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

At the beginning of the last century, I. P. Pavlov dreamed:  “If one could see through the skull bone and if the focus in the cerebral hemispheres with optimal excitability shone...” A hundred years later, Russian scientists developed the methods to make the animal’s brain literally transparent and see traces of its work. The Transparent Brain project is a special technology of optical enlightenment of biological tissues, creation of glowing of fluorescent protein in active neurons and new methods of laser microscopy of the whole brain. They allowed “capturing the thought” for the first time—that is, making glow all the neurons of the brain that participated in one or another of its activities. Today, it is one of the most powerful approaches by which neuroscience explores the cellular traces of subjective experience.

Transparent Mind

Functional systems may be innate—that is, reflecting the experience of the species, and acquired, resulting from individual experience. But in both cases, tens and hundreds of millions of cells from different parts of the brain and the whole body must correctly assemble into such a system. This process is called systemogenesis, and how such complex integrations arise in evolution, how the body solves this problem in its embryonic development as well as in behavior and learning is described by a special branch of the theory of functional systems—the theory of systemogenesis. It solves the question of how something rational naturally arises from something irrational.

Systemogenesis

The pictures of the distant future are full of fantasies not only about technological triumph but also about how previously material artificial systems that were put into service for humans, become moral agents, become subjects of relationships, the entrance to which was previously intended only for the "living." Solving new ethical puzzles of the relationship between robots and humans as well as artificial systems with each other is a challenge to the ethics of the future. Perhaps the time will come when robots will sue upon humans for insulting their own dignity.

Roboethics

The technology of neural interface in the future can not only enable to connect the human brain with a prosthesis or manipulator, a machine, but fully integrate it with the artificial environment. To merge the reality of human consciousness with a virtual one, to allow building multiuser neural interfaces that connect several people as if into one agent. This is not only a radical change in the image of a human but also an attempt to counter the threat from artificial superintelligence. This is the future that is already beginning today.

Neural Lace

Sensory abilities of humans and bats are different. The latter have ultrasonic sonar that helps orientate in space. Let's suppose we learned everything about its nature. But do we know what the bat’s conscious experience is, “what is it like to be a bat?” Intuition tells you no. And this means that even the most ideal materialistic explanation leaves out special facts—the facts of consciousness, "what it is like to be those who we are." It is for this reason that consciousness is so mysterious, it is an abnormal phenomenon for natural science.

What is it Like to Be a Bat

This title refers to apocalyptic ideas about the end of time when the time of humanity expires, and its history ends. But this is not about the Last Judgment and the second advent but about the technogenic end of time. It can be either catastrophic or positive—it can start a new era. Technological singularity is thought to be such a limit, as a result of which artificial superintelligence will appear, the goals of which will be unknown to us, and control over which is impossible. The history of mankind will end as soon as we have to negotiate not with people but with machines, as soon as, perhaps, nothing remains of a biological human. But everything can end earlier and more prosaically—from a nuclear disaster. In this sense, the latter invention has already been completed.

Last Invention

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

On November 10, 1616, in the small German town of Ulm, the French philosopher René Descartes went to bed. At night, he saw three visions, the three most famous dreams in the history of mankind. It was this night that sent young Descartes in search of a new system of views on consciousness and body. Its significance became apparent centuries later. "A brief and fairly complete description of the intellectual life of European peoples up to the present," the English philosopher Alfred Whitehead noted, "is that they sponged on the capital left by a genius of the 17th century." Anyone who is now engaged in the study of consciousness mentions Descartes. He brought into the world a profound problem that neither he himself nor the philosophers of subsequent centuries could cope with.

Descartes Delusion

Neurobiologist Mary lives in a black and white room and has never seen colors, but, as a scientist, she knows everything about color perception. One day, she leaves her room and sees a scarlet rose. Did she learn something new about colors? If so, then even the ideal neuroscientific theory of consciousness, as this philosophical argument affirms, cannot explain it.

Rose for Blind Mary

Physicalism claims that physical facts determine the presence of all the others. But suppose there is a world exactly the same as ours in physical terms, but in which physiological processes in its inhabitants are not accompanied by conscious experience. These creatures are called philosophical zombies—they are just like us in everything, except for the absence of consciousness. If the intuition about zombies is correct, it automatically means that physical facts do not determine all the others; therefore, physicalism is false, and the main factor in its falsehood is consciousness that becomes the last redoubt on the path of advance of physicalism theories.

Philosophical Zombie

Consciousness is a dance of mysterious qualia, we know everything about them but cannot explain. Without them, consciousness crumbles, they weave a canvas of subjective reality. In the darkness of the vast Universe, qualia combinations create worlds of consciousnesses. These are colors, sounds, pain, euphoria, the experienced side of physical processes; they are an integral part of the history of the Universe, which is directly in front of us, and that we still know little about.

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.

Dancing Qualia

D-Pulse