I don't think it's anything other than electric activity, but it's clearly not "some electrical signal". It's the totality of them. They are many, and complicated. And they seem to be required for consciousness. Doubt there's any proven conscious state in a human, lacking electrical activity in the brain.

Scalp-recorded EEG does not measure action potentials, it can only measure the graded potentials of basically one type of neuron (pyramidal cells) in the cortex, which is a really tiny percentage of both neurons and electrical activity in the brain. Additionally, there is also the various roles neurotransmitters play in the brain, etc., and glial cells seem to also play an important role. So, it’s definitely not the case that there aren’t any gaps that need new science, and even if there weren’t, it’s a pretty big stretch from there to decoding all brain activity solely through the electrical component.

It seems neatly organized to say "that we can explain all brain activity" and yet not necessarily bound exactly what is "brain activity." I think prior to recent research [1] people would have concluded that memory was solely the domain of the brain. But that sense/setting/environment would allow Clive Wearing to circumvent amnesia to access skills otherwise unavailable to his conscious mind [2] should raise questions of that understanding.

[1] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/novemb...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing

No, none of this is settled. We cannot adequately explain brain function with current science.

There have been studies this year implying that some brain functions rely on quantum interactions.

> We know that the brain is a structure that works through electrochemical reactions. Synapses transmit signals sent by axons to neurons. We can test this. We can measure it. There's nothing else going on that we can describe using known science

But what we can describe using known science doesn't describe the system. That doesn't mean the vacuum is voodoo. It's just a strong hint something more is going on. (Like the photoelectric effect.)

We know more about dark energy and matter than the dark essence that separates our leading electrochemical models from consciousness.

Can we? We can only see whatever we can measure with the tools we currently have, which are based on the knowledge we currently have. Who's to say there isn't something out there we haven't discovered yet? There's more than enough we still don't understand in many domains of science

I think there is new science we need first. The brain very likely uses quantum processes. We don't understand quantum mechanics yet.

> surgeons and researchers have shown that electrical stimulation of certain brain regions, can induce "perception" during procedures

I can carefully drop liquid reactants on a storage medium and induce nontrivial and reproducible changes in any computer reading it. That doesn't tell me how digital storage works, it just says I'm proximate to the process.

It goes far beyond smells, in ways I find deeply unsettling

We can induce religious experience, see "The God Helmet"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

or deep depression & suicidal thoughts

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199905133401905

Well, if you are making the assertion, which you implicitly seem to be, you must first define thought. Is a word == thought? And of correlations, we all know the adage about correlation and causation. Not that I would make the counter argument, that thought is not encoded by electrical signals, but I would bet you aren’t totally correct. Do you think there will be no future paradigm shifts?

That is such a great analogy!

Another I heard is that measuring EEG is like standing outside a stadium during a match and listening to the roar of the crowd.

Reading thoughts through EEG is like standing outside the stadium, listening for the roar of the crowd, and based on what you hear, knowing what the umpire's mother-in-law had for breakfast.

You can't build a universal mind-reading device that doesn't require calibration.

> Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions.

There have been enough studies about this and the result is mostly the same: it's difficult to nearly impossible to reliable decode neural recordings that differ from the distribution of neural recordings that the decoder was trained on. There are a lot of reasons why this happens, electrical activity being insufficient is not one of them.

I think you misunderstood the person you're responding to. They did not say there was some higher force beyond the physical pieces.

What they're saying is that the brain is really really complicated and our understanding of biology is far too rudimentary right now to be saying "yes, absolutely, 100% sure that we know the nature of consciousness from this one measurement of one type of signal".

* Neurons are very complex and all have unique mutations from one another

* Hundreds of other types of cells in the brain interact with them and each other in ways we don't understand

* The various other parts of the body chemically interact with the brain in ways we don't understand yet, like the gut microbiome

Trying to flatten all of consciousness to one measurement is just not sufficient. It's like trying to simulate the entire planet as a perfect sphere of uniform density. That works OK for some things but falls apart for more complex questions.

> Neocortical networks, with thalamic and hippocampal system integrations, are sufficient to explain the entirety of human experience, in principle.

Where did you get that? That's not an established scientific theorem, it's a philosophical stance (strong physicalist functionalism) expressed as if it were empirical fact. We cannot simulate a full human brain at the correct level of detail, record every spike and synaptic change in a living human brain and we do not have a theory that predicts which neural organizations are conscious just from first principles of physics and network topology.

> We can induce emotions, sights, sounds, smells, memories, moods, pleasure, pain, and anything you can experience through targeted stimulation of neurons in the brain

That shows dependence of experience on brain activity but dependence is not the same thing as reduction or explanation. We know certain neural patterns correlate with pain, color vision, memories, etc. we can causally influence experience by interacting with the brain.

But why any of this electrical/chemical stuff is accompanied by subjective experience instead of just being a complex zombie machine? The ability to toggle experiences by toggling neurons shows connection and that's it, it doesn't explain anything.

> We've got a good enough handle on physics to know that it's not some weird quantum thing, it's not picking up radio signals from some other dimension, and it's not some sort of spirit or mystical phlogiston.

We do have a good handle on how non conscious physical systems behave (engines, circuits, planets, whatever) But we don't have any widely accepted physical theory that derives subjective experience from physical laws. We don't know which physical/computational structures (if any) are sufficient and necessary for consciousness.

You are assuming without any evidence that current physics + it's "all computation" already gives a complete ontology of mind. So what is the consciousness? define it with physics, show me equations, you can't.

> It's a computer, in the sense that anything that processes information is a computer. It's not much like silicon chips or the synthetic computers we build, as far as specific implementation details go.

We design transformer architectures, we set the training objectives, we can inspect every weight and activation of a LLM. Yet even with all that access, tens of thousands of ML PhDs,years of work and we still don't fully understand why these models generalize the way they do, why they develop certain internal representations and how exactly particular concepts are encoded and combined.

If we struggle to interpret a ~10^11 parameter transformer whose every bit we can log and replay, it's a REAL hubris to act like we've basically got a 10^14-10^15 synapse constantly rewiring, developmentally shaped biological network to the point of confidently saying "we know there's nothing more to mind than this, case closed lol".

Our ability to observe and manipulate the brain is currently far weaker than our ability to inspect artificial nets and even those are not truly understood at a deep mechanistic concept level explanatory sense.

> Your mind is the state of your brain as it processes information.

Ok but then you have a problem, if anything that processes information is a computer, and mind is "just computation" then which computations are conscious?

Is my laptop conscious when it runs a big simulation? Is a weather model conscious? Are all supercomputers conscious by default just because they flip bits at scale?

If you say yes, you've gone to an extreme pancomputationalism that most people (including most physicalists) find extremely implausible.

If you say no, then you owe a non hand wavy criterion, what's the principled difference, in purely physical/computational terms between a conscious system (human brain) and a non conscious but still massively computational system (weather simulation, supercomputer cluster)? That criterion is exactly the kind of thing we don't have yet.

So saying "it’s just computation" without specifying which computations and why they give rise to a first person point of view leaves the fundamental question unanswered.

And one more thing your gasoline analogy is misleading, combustion never presented a "hard problem of combustion" in the sense of a first person, irreducible qualitative aspect. People had wrong physical theories, but once chemistry was in place, everything was observable from the outside.

Consciousness is different, you can know all the physical facts about a brain state and still not obviously see why it should feel like anything at all from the inside.

That's why even hardcore physicalist philosophers talk about the "explanatory gap". Whether or not you think it's ultimately bridgeable, it's not honest to say the gap is already closed and the scientific explanation is "sufficient".

There’s nothing in known physics that explains consciousness. I agree about the rest, but consciousness not only defies explanation by known physics, it’s so far beyond what’s known that there isn’t even any concept of what it could be. We barely have the ability to describe it, let alone explain it.

Also "Common People," first episode in season 7 of Black Mirror. One word: ads [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

It might be able to react fast enough to prevent the horror of the wrongthink reaching twitter.

> The patients could accurately indicate whether an object was present in the left visual field and pinpoint its location, even when they responded with the right hand or verbally. This despite the fact that their cerebral hemispheres can hardly communicate with each other and do so at perhaps 1 bit per second

1 bit per second and we are passing complex information about location in 3d space?

Wow this is fascinating, and gets rid of one of my eldritch memetic horrors. Thanks for sharing, I’m going to submit it as its own post as well!

That's a great paper, but I don't think it calls into question anything about post-hoc rationalizations, and it might actually put that idea on more solid ground.

There are a lot of things I feel that end up not being "real," like embarrassment, a failure. and anxiety. Why should free will not be like any of those?

Hm, but maybe you can predict the feeling before you can predict the action. Checkmate atheists :)

(for the record I am also a compatibilist)

I don't see why having some latency in the path of free will makes it no longer free. Before my arm moves up, there is a motor neuron that fires that is always correlated with my arm moving up; doesn't that just mean the free will occurs earlier in the process than the motor neuron firing?

There is no single definition for all scientists. However if you define free will as choices that are completely free of deterministic or even statistically deterministic causes that science could in principle predict, then most scientists would say: no, that kind of free will probably doesn’t exist.

Propaganda is mostly without Science. This is with.

A handsome, well-dressed alpha speaking with confidence and certainty. That's truth right there.

Oh that sounds cool. Thanks for sharing. I’m definitely going to check it out.

>and I think it's unequivocally a bad thing that we keep thinking we know better and interfering with it.

I'll believe you actually hold this opinion after you die from an entirely curable decease. Until then I'll assume you actually think we do know better and that our interfering with, for example, bacterial infections, is actually a good thing.

Not to tell you what you think, but this is one of those opinions people seem to think they hold until it's phrased in a way that demonstrates the cost of the idea to them.

Just the fact that you survived long enough to type this comment into HN tells me it's highly unlikely medicine hasn't saved your life at least once already. And if it hasn't, it will.

I can count 5 times of the top of my head that I would've died if not for modern medicine (usually antibiotics, but also one life saving surgery). I would've been rendered a cripple a few times over too!

>The discussion of technology should be able to withstand the good and bad points of its conception

True, but that's a poor excuse to make up hypothetical problems that don't even exist. Tying it into the current craze about data privacy is a bit too transparent imo.

The journalists should do better, the article makes a downright dishonest interpretation of the issue by shoehorning it into a lens of a long ongoing controversy about data privacy that is in no way applicable to the technology they're discussing.

The privacy issue is not only hypothetical, but far enough off in the future that it'd be a better fit for a sci-fi novel then nature.com reporting.

The problem is not discussing the downsides, the problem is doing it dishonestly, as the article does.

That's actually happening. Commercially you can buy a 0.55T system such as the Siemens Free Max for around $500k.

There are also developments in ultra-low-field fMRI (<0.1T) which use permanent magnets, which are estimated to retail in the five figure range, however it's more for structural usage (can identify a tumour or stroke progression).

What you are saying sounds like being able to control your own heart rate if you see it on a monitor. Maybe combining low resolution fMRI with models trained on higher resolution data, could give you enough visibility that you could learn how to activate other areas of the brain that you wouldn't normally use for tasks.

> It’s so much more convincing with a device though. Backed by scientific consensus.

Hold on, I dropped my Nobel Prize for lobotomy on the ground somewhere... going to need some help looking for it...

On second thought, maybe it's better off not being found.

They make better parabolic reflectors than Faraday cages.

I’ve been saying “There is a real you, unfortunately, you’re not it.”

You can take that position, but there's very little evidence that the translation layer that is accepting what I'm writing right now has any access to the vast expanse of mind underneath. The evidence is growing that our subconscious decides and 'we' as the conscious element of the system rationalizes that decision after the fact. There is a children of time novel about sentient octopuses that have a very pronounced disconnect between the 'crown' making the big picture calls and the 'reach' doing the implementation. When I first read that it was fascinating because it seemed so alien, but maybe that isn't so alien after all