What mechanism causes self-awareness?

Emergence.

How are you defining self-awareness?

oh my god, @Qingu what a link. you may have just solved a lot of issues i had in my mind.. hmm…

You need a meta program—i.e., a program that watches the program and can modify itself.

@ninjacolin, yeah, emergence is pretty awesome. It’s a very simple concept that explains basically everything. But it’s not very intuitive so most people miss it.

I.

There are three books I know of (but not yet read) that propose answers to this question:
Society of Mind
I Am a Strange Loop
On Intelligence

I’m so glad I didn’t miss this question… as I’m studying Thought and Experience Philosophy…

There is also Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained… if we’re defining self-awareness as part of that phenomenon?

I’m definitely in favour of the emergent property business

I would have to say that self-awareness is most likely explained by feedback. The level of feedback in the human brain is pretty large and the ability to self-modify is what allows us to reflect on our state.

I think daloon actually put it pretty well. Qingu is probably right that self-awareness is an emergent phenomena of our complex brain-system, but I think the fundamental facilitator of this is feedback.

@Shuttle128 can you explain to me a little more of what you mean by feedback please?

Feedback is a part of any control system. It is when the final state of the system is fed back into the input of the system. Basically a loop within a control system. In the case of a human, feedback occurs in many ways. There are internal feedback loops in the brain where the current state can be reflected upon. There are also external feedback loops where things you have physically affected affect your state of mind. The latter form leads to an awareness of the self existing within a physical world. The former leads to awareness of the mental thought-producing self.

I think most animals have some self-awareness, usually of the physical kind, but others with more developed brains can most likely attain some mental self-awareness.

,...buuuuuut…. things can return in a loop but that doesn’t necessarily give rise to consciousness does it? I don’t know… like the feedback in a sound system perhaps?

where things you have physically affected affect your state of mind
How does this lead[s] to an awareness of the self existing within a physical world?

In I am a Strange Loop, Hofstader theorizes that the feedback has to do with the brain’s complexity of categorization.

Primitive nervous systems categorize internal and external senses and adjust behavior based on these categories. Like “hot > move towards / cold > move away.” “Hunger-> eat.”

As brains evolve in complexity, so do the number of categories they can form. The categories are like filters.

Somewhere along the line, brains developed a category for their own activity. Consciousness is simply what happens when this happens—your “consciousness” is your brain categorizing your brain’s internal behavior. The metaphor is a mirror looking at a mirror. It is a feedback loop, but obviously more complex than that of a sound system.

Thanks @Qingu

In your comment though you say that in primitive system’s ‘senses’ adjust behaviour based on the categories… but that’s not true is it. Senses… can’t adjust behaviours… only consciousness can… there has to be a system that knows the senses in order to adjust… there has to already be an overseeing ‘eye’ as such to calculate what the next move must be.

At some point in evolution that must have come about…but I’m not convinced at all as yet that the accumulative emergence theory takes us all the way there to the definitive answer…Thinking about it… If it was indeed a scientific emergent phenomena, surely we would have discovered it by now no? We know that when you pile enough grains of sand on a mound they fall… that’s how it works… we know this.. but we don’t know how the mind works to we. Unless we’re being reductionist about it.

Incidentally…has anyone here read Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about her stroke… very insightful in terms of consciousness My Stroke of Insight ?

@lynneblundell, you don’t need consciousness to adjust output based on sensory input. Look at a thermostat.

A thermostat senses the temperature. Its internal mechanisms have two categories—“above threshold temperature” and “below threshold temperature.” If the sense falls into the first category it does nothing. If the sense falls into the second, it turns on the heat… until the sense falls into the first, and then it turns off the heat.

Most bacteria can “sense” and “respond” to external phenomena and even internal phenomena. It’s mechanical, like a thermostat. So do plants. For multicellular animals, though, the machinery of the nervous system has to be significantly more complex to ensure swift and appropriate behavioral responses.

…but does it know what its doing
??? the thermostat that is….and

Are you suggesting that the human brain is analogous to bacteria?

@Qingu Does I Am a Strange Loop ever make anything other than passing reference to advances in neuroscience? Skimming through it, references to Gödel sentences and Russell’s Principia abound, but I don’t see any illustrations of a brain or neurons.

I see two possibilities here:

1. Self-awareness is a process. But that doesn’t make sense to me because any process can be broken down into discrete steps. For example a computer program may have a series of steps like:

READ FILE A INTO X
READ FILE B INTO Y
REPEAT UNTIL EOF A AND EOF B
IF X < Y READ FILE A INTO X
IF X > Y READ FILE B INTO Y
IF X = Y WRITE FILE C FROM X
END

Ignoring the fact that the above program has a serious bug, no matter how complex you make a program, each individual instruction is not self-aware, and there is no rational mechanism that can make the program as-a-whole self-aware no matter how many instructions you pile onto it.

2.) All matter is self-aware at the sub-atomic level. Unfortunately for a rock, it has no sensory organs, no memory chemistry, and no motor functions, so the poor rock is “locked in.” If this is the answer, then the next question is: what mechanism creates the “link” to the matter’s innate self-awareness and the external I-O functions?

@lynneblundell, no, I was saying a thermostat is analogous to bacteria. It is a mechanism that (1) senses and (2) adapts behavior based on what it senses.

“What is senses” is important. It’s a category. Or, to put it another way, a filter—sense goes in, modified behavior goes out.

A nervous system can make a bunch of such categories. Brains, even more. As brains evolve in complexity they get more and more ways of categorizing stuff—both outside the body and inside the body.

What I am suggesting, based on Hofstader’s book, that consciousness is simply what happens when the brain starts to categorize/filter its own activity.

@hiphiphopflipflapflop, there isn’t much neuroscience in the book and I am told that it mangles psychology. It is primarily a math book. The basic point is that the way conscious arises is a very good parallel to the concept of a “strange loop” in mathematics. It spends 70 pages explaining the most famous example of a strange loop, Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It may sound out there but it’s actually very illuminating and convincing.

@HungryGuy, you are correct, there is no line of code that corresponds to consciousness. This is because it’s an emergent phenomenon.

Here’s a parallel: termite mounds. These are vast, complicated structures. Some of them even have air conditioning. The termites build them, but they have no idea how or why. There are no termite engineers that oversee the project or plan the number of passageways or the position of the air vents. They operate—like the lines of code in your computer program—on a very simple behavioral basis. No termites have genes with programmed instincts about the structure of the whole mound. But all of their behavior combined, over time, results in a higher level structure. What’s more, the structure of the mound feeds back down to the termites and dictates to some extent how they behave on an individual level.

Another example: the stock market. The stock market has a quantifiable behavior and structure. It goes up and down by a certain number of points. It seems to react to external events. But the stock market doesn’t exist on its own—it emerges from the combined behavior of the mass of individual traders. It is the “higher level” structure and the traders are your lines of code, the “lower level structure.” But it’s also a feedback cycle—because the stock market, the higher level structure, ends up influencing the behavior of the lower level actors that generate it!

Consciousness is the same way. There is no collection of neurons that can be identified as “consciousness.” It emerges from the behavior of the brain as a whole. And part of that involves feeding back down and influencing the parts of the brain from which it emerges. A “strange loop.”

A belated GQ from me. I’m surprised this one rates only two so far. This is a classical philosophical question with the bonus that many scientists think it falls into the domain of science (i.e. there is some hope of arriving at a convincing theory rather than forever going around in circles).