From Biological to Artificial Consciousness Neuroscientific

Insights and Progress

Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:

https://medipdf.com/product/from-biological-to-artificial-consciousness-neurosci
entific-insights-and-progress/

Click Download Now

Masataka Watanabe

From Biological to Artificial

Consciousness
Neuroscientific Insights and Progress

Translated by Tony Gonzalez

Masataka Watanabe
School of Engineering
University of Tokyo
Tokyo, Japan

ISSN 1612-3018 ISSN 2197-6619 (electronic)

The Frontiers Collection
ISBN 978-3-030-91137-9 ISBN 978-3-030-91138-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91138-6

Translation from the Japanese language edition: Nou no ishiki, kikai no ishiki (Brain Consciousness,
Machine Consciousness) by Masataka Watanabe, © Chuou-kouron-shinsha 2017. Published by Chuou-
kouron-shinsha. All Rights Reserved.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the
material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting,
reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known
or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface

Were it possible, would you upload your consciousness to a machine? What if you
were soon to die otherwise? The fleeting nature of life is part of what makes it
precious, but I would doubtless succumb to curiosity. If I were transplanted into a
machine, what would I hear? What would I see? As time passed, would I cease to
long for my previous physical form?
I believe that at some point in the future, we humans will inevitably learn how
to transfer consciousness and extend our lives in some mechanical form. Today,
however, realization of such a feat remains a far-off dream—we have no idea what
kind of device could harbor consciousness, or indeed what consciousness even is. The
science of consciousness lacks uniformity, instead remaining a confusing amalgam
of varied positions. In recent years, however, a concerted effort has begun to emerge
among a subset of consciousness researchers. Through their work, the vague outline
of a new science of consciousness is coming into focus, revealing new paths toward
a solution. The present book is an exploration of these efforts.
Simply stated, this subset of researchers—among whom I count myself—is
attempting to introduce natural laws into the science of consciousness. As the term
implies, “natural laws” refer to the rules by nature behaves and form the foundations
of the natural world. One example is the constancy of light velocity which serves as
a foundation for Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Einstein’s theory has revealed
many strange phenomena, such as that traveling at the speed of light would stop time.
It is highly probable that a phenomenon as strange as consciousness, which escapes
explanation by conventional science, also arises from some set of novel universal
principles.
What would such a natural law look like? To give two examples, the philosopher
David Chalmers posits that all information produces consciousness, while the neuro-
scientist Giulio Tononi presumes that consciousness can only arise from information
in a particular integrated state. I address the meaning and unique characteristics of
each hypothesis in detail in the main text.
Initiatives toward introducing a natural law of consciousness aim at recasting the
science of consciousness into the form that science should take. Namely, a science
of consciousness should propose hypotheses based on natural laws and elucidate the

v
vi Preface

nature of its subject through reproducible experiments that test those hypotheses.
Doing so would finally lay bare the nature of consciousness, which for thousands of
years has straddled the boundary between philosophy and science.
My own field of study is neuroscience, and I have been obsessed with conscious-
ness for some time, just as in the words of the philosopher John Searle, “Studying the
brain without studying consciousness would be like studying the stomach without
studying digestion.” Every day, I conduct experiments on the brains of mice, during
which I constantly ponder the neural mechanisms of consciousness. And there is one
thing my experience allows me to say with confidence: Throughout all of science,
no subject is both so deep and so elusive as this one.
My primary goal in writing this book is to impart upon the reader the depth of
this problem of consciousness. I wish to demonstrate that we need not travel to the
farthest reaches of space to find problems deserving of our utmost efforts toward
understanding: Such a problem resides right in our own heads. A secondary goal
is to propose a method for validating the natural law of consciousness, which is
indispensable to the establishment of the current approach but yet missing.
The remainder of the book is organized as follows.
Chapter 1 defines consciousness as it is addressed in this book. Specifically, I
discuss “qualia,” a term for subjective experiences such as seeing and hearing. I
present various illusions that allow the reader to see and understand how retinal input
can exist without accompanying visual qualia, and conversely how visual qualia can
exist without retinal input. In many cases, however, it is difficult to comprehend that
subjective experience or qualia lie at the very core of defining consciousness; hearing
and seeing are all too familiar to us.
The reader need not worry, however. While qualia are the most primitive building
block of consciousness, they contain the essence of all its difficulty. A thorough under-
standing of them lays the groundwork for understanding consciousness in general,
including its most challenging aspects.
Chapters 2 and 3 relate the dramatic tale of how our predecessors established
a scientific basis for consciousness. In order to understand why the natural law
of consciousness is crucial, we must first understand exactly what the problem of
consciousness is, and what remains unknown about it. These chapters provide that
background.
We finally arrive at the true problem of consciousness in the first half of Chap. 4
and begin to see what makes it such a uniquely difficult challenge. In the words
of Francis Crick—a co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA who made
major contributions to early understandings of consciousness—we are nothing but
a pack of neurons. Contemplating just what he meant by that is essential. I expect
some readers will experience quite a shock upon truly grasping what it means for
consciousness to reside solely in our physical brains.
To help as many readers as possible to appreciate the true shock, I have done my
best to explain, with neither deficiency nor excess, the mechanisms by which the brain
operates. I describe these mechanisms at a variety of scales, from nanoscale processes
at the molecular level to those involving neurons, neural networks comprising
multiple neurons, regions of the brain made up of billions of neurons, and the brain
Preface vii

as a whole. While this may feel tedious at times, my goal is not to provide a thor-
ough understanding of these mechanisms but rather to show that there are no “black
boxes” hidden within the brain. Indeed, consciousness with no black boxes is the
very subject of this book.
In the second half of Chap. 4, I consider the need for a natural law of consciousness
and issues related to their verification, laying out an argument for why these laws are
key to taking on the challenge of consciousness from a scientific perspective.
Getting ahead of the discussion, there are limits on applying biological brains
to validate such natural laws. For example, to test the above-mentioned hypothesis
that information generates consciousness, we must extract only information from
the brain. The biological nature of brains makes this difficult, however, because
forced extraction of information kills the object of study. We may turn to analysis-
by-synthesis, say, verification of natural laws through the development of machine
consciousness, but it gives rise to a new problem. As of today, there is no method
for testing machine consciousness. This is where the second goal of this book comes
in; putting forward a test for machine consciousness.
In Chap. 5, I lay out several thought experiments regarding the proposed test for
machine consciousness and examine the grounds of currently proposed natural laws
of consciousness. Specifically, I question the validity of natural laws that link neural
information and consciousness, and in turn suggest a natural law that involves neural
algorithms.
Based on the considerations outlined above, the concluding Chap. 6 discusses
future technological developments in brain-machine interface and machines that
may harbor consciousness. Specifically, I put forward a new type of brain-machine
interface that makes the proposed test for machine consciousness and the consequent
mind uploading viable. At the start of this foreword, I mentioned that uploading
human consciousness is a far-off dream, but I personally believe that day will come
much sooner than many people expect.
Childhood of neuroscience is drawing to a close, and I am very excited to see
what it becomes in its next stage of development and how it will change the world.

Tokyo, Japan Masataka Watanabe

Acknowledgements

I could not have written this book without the help of many people, chief among them
my mentors Shunsuke Kondo, Kazuo Furuta, Kazuyuki Aihara, Hiroshi Fujii, Minoru
Tsukada, Okihide Hikosaka, Masamichi Sakagami, Ichiro Fujita, Shinsuke Shimojo,
Keiji Tanaka, Cheng Kang, and Nikos Logothetis, each of whom provided invaluable
resources for my research. I extend my sincerest thanks to each of them. I also thank
Ryota Kanei, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Ryusuke Hayashi, and Daw-An Wu, each of whom
is younger than me, but nonetheless my seniors in terms of consciousness research.
Without the thorough initiation these three provided me under the blue skies of
California, I likely never would have bitten into the forbidden fruit.
I am very thankful to Tatsuya Kanbayashi, my editor of the Japanese version at
the publisher Chuo Koronsha, for his never-ending patience with my always late
manuscripts. It was only through his detailed advice that I was able to grasp how to
write for a general audience and assemble my thoughts into a monograph. Also, I
thank all the members of the Japanese reading club in Tübingen, Germany, who gave
me precious feedback on the very early versions of the manuscript.
I wish to thank my high-school classmate Tomoko Yogi for the many excellent
illustrations she prepared for this book. Her careful depictions helped make many
otherwise confusing aspects of the brain much easier to understand.
Regarding the translation process and publishing of this English version, I greatly
thank Tony Gonzalez for the original translation and countless cycles of editing,
Stephen Lyle for valuable suggestions and editing after thoroughly going through
the early versions, Yumiko Shibayama for also going through the early versions and
assisting me with the final processes, and all the editors of Springer Nature, Angela
Lahee, Emmy Lee, and Banu Dhayalan for full support.
I thank my wife Azusa from the bottom of my heart for her forbearance while
I spent so much time writing this book, for her assistance with last-minute editing
tasks, and for the emotional and health support she provided.
I would like to close by expressing my deepest regret at the loss of my former
research partners Cheng Kang and Satohiro Tajima, both of whom passed away as I
was writing this book. I am truly saddened that I never got the chance to show it to
them after its completion.

ix
Contents

1 The Mystery of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

I Think, Therefore I Am . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Subjective Experience: The Ultimate Reduction of Consciousness . . . . . . 2
The Fiction of the Visual World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Imagine Being a Mole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Seeing Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Visual Processing in the Human Brain Without Subjective
Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Subjective Experience Is a Privilege of the Conscious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Neurons as the Source of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Research by Hodgkin and Huxley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Cranking Out Hypotheses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Are Neurons Connected? The Debate Between Golgi and Cajal . . . . . . . . 18
Information Transmission Between Neurons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Neuronal Interaction Through Neurotransmitters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Neuron Thresholds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
The Brain Learns by Fiddling with Synapses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
You Are Nothing But a Pack of Neurons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2 Pursuing the Shadows of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Neuronal Activity Accompanying Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Binocular Rivalry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Logothetis’s Search for Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
An Upheaval in the Science of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Hubel and Wiesel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Neurons Conduct Telephone Surveys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Where Are the Cherry Trees Blooming? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
The Survey in the Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Retinotopy in the Visual Cortex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Hierarchy of Visual Areas and Response Properties of Neurons . . . . . . . . 40

xi
xii Contents

Generalization: Another Hierarchical Change in the Response

Properties of Neurons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Searching for the Seat of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
The Battle of V1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Information in the Primary Visual Cortex that Consciousness
Cannot Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Binocular Rivalry in the Primary Visual Cortex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
The Difference Between Correlation and Causality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
NCC and Akira . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Pursuing NCC by Process of Elimination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
CFS: An Innovation in Consciousness Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Consciousness Versus Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Empire Strikes Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3 Neural Manipulation for Causal Investigation of Consciousness . . . . . 61
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation as a Revolutionary Tool . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
The Yin and Yang of TMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Time Lag in Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Subjective Back-Referral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Does the Future Affect Consciousness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
What About Conscious Free Will? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Conscious Free Will is a Grand Illusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Motion Phosphenes and NCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
The Difficulty of Using Manipulation Experiments to Search
for NCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Process of Elimination Through Manipulation Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Optogenetics: A New Development in Manipulation Experiments . . . . . . 77
Do Rats Experience Binocular Rivalry? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
A New Hope: Visual Backward Masking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Do Rats Experience Visual Backward Masking? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Do Mice Experience Visual Backward Masking? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Investigating NCC Through Optogenetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
The Future of Neural Manipulation in Search of NCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
4 The Quest for a Natural Law of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
The Brain as a Neural Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Glimpses of Consciousness in Neural Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Is NCC All There Is? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
The Mill Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
The Hard Problem of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
The Consciousness of a Thermostat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Can Consciousness Actually Be Understood? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Natural Laws Are the Foundation of All Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Resistance to Natural Laws of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Bridging the Explanatory Gap and Solving the Hard Problem . . . . . . . . . . 96
How Do We Verify Natural Laws of Consciousness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Contents xiii

Analysis by Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Fading Qualia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Digital Fading Qualia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Philosophical Zombies Hinder Tests of Machine Consciousness . . . . . . . . 104
Seeing for Ourselves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Two Hemispheres, Two Consciousnesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Sperry Extracts the Right-Hemisphere’s Testimony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Interhemispheric Communication in Cortical Hierarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
A Subjective Test for Machine Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
5 Is Consciousness Information or Algorithm? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Candidate Natural Laws of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Integrated Information Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Preliminary Validation with the Proposed Test for Machine
Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
The Problem with Equating Information and Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Algorithms and Generative Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
The Virtual Reality Within Our Brains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
Brain’s Virtual Reality During Wakefulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Generative Model as a Neural Implementation of Brain’s Inner
Virtual Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Towards Realistic Virtual Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Will Generative Models Pass the Subjective Test for Machine
Consciousness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Explaining Time Lags in Consciousness with the Generative Model . . . . 134
The Generative Model Explains Differential Subjective Experience
Arising from Various Sensory Modalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Dual Aspect Theory of Generative Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
6 Uploading Human Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Viable Method for Mind Uploading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Prospects for Machine Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Complications in Perfecting a Digital Copy of Our Brains . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Constructing First a Neutrally Conscious Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Prospects for an Invasive Brain–Machine Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Possibilities for Machine–Brain Hemispheric Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
The Problem of Writing Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
A New Type of BMI: Insertion of 2D Electrode Array
into a Dissected Axonal Bundle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Integration Between Artificial and Biological Hemispheres . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Waking Up in a Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Transfer of Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Bon Voyage! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
xiv Contents

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Chapter 1
The Mystery of Consciousness

I Think, Therefore I Am

Presumably, you are sitting with this book in hand, and your eyes are tracing over its
words. Please take a moment to look around at your surroundings. How can you be
sure that the people and objects you see actually exist? Even this very book?
Even I must ask myself such questions. I see a computer monitor and keyboard
in front of me, but are they really there? I hear the clicking of keys, and can feel
my fingers as I type, but could these be mere illusions? Perhaps I am actually asleep
in a bed somewhere, trapped in an endless dream. Or maybe my brain is connected
to a computer that has me imprisoned in some virtual world. I may not even have
a brain or a body; I might be nothing more than a series of electric pulses on a
circuit board. You might consider this to be overly fanciful, but if it were possible to
completely take control of the brain’s systems for input and output, distinguishing
between virtual reality and actual reality would become impossible. My situation
would be much like that of the protagonist Neo in The Matrix.
Amidst all this uncertainty there is but one certain thing: my own existence. In
saying so, I am not referring to my body, but rather to my consciousness, that part of
me which feels as if it is viewing a monitor and typing on a keyboard. That part of
me that thinks, “This is reality.”
Identifying this phenomenon was a goal of René Descartes, the father of modern
philosophy. Descartes began his pursuit of reality by doubting all things. Only by
passing everything through the sieve of doubt, he believed, could he separate out the
truth that could not be logically denied.
Visible and audible phenomena—indeed, all sensory input—were the first to be
filtered out by Descartes’ sieve. These could too easily be illusions or hallucinations
with no basis in reality. We cannot even be sure that we are awake from one moment
to the next, he argued. After all, we commonly fail to realize when we are dreaming,
so believing that we are awake is no guarantee that we actually are. No matter how
broad our knowledge, if we cannot trust our own senses, then reality stands on a
shaky foundation.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 1

M. Watanabe, From Biological to Artificial Consciousness, The Frontiers Collection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91138-6_1
2 1 The Mystery of Consciousness

In this way, Descartes removed all doubtful things one by one, until in the end he
was left with a single phenomenon that he could not exclude: his own mind, actively
attempting to exclude all other things. In other words, his consciousness. From this,
he derived one of the most famous lines in philosophy: “I think, therefore I am.”
This Cartesian “I” is the focus of this book. It is our starting point for inquiring into
consciousness. It is the one undeniable aspect of existence. Even if we are merely
brains in jars, even if we are just programs running on some advanced computer,
when we reflect on our own existence, there is no doubt that we exist.
However, this “I” alone does not provide a sufficient basis for scientific inquiry
into its nature. If we doubt everything beyond our own existence, then even our
experimental equipment resides in a fog of uncertainty. Indeed, we know of no
technique external to our own brains for establishing the “self.” Hence, if we hope to
subject consciousness to scientific scrutiny, we must maintain “self” as our primary
object of study, yet capture it in such a way as to allow verification through observation
and experimentation.

Subjective Experience: The Ultimate Reduction

of Consciousness

To unravel the mechanisms of consciousness, we must first reduce it to its most

basic elements. Most people would agree that today’s computers do not exhibit
consciousness. But what is the essential difference between them and us?
Of course, computers have achieved some remarkable feats. In 1997, the IBM
supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2017,
the AlphaGo program, developed by a Google subsidiary, bested Ke Jie, the highest-
ranked go player at the time. The problem-solving abilities of computers have
surpassed those of humans in many other fields with well-defined sets of rules as
well. Through “deep learning,” the latest development in machine learning, software
programs are even surpassing humans in areas previously considered beyond their
reach, such as image recognition.
You have probably seen images like that in Fig. 1.1, a string of CAPTCHA
text distorted to purposely impair readability. These are used to prevent automated
creation of accounts for online services, on the basis that humans, but not computers,

Fig. 1.1 CAPTCHA text

Subjective Experience: The Ultimate Reduction of Consciousness 3

can read them. Don’t expect these to be around much longer, though; computers are
learning to read them even better than humans can.
Despite such remarkable advancements, however, there is one thing that
computers don’t have, and that some scientists and philosophers think they never
will: subjective experience of vision, audition, tactile sensation, emotion, decision
making, etc. In other words, qualia.
If you have heard of qualia before, seeing this word may set you on edge. Defini-
tions found online are typically vague, or even borderline incomprehensible. In truth,
however, the definition of qualia is not all that complex. In terms of vision, it simply
means “the experience of seeing.” You can see a face in front of you, but you cannot
see one behind you. There are visual qualia in what you see, and none in what you
cannot. That’s all.
The hard part is the “qualia problem.” Namely, why do qualia, or subjective
experiences, occur in beings with brains, and only in beings with brains? Modern
digital cameras can capture a scene, search for faces within that scene, and adjust
their focus accordingly. But the camera does not “see” the scene or the faces. Digital
cameras do not experience visual qualia.
Getting a feel for this fact is the first step toward understanding the qualia problem.
We are so used to seeing the world that we easily fall into the trap of assuming that
cameras see it too. The important thing here is the fundamental difference between
processing and recording an image and seeing the world. Because this is the first
potential stumbling point, let’s consider it more carefully through some examples.
Allow me to repeat, however, that this is only the first step toward understanding
the qualia problem, the heart of which is its mere existence in our minds. To fully
understand that, we must learn about brain mechanisms, along with the progress of
consciousness research up until now. Doing so will lead us to the surprising fact
that our brains are, in essence, nothing more than electronic circuits, not critically
different from a digital camera. If so, given that cameras cannot “see,” why can we?
After some preparation, we will revisit the full complexity of the qualia problem in
Chap. 4.

The Fiction of the Visual World

Qualia are such matter-of-fact phenomena to us that it is difficult to comprehend

that they only exist in conscious beings. Such comprehension requires a certain
transformation of concepts, starting with the fact that the world we see is completely
unlike the world as it actually is. We do not observe the world itself—what we
see instead is our brain’s interpretation of the world, a creation based on visual
information from the eye.
For example, every day, we experience a visual world that we consider being full
of natural color, but color is not an aspect of the real world—it is a fabrication of the
brain. The actual world is a dreary place filled not with color, but with electromag-
netic waves. These waves—which allow you to listen to the radio, watch television,
4 1 The Mystery of Consciousness

heat food in your microwave, and see—are all in essence the same thing. The only
difference is how long their wavelengths are. The light we can see has wavelengths
between approximately 4/10,000 and 8/10,000 of a millimeter (400–800 nm). Shorter
and longer wavelengths are invisible to us.
Interestingly, we perceive red and purple as similar colors, but as evidenced by
the words “infrared” (wavelengths too long to be seen) and “ultraviolet” (those too
short to be seen), these colors lie on opposite ends of the visual spectrum. So while
the physical properties of these colors are very different, we perceive them as being
similar (see Box 1 for its possible reasons). Hence, qualia experienced when viewing
colors must be a creation of the brain.
It may seem as though your eyes scan the three-dimensional world like searchlights
in the dark, directly accessing and revealing the world as it is, but that is not the case.
Rather, your brain combines two sets of imperfect visual information (3D to 2D
compression, drastic loss of resolution in peripheral vision, etc.) and compiles the
results for “you.” Your brain so cunningly creates this virtual world that it seems real
and authentic.

Box 1: Retinal Photoreceptors and Color Perception

Much of our ability to sense light as color comes from special cells (cone cells)
embedded in our retinas. There are three types of cone cells (Fig. 1.2, top),
which react to the wavelengths of the three primary colors that we perceive:
red, green, and blue (Fig. 1.2, bottom). Each type of cone cell reacts more
strongly to its preferred wavelength than the other two types. For example,
the peak reaction in a “red” cone cell occurs at around 630 nanometers (one
nanometer is one-billionth of a meter), but “green” cone cells react only weakly
to those wavelengths.
The reds and purples that mark the lower and upper limits of visible light
may seem similar to us because, at these extremes, none of the three types
of cone cells have a strong reaction. So while the physical properties of these
wavelengths are very different, our brains perceive them in similar ways.
One other note about the three primary colors: We perceive a combination
of red and green light as yellow because cone cell activation at those wave-
lengths (680 and 550 nm) is similar to that resulting from activation due to
a single intermediate wavelength (620 nm; Fig. 1.2, bottom). Given that the
responses are analogous at the retinal level, our brains situated downstream
cannot distinguish between the two stimulus configurations (680 + 550 nm
vs. 620 nm alone). In this manner, the three primary colors of light and light
synthesis rules such as “red + green = yellow” or “green + blue = cyan” are
totally a creation of our brain, following the property of our retinas.
Note that many mammals have only two types of cone cells, and therefore
experience two, not three, primary colors. They are able to distinguish between
far fewer types of light than humans, and do not perceive light synthesis rules
The Fiction of the Visual World 5

Fig. 1.2 Light reception in the human retina

like we do. The world of color that they live in must therefore be very different
from ours.

Imagine Being a Mole

To better understand how our brains compile a virtual visual world that does not
necessarily match reality, imagine you have turned into a mole. (We will assume
6 1 The Mystery of Consciousness

for now that you-as-mole is a conscious entity.) Considering that the structure of a
mole’s eyes is less developed than that of a human’s, we can assume that your visual
world is very fuzzy.
Say you are crawling in your dim tunnel, toward a faint brightness ahead, and
a dark shadow crawls across your field of vision. It’s an earthworm, one of your
favorite snacks. You grasp it with your well-developed claws, through which you
confirm other details, such as its slimy skin and long, segmented body. As a mole,
you might think, “This is the real world, quite unlike the nebulous blur that I see with
my eyes.”
What is important here is the truth of the qualia behind all this. The fuzzy scene
your mole eyes see is nothing like the actual world; it is a pure fabrication of your
tiny mole brain. Even so, that blurry visual world, no matter how unlike reality it may
be, is a quale (“quale” is the singular form of “qualia”). You might not realize the
difference between quale and reality if you were a mole, but it is worth considering
while you imagine you-as-mole.

Seeing Things

Let’s consider the matter from a different perspective.

First, look at Fig. 1.3, which demonstrates a phenomenon called neon color
spreading. You probably see a faint, semitransparent square in the middle, but no
square actually exists—the image shows only concentric circles with quarter sections
of different brightness. But even knowing that, the square persists as an incontrovert-
ible creation of your brain. To prove it to yourself, try covering the two upper sets
of concentric circles with your hands. As soon as you do, the central top edge of the
square that was so clearly present before disappears into the page.
Your brain shows you this phantom square because it would be “natural” for it to
be there. This raises the question of what “natural” means in this context. The answer
to that is closely connected to the “unnaturalness” inherent in the figure.
The actual stimulus is an arrangement of twelve circles arranged into four sets of
three concentric circles each. In each of these sets of grayscale circles, a 90° segment
has a different luminance. Take a look at just one of the sets of concentric circles.
As you can see, the boundaries marking the change in the circles’ luminance form
perfectly straight lines. The lines are too straight, in fact—were you looking at, say,
a piece of rusty metal, you would never expect such a perfect linear alignment of
pattern to occur by mere chance. Even more unnatural is the perfect alignment of
the luminance boundaries between the four sets of concentric circles.
In what type of situation would you find such perfect alignment? The simplest
case would be that a single, semitransparent square is placed on top of the concentric
circles. If we interpret things in this way, then of course we expect a perfect alignment
of luminance boundaries. Thus, our brains present such an image to us.
Your brain strives to provide you with the most faithful visual perception possible,
but at the same time, it does its best to show you a natural interpretation of the world.