What are current neuronal explanations and models of 'consciousness'?

models-of-consciousnesses

Consciousness is currently not completely understood through conventional mathematics - nor by any other mainstream scientific approach, for that matter. 

Conventional neuroscience teaches that consciousness is a by-product which arises out of biochemical and electromagnetic activity in the brain. New research indicates the opposite is true - electromagnetic and biochemical activity in the brain is an incidental by-product which arises out of consciousness. This idea represents a cardinal paradigm shift, and a turning point in the history of neuroscience.


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**Giulio Tononi**

**[An Integrated Theory of the consciousness][2]**

Interestingly, the new approach to consciousness has come from outside the physics community, principally from neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Over the past few years, the theory has become increasingly influential; it has even been championed by the eminent neuroscientist Christof Koch, a Caltech professor and the chief science officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

IIT proposes that consciousness arises as a property of a physical system, its 'integrated information'. Integrated information is defined in such a way that it can be measured and quantified using mathematical equations. This definition deviates markedly from standard definitions of [Consciousness][3].

In 2008, Tononi proposed that a system demonstrating consciousness must have two specific traits (axiomatic pillars). First, the system must be able to store and process large amounts of information. In other words consciousness is essentially a phenomenon of information.

And second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts. That reflects the experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that cannot be decomposed into separate components.

The suggestion is that the amount of consciousness an entity has is equal to the amount of integrated information it can process. From this premise, an equation is developed to define and quantify the amount of integrated information present, and the suggestion is that this quantity directly defines the level of consciousness of the information processor.

There are several reasons to take Tononi’s ideas about phi seriously. Unlike many other theories of consciousness, his gives scientists and philosophers a quantitative way of grappling with the possibility that creatures like mice and cats might have some degree of awareness (though less than humans). The theory also helps explain why certain relatively complicated neural structures don’t seem critical for consciousness. For example, the cerebellum, which encodes information about motor movements, contains a massive number of neurons, but doesn’t appear to integrate the diverse range of internal states that the prefrontal cortex does.

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**Max Tegmark**

Today, Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart. [The latest breakthrough in this new field][1], published by Max Tegmark, postulates that consciousness is actually a state of matter. “Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says. With this new model, Tegmark says that consciousness can be described in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory, allowing us to scientifically tackle murky topics such as self awareness, and why we perceive the world in classical three-dimensional terms, rather than the infinite number of objective realities offered up by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Finally, Tegmark uses this new way of thinking about consciousness as a lens through which to study one of the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics known as the quantum factorisation problem.

This arises because quantum mechanics describes the entire universe using three mathematical entities: an object known as a Hamiltonian that describes the total energy of the system; a density matrix that describes the relationship between all the quantum states in the system; and Schrodinger’s equation which describes how these things change with time.

What’s fascinating about his approach is that it is formulated using the language of quantum mechanics in a way that allows detailed scientific reasoning. And as a result it throws up all kinds of new problems that physicists will want to dissect in more detail.

From neurological point of view, Tegmark points out that any information stored in a special network known as a Hopfield neural net automatically has this error-correcting facility. However, he calculates that a Hopfield net about the size of the human brain with 10^11 neurons, can only store 37 bits of integrated information.

“This leaves us with an integration paradox: why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly larger than 37 bits?” asks Tegmark.

To summarize, based on this model - the consciousness is a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. This substance can not only store and retrieve data, but it’s also indivisible and unified. A new way of thinking about consciousness is sweeping through science like wildfire. Now physicists are using it to formulate the problem of consciousness in concrete mathematical terms for the first time.

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Both of these traits can be specified mathematically allowing physicists like Tegmark to reason about them for the first time. He begins by outlining the basic properties that a conscious system must have.

Given that it is a phenomenon of information, a conscious system must be able to store in a memory and retrieve it efficiently. It must also be able to to process this data, like a computer but one that is much more flexible and powerful than the silicon-based devices we are familiar with.




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**Summary**

There’s a quiet revolution underway in theoretical physics. For as long as the discipline has existed, physicists have been reluctant to discuss consciousness, considering it a topic for quacks and charlatans.

That’s finally beginning to change thanks to a fundamentally new way of thinking about consciousness that is spreading like wildfire through the theoretical physics community. And while the problem of consciousness is far from being solved, it is finally being formulated mathematically as a set of problems that researchers can understand, explore and discuss.



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See also:

 - [Consciousness as a State of Matter by Max Tegmark at Dept. of Physics & MIT Kavli Institute][4]
 - [Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas][5]
 - Video: Consciousness and the Brain, Giulio Tononi
 - [Video: Consciousness is a Mathematical Pattern: physicist Max Tegmark at TEDxCambridge][6]
 - [Future Life Institute][7] mentioned by the scientist Stephen Hawking in an [article][8] on Artificial Intelligence in the International Business Times.


  [1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
  [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
  [4]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
  [5]: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d
  [6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzCvlFRISIM
  [7]: http://www.futurelives.org/
  [8]: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/stephen-hawking-artificial-intelligence-potentially-worst-thing-happen-humanity-1447016