists have interpreted this as the illusion of being in charge. Dennett supports that this is a mistaken view. Instead, a conscious agent must be seen as a continuum, where there is no single moment of decision.
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Plato Demosthenes
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Re:Consciousness as Hallucination - 2007/07/09 23:45As I commented on the link you gave, the methods used seem a bit flawed. Could you give a link to their actual paper? The illusion of agency seems to be sub-illusion of the more general reality illusion. However, it seems that Dennet makes a stronger point, that decision making is an approximate continuum. Perhaps fuzzy logic/number theory could come in use with a neuronal description of this continuum?
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I am afraid I don’t know the details about the Libet’s experiments. According to [2], I think the scientists actually don’t know what the neural firing which causes the decision is. What they know is the neural firing that corresponds to an action, and they see this firing pattern around 300 ms before the subject has any conscious decision about the action. As I have understood it, the scientists calculate the time of conscious decision by the patient report (not by seeing it in the brain imaging). This is an excerpt from [2]:
[…] the neural activity that begins an action starts up around a third of second before the agent’s conscious decision to act. Neuroscientists have frequently interpreted this as showing that decisions are somehow illusions: Consciousness is “out of the loop”. They maintain that the action is originally precipitated in some part of the brain , and off fly the signals to muscle, pausing en route to tell you, the conscious agent, what is going on (but like all good officials letting you, the bumbling president, maintain the illusion that you started it all). […]
[2] Simon Blackburn. “Who’s in Charge”. American Scientist, Volume 91. 2003.Raúl Arrabales Moreno. conscious-robots.com/raul
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