neuroscience – Page 2 – Yohan J. John, PhD

Neural correlates of consciousness – how exactly can we find them?

By Yohan August 13, 2020Axis Praxis, neurologism

This is a slightly edited version of an answer I wrote on Quora: What is the best way to understand consciousness?

File:Digesting Duck.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

This emoticon captures my attitude towards questions about consciousness:

¯\(°_o)/¯

Consciousness seems to be invisible to scientific methods. The only way to incorporate consciousness into science is to change the definition of science so it includes subjective experience. I am not really comfortable with doing this, because it waters down science to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from introspective philosophy. Science is useful because of what makes it different from philosophy: it makes predictions that can be tested objectively. Truly subjective experiences seem to be ruled out by definition.

My favorite way to think about consciousness is inspired by Indian philosophy, though the general idea crops up all over the place:

Consciousness is not a phenomenon: it is the precondition for the appearance of phenomena. The mind is not a thing to be observed, but the medium by which things are observed.

This is emphatically not a scientific statement, but that’s okay: science is only one of many ways to look at the universe.

So let’s examine the scientific approach to consciousness in detail!

Are Selves Illusory? Emergent? Ubiquitous?

By Yohan July 16, 2020Axis Praxis, neurologism5 Comments

I was asked this question on Quora recently:

Is the self an illusion or an emergent phenomenon? I’ve read people who use neuroscience to argue for one, the other, or both simultaneously.

Here’s how I responded.

No one knows what the self is. Least of all my fellow neuroscientists! 😉

Personally, I think the idea that the self is an illusion is meaningless. I suspect it’s just a (highly misleading) shorthand for saying that people’s notions of a permanent, unchanging self are incorrect. In other words, it means that the self is not an eternal soul with permanent, intrinsic, essential properties. Instead it is a process that changes on various timescales.

Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so Hard? Intentionality.

By Yohan June 24, 2020Axis Praxis, neurologism1 Comment

Someone I know sent me some material related to their research on consciousness, asking for some feedback. What follows is an edited version of what I wrote to them.

Solving the easy problem of consciousness — by explaining the causes and neural correlates of particular conscious experiences — is challenging but at least conceivable. This is not so for any claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness — it is going to evoke skepticism from both scientists and philosophers. I’m one of the many neuroscientists that do not think the hard problem is solvable — to us it is not clear that phenomenal consciousness is a scientifically tractable phenomenon in the first place.

On the neuroscience of creativity

By Yohan February 19, 2020neurologism

I was asked the following question on Quora recently:

What part of the brain is responsible for linear thinking? What part of the brain is responsible for creativity?

Thinking [1] [2] is very poorly understood, but broadly speaking in seems to involve the prefrontal cortex (PFC), with a special role for the dorsolateral PFC. Other important areas include the hippocampus and parietal cortex. Ultimately, thinking involves many brain regions, and cannot be localized to one place. Thinking is a distributed process that can incorporate many different parts of the brain. And the specific content of the thoughts will influence which brain areas are involved. If you are thinking about images, visual areas will be involved. If you are thinking about movement, motor areas will be involved.

In my opinion, the distinction between “linear” and “creative” thinking is somewhat vague. At this point, the most important thing to note is that the idea that the “left brain is rational/logical and the right brain is creative/artistic/emotional” is totally wrong [3] . Both hemispheres contribute to logic as well as creativity. Moreover, the use of logic can itself be a creative activity.

Is thinking conscious or unconscious?

By Yohan January 28, 2020neurologism

Sherlock Holmes smokes his pipe reclining on cushions and wearing a roomy overcoat There are two ways to define thinking: each leads to a different answer to the question of whether thinking is conscious or not.

Thinking as a subjective experience. If someone asks you what you are thinking about, you can introspect, and describe your thought process. You can also say that you weren’t really thinking at all.
Thinking as the cause of ideas and thoughts. If you discover a thought, then you can infer that the process that led up to the thought was a form of thinking, even if there was no subjective experience associated with the process.

We can test our preference for definition 1 or definition 2 by considering an example.

Sherlock Holmes was a good chemist. When he found himself stuck while attempting to solve a mystery, he would sometimes distract himself by doing a chemistry experiment. At the end of such an experiment, he often found that a solution simply popped into his head.

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