"Hybrid Consciousness": an object for thought experiments

[anhinga_anhinga]

Imagine a hypothetical situation where a brain and an artificial device are coupled in such a way that a single consciousness (a single subjective reality) is associated with them. Let's call this a "hybrid consciousness" (perhaps, a better name can be suggested for this).

One can do various interesting thought experiments with such an object. The contexts where this might be useful include the abstract topics such as "Hard Problem", technological singularity, or uploading, and more practical topics, for example, something like "if I could change a way I am [reading mathematical papers/writing computer code/...], how would I want to do that, and what would I want to feel in the process of doing that".

1) In context of the "Hard Problem", I think the ability to achieve a situation like this would be the best test of our understanding of the "Hard Problem" (and would make the subjective realm much more amenable to tests and experiments).

Here we must assume that a sufficiently non-trivial part of a given subjective personality is associated with the artificial device (and, for example, when the body gets sleepy, we are likely to observe the shift of the subjective towards what is mostly running on the artificial substrate; and if the coupling remains during sleep, we might get some version of lucid dreams as part of the overall activity).

2) In context of mind uploading, this seems to provide a much saner approach that what people usually discuss; an example of an approach along these lines is here:

http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Uploading/gupload.html

3) In more practical contexts, the question what would I want to feel in the process of doing [A/B/C/writing computer code/reading mathematical papers/...] makes sense on its own and might be useful to consider.

4) We can also ignore the fact that we don't know whether one can use an ordinary computer as a device coupled in this way to a human brain, and even if the answer is positive, that we don't know what would it take to achieve a coupling like this (both depend on what the answer to the "Hard Problem" really is), and ignoring our lack of knowledge here we can try to meditate on how we might want to program the computer to do this or that, if such-and-such layer of the processing were conscious. (Ignore the fact that without further progress on the "Hard Problem" we don't know how to distinguish between conscious and unconscious processing; and decide that we have some freedom is designating some views into the running system as conscious.)

5) One also has some freedom to run things slower or faster in the artificial device, although if one wants to preserve coupling with the biological there are probably some constraints. When I start to think/introspect about accelerating some parts of the train of conscious thought relative to other parts, what I mostly feel is cognitive dissonance, so I am not sure whether this direction of thinking is fruitful (в этом месте, оно несколько сносит крышу).

I am not sure how much of the above makes sense, but I was thinking about this topic during the previous week and have not lost interest, so I decided to share this.

Comments

[cema.livejournal.com]

It makes sense, but is very vague so far.

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

I do not see any importance of such experiments to the hard problem (so far). Will I feel differently if I lose eyes? Yes, to a certain extent. What could feel someone who was initially blind and got vision capabilities as an adult? I believe his subjective reality will change a lot, but still not drastically (it is interesting whether such cases exist, is anything published about it?). I even believe that my experiences change when my consciousness is influenced by receiving an enormous amount of information as a result of a close contact with someone else. I do not see why adding an electronic device will change it more than getting a (human) eye.

A more interesting experiment is to connect two brains.

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

> I do not see any importance of such experiments to the hard problem (so far).

The "standard dogma" believes that, for example, retina is completely unconscious, just like photons coming from a lamp. Basically, that it is a part of the unconscious "machine" feeding signals into the central system, which is associated with the "subjective". Of course, when we talk about the "hard problem", we should not postulate a priori that the "standard dogma" is correct.

But it is quite likely that my retina is similar to the outside lamp in this sense; namely that if I take strong central sedative, but keep retina stimulated, I'll still go to sleep and feel approximately the same as if I go to sleep in a brightly lit room.

The external device should be sufficiently complicated to "support subjectivity", so that, for example, if my biological brain goes to sleep, the locus of subjectivity would just move there, unlike the example in the previous paragraph. Our ability to create something like that tests our understanding of the hard problem quite a bit.

So the difference is that we would like to connect to a device, which we think is a carrier of subjectivity, *and* to share this subjectivity (just the fact of connection does not mean that the subjectivity is shared).

And, of course, to have a device which is a carrier of subjectivity, but which can be tweaked in a controllable manner (because it is an artifical device, and not a messy thing, like a brain) would allow for various interesting experiments.



> A more interesting experiment is to connect two brains.

We do have plenty of instances, when people report the transient states of shared consciousness. The problem is how to verify the status of such reports, for example, how to distinguish between illusion and reality here.

We can try to further assist this with technology, but the problems of figuring out whether the effect is real would remain. So I doubt it would be easy to shed any light onto hard problem via this route (although these are interesting experiments on their own).

(Another problem is, to get any meaningful subjective reports at least one of the subjects must be human; and with one brain involved I can imagine taking a risk and being that subject myself, simply because I am curious enough to want to look at all this from the "inside"; with two brains it might be much more tricky [and I might be much more reluctant to be one of them, for a number of reasons]. This is if we are talking about this as a real experiment; as a thought experiment it probably would not yield much because of those reports of shared consciousness, which allow us to imagine that the "strong connection" exists sometimes even without us doing anything technological to further enhance it.)