"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

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

I do not believe this "standard dogma" (but this is not my point).

We know one such device "supporting subjectivity": a hemisphere. You know, there is some data about hemispherectomy... Do you occasionnally have any reference to how these people feel after the surgery?

Coming back to the experiment you suggest. Can you suggest a test verifying that a particular device supports subjectivity?

For connecting two brain, I mean physical connection. Mice first, of course :) This is very far away.

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

> I do not believe this "standard dogma"

I am quite agnostic on this..

> Do you occasionnally have any reference to how these people feel after the surgery?

Not really, no.. Everyone is so happy to focus on the evidence that we are getting two different persona there, that not much is told about feeling.. (Of course, the interaction is mostly with the "left-brained one".)

Do you have any reference to how they feel?

> Can you suggest a test verifying that a particular device supports subjectivity?

I am afraid, the smallest test is the one I described, when I am also connected to it in such a way as to share subjectivity, and "if my biological brain goes to sleep, the locus of subjectivity would just move there".

I wish there would be something less than that, but verification of subjectivity seems to require first-person observation, so it seems that one needs a coupling, and then one needs to sufficiently suppress the activity of one's brain, by getting sufficiently sleepy, while not losing the coupling, or something like that.

Basically, we are trying to find a way "to look from the inside", and also to make sure that the impressions do not come from our own cortex.

> For connecting two brain, I mean physical connection. Mice first, of course :) This is very far away.

I am sure we can connect mice brains today :-) The quality of connection and whether the results would be interesting -- that I am less certain about :-) (Some of the latest techniques with genetically engineered mice, such as optical control inside the brain, are quite remarkable -- I would even say there are dozens of ways we can physically connect them today; the question is, "are there interesting ways among those?")

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

Not really, no.. Everyone is so happy to focus on the evidence that we are getting two different persona there, that not much is told about feeling.. (Of course, the interaction is mostly with the "left-brained one".)

I mean hemispherectomy, i.e., complete removal of one hemisphere. I wonder whether they feel themselves differently after this surgery (apart from the evident issues with one side of the body).

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

ah, with one hemisphere left.. probably quite horrible at first (given both all the one-side issues, which are especially horrible if the "left hemishpere" is removed, resulting in the loss of language and complete disability, and post-surgical recovery), then they adapt somehow..

even if the "right hemisphere" is removed there is a complete loss of certain functions, e.g. artistic perception must suffer drastically.. this ought to be felt differently..

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

Horrible, but the question is whether they feel THEMSELVES any change of personality apart from the one-side BODY issues. I was surprised that these people sometimes have normal life and even write about it...

Although split-brain patients deny that they are two persons, as far as I understand, so such testimonials are...hm...unreliable...or do they still have ONE person to a certain extent?..

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

If we remove the "left hemisphere", they don't get to write or speak ever again. If we remove the "right hemisphere", and the person was "left-brain oriented", then yes, I can imagine that they would ignore the differences (especially given that the memory of the earlier state is very impaired, so it's difficult for them to compare)..

With the split brain patients we mostly interact with the "left-brained one", the other one cannot speak or understand language, so the interaction is difficult.

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

Anyway, the left-brained person declines that there is someone else there(?). Unfortunately, there are too few investigated cases, and, as far as I understand, none of the patients was a biologist or, at least, a mathematician...

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

Yes, they do not communicate usually.

A contact with someone, who does not have language, is difficult.

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

By connecting two brains I mean a huge number of connections (of the same order as the number of connections between two hemispheres). I do not see how to achieve this at present even with mice: connecting two particular neurons with technical device is difficult and I do not know if biologists are able to force neurons to make new connections with someone else's (and even the same) brain. But who knows...

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

One way is to interfere with the developing mice, and to, essentially, create Siamese twins conjoined at the brain. One could further tune this with various signalling proteins. The animals would be quite handicapped, of course, just from being Siamese twins, and from irregularities in brain development.

Another way is via placing photoreceptors on the central neurons. We can place as many of them as we want these days. The control is not very fine-tuned, though, but it can be remote, and the resulting animals can be more or less normal.

The question is, however, what to do with these animals? What kind of experiment with the coupled animals might be interesting enough to justify the effort?

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that for developing mice (and humans) that does not make real difference if medical issues are resolved. There will be one person from the beginning (well, from the moment when this person can be interrogated). It is more interesting to connect two mature persons.

Photoreceptors --- can we place THAT many?

For animals, I do not see interesting experiments. The only value of these efforts is developing a harmless technique that could be applied to humans... Thus I would not expect this to happen in less than 50 years...

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

> Photoreceptors --- can we place THAT many?

Yes, this is done via genetic engineering. At least the recent talks at MIT were sounding very upbeat. They placed enough to control the animals by turning on small lights inside there skulls.

> It is more interesting to connect two mature persons
>
> The only value of these efforts is developing a harmless technique that could be applied to humans

Then you surely want to do it via an interface to an electronic device, or something like that. "Harmless" first of all implies "reversible". The last thing you want, in this sense, is to have physical synapses between their neurons.

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

> There will be one person from the beginning

Surprisingly, it turns out not to be always the case. It seems that these Siamese twins are sufficiently joined to share each other sensations, but remain separate persons:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210&pagewanted=all

"[...]Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it. [...]"

[edwardahirsch.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. However, here is where the exact amount of connectivity does matter, and probably it is important also which part of the brain is connected. If the amount of communication in each of the two brains is orders-of-magnitude larger that the communication between two brains, the development of two personalities is natural. From what I learned from this article, only low-level sensory signals are transmitted through the channel that the girls share. Is it due to the amount or to the type of the connecting neurons or due to the part of brain where it is connected?..

Since time passed [since our communication] I had also another thought about all this. While natural sources of information (eyes, ears,...) is what we are doing for years, a different type of device (say, external memory or a direct connection to someone else's brain) may be more difficult to handle. Probably genetic evolution is not absolutely necessary; the "cultural" development of concepts around such connections can replace it. However, we may still need several generations to learn how to use and even feel it properly, because proper hormones have to be released, etc.

On the other hand, if two mature humans are connected so strongly that they couldn't distinguish whose memory it is and whose feeling it is, it will almost certainly create fatal madness --- just because we are incapable of handling this in our "culture", no experience, no learning how to handle it from the childhood, etc.

All this makes real experiments even more difficult.