Week 7 | Neuroscience + Art

"What is Consciousness - Michael S. A. Graziano". YouTube, uploaded by TED-ed. 11 Feb. 2019 https://youtu.be/MASBIB7zPo4

The problem of consciousness is widely known to be one of the hardest, if not impossible, problem of science and philosophy for humanity to solve. That we are even able to ponder this problem with sufficient self-awareness is astonishing, given the improbability of the evolution of intelligent life in the visible universe. Consciousness, on one hand, is something very personal and dear to us: our experiences that make up our memory and our whole life, including the anticipated or dreaded future, including the smell of coffee, the warmth of sunlight, the fuzzy feeling of love. On the other hand, it leads to questions about the relation between mind and matter, between reality and consciousness: what leads to consciousness? Can silicon chips be conscious? Are we in a simulation? Am I the only consciousness dreaming the whole world? Is reality just consciousness, whether of a single individual or multiple combined?

"How do you explain consciousness | David Chalmers". YouTube, uploaded by TED. 14 Jul. 2014 https://youtu.be/uhRhtFFhNzQ

We are fascinated with our brains because they seem to be where our minds are, and we care about our minds because minds are us, with our quirks, memories, aspirations, and all the things that life would be meaningless without. If we are not just brains in vats or computer programs in a simulation, we are each blessed with conscious experience from birth. And yet, it is impossible to know for sure that the person I am talking to is conscious. Are our cats and dogs conscious? What is it like to be them? What is it like to be a bat? 

Anker, Suzanne. "MRI Butterfly (1)". http://suzanneanker.com/artwork/?wppa-album=16&wppa-photo=125&wppa-occur=1


Even with state-of-the-art neuroimaging technologies and supercomputer simulations, we are nowhere near understanding the nature of consciousness and the mind. Nor can we recreate a computer version of a human mind with a black box program. Even if art cannot directly answer our burning questions about consciousness and the brain, "art leaves questions suspended, and provokes thoughts and imagination"(Frazzetto and Anker 2009), which seems good enough for us conscious beings.



Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. “Neuroculture.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 11, 2009, pp. 815–821., https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2736.

Graziano, Michael S. Consciousness and the Social Brain. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Hoffman, Donald. Case against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Koch, Christof. Consciousness Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. The MIT Press, 2017.

Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 1974, p. 435., https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914.

Noë Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Hill & Wang, 2010.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 8 | NanoTech + Art

Image
  "A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie".  YouTube , uploaded by IBM. 30 Apr. 2013 https://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0 Nanoscience indeed gives us a shift in our perception of reality, when we can visualize individual atoms whose sizes are hard to even grasp.  Even though Jim  Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna characterized the shift as "from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity" (Gimzewski and Vesna 1), focusing on the mode of perception, I would like to focus on the significance of the shift in the content of perception, or more precisely the interpreted content of perception since while our perception changed over time reality stayed the same.  “Scanning Tunneling Microscope.”  IBM100 - Scanning Tunneling Microscope , https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/microscope/. Much like inhabitants of Flatland, for majority of human history, we could only see the surface of things at only our particular arbitrary human scale...
Read more

Week 4 | MedTech + Art

Image
When we are appreciating art, that experience unfolds in our brains. Brain as we understand now is where all the interesting and exciting things happen: our feelings, imagination, intelligence, creativity, and consciousness all reside in the brain. It is impossible to imagine what kind of interesting life a brainless zombie would lead. If eventually what we care about are the ideas and feelings that we entertain and that entertain us, then it is safe to say that the brain is the most important organ when it comes to art. We create and seek art to expand our minds through novel experiences. Hence, I can imagine the future where we modify our brains with brain computer interface technology to augment our conscious experience. With companies like Neuralink, we may be closer to that future than we expected.  "Upgrade Trailer #1 (2018) | Movieclips Trailers".  YouTube , uploaded by Movieclips Trailers. 3 Apr. 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36PDeN9NRZ0.  "The Science Beh...
Read more

Week 2 | Math + Art

Image
Turing Machine from  Wikimedia Commons Ideas are the currency and art of mathematics. In deep, novel, beautiful ideas lies the heart of mathematics. Like physical technologies, those ideas then combine to produce even more deep and beautiful ideas that surprise and inspire us. For instance, Alan Turing distilled the idea of computation from human "computers" back in the day, scribbling on papers and carrying digits, into abstract Turing machines that form the foundation of computer science, giving birth to the modern electronic computers and providing theoretical underpinnings for algorithms that run on those computers. Not only that, Turing machines further give rise to the Halting Problem, the problem of determining whether a computer program stops and successfully returns a result or never stops and runs endlessly like a broken record without returning a result, and the Halting Problem then implies Gödel Incompleteness Theorem, which tells us that we cannot prove that a ma...
Read more