A random series of events brought together a band from the St. Petersburg with the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies and the Institute for Perspective Studies of the Brain of Moscow State University. We were discussing problems of consciousness for hours together, shared experience and knowledge. And as a result, there has been released a music album on consciousness. Every track of that album is dedicated to one or another important problem of consciousness and brain studies. It seems to us that musical expression allows us to say something about consciousness that we cannot express by words, allows to pick out the very phenomenon of consciousness. The title 'Dancing Qualia' goes back to David Chalmers' thought experiment in 'The Conscious Mind'.

"Consciousness is a dance of mysterious qualia, we know everything about them, but we can’t explain them. Qualia weave a canvas of subjective reality. Consciousness crumbles without them. In the darkness of a huge Universe, combinations of qualia create worlds of conscious minds. They are colors, sounds, pain, euphoria, the experienced aspect of physical processes. They are an integral part of the history of the Universe, which is right in front of us, and about which we still know little. " - Konstantin V. Anokhin
credits

Written, arranged, performed and produced by Klim Sukhanov, Anton Kochnev, Semyon Perevoshchikov, Sam Konyakhin. Mixed by Klim Sukhanov and Semyon Perevoshchikov. Mastered by Andrei Zakharov at TMTC Studio (St.Petersburg). Cover art by Michael Kroz.

Dancing Qualia

The brain never works with all neurons at the same time. It solves each problem by combining some of its neurons. Such distributed patterns of cells designed for obtaining a specific result for the whole body are called functional systems. Our entire brain resembles a giant Swiss penknife with thousands of such tools. The human mind and intellect are largely determined by the repertoire of its functional systems and the ability of each of them to find the optimal solution to their problem. Functional systems and their properties were discovered in the 30s of the last century by P. K. Anokhin, a student of I. P. Pavlov. He contrasted them with reflexes for which he was accused in 1950 at the famous Pavlovian session of betraying his teacher. The disputes whether the brain works on the principle of reflexes or functional systems are still ongoing.

Functional Systems

Do Androids dream of electric sheep? This name refers to the famous novel by Philip Dick, which is better known as “Blade Runner.” As in the modern "Westworld," we are talking about the inside of the creatures of the artificial world. Many people believe that evolution is blind, but in its complete ignorance, it has led to the emergence of those who inquire about their nature. But what if, in the same ignorance, we created a new quality of life in androids? However, the interest of these works is not only in how ably they turn to the scenarios of the future. At the same time, they make us think about the present. Aren't there the same androids among us that dream of electric sheep?

Android Dreams

As Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, said, “neuroscience has not yet discovered the double helix of the brain.” One of the new ideas in this field is that the codes of the mind and consciousness are hidden in the neural hypernetwork of the brain. The brain hypernetwork is a network of networks. The nodes in it are clouds of neurons jointly encoding certain knowledge and relations of the body. Connections, communication between such hypernodes are carried out through the common neurons. Our consciousness, according to this theory, lives in this neural hypernetwork.

Hypernetworks

A hard problem of consciousness is “Why are processes in the brain accompanied by conscious experience?  Why don't they happen in the "dark"? It is called "hard" because it cannot be solved by standard methods of the natural sciences. And it is possible that its solution requires a review of the very structure of the natural world.

Hard Problem

The "Chinese room" is the most influential argument about artificial intelligence in the 20th century. It states that regrouping of symbols any computer program is based on does not intrinsically lead to understanding. Imagine that a person is placed in a closed room and, using the instructions, they regroup the Chinese characters they received and pass these further out. But no matter how long they do this, they will not begin to understand Chinese, although a native speaker of Chinese outside the room, who transmits messages inside and receives answers to them, can think differently. Therefore, for understanding and perception, a correctly programmed machine is not enough. Some extra ingredient is required, which provides these properties.

Lost in Chinese Room

The first-ever Nobel Prize in Physiology was awarded to I. P. Pavlov. After receiving it for research of digestion, he stated in his Nobel speech: "Practically speaking, we are interested in only one thing in our life—in our mental content." A new way to study this content was the acquired reflexes discovered by him. 

"Pavlov's bell" forcing the dog to salivate before the appearance of the food it expected, made him famous all over the world. However, he did not find a satisfying answer to the question burning in his mind: "How does the brain matter produce a subjective phenomenon?"

Spoken-word in this track belongs to P.K.Anokhoin and A.R. Luria and it is an excerpt from an archived interview for British Themes television.

Functional Systems

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