Kids on consciousness and mind

Over at Edge David Chalmers is holding forth on consciousness. I believe he's the one responsible for foisting the notion of a "hard problem" of consciousness on him. I think that notion is over-rated, but that's neither here nor there. I'm interested in some remarks that come up during the discussion.

[Rodney] BROOKS: What age do kids start reporting on consciousness? Do you have any idea?

CHALMERS: It depends where you count. Are you talking about consciousness in general, the abstract category? This comes relatively late. What age do kids start talking about pain?

ALISON GOPNIK: If you’re talking about things like differences between mental states and physical states, by the time kids are three they’re saying things like, "If I’m just imagining a hotdog, nobody else can see it and I can turn it into a hamburger. But if it’s a real hotdog then everybody else can see it and I can’t just turn it into something else by thinking it." There's a bunch of work about kids understanding the difference between the mental and the physical. They think that mental things are not things that everybody can see, and that you can alter them in particular kinds of ways, whereas physical things can't, and that’s about age three or four.

There is a whole line of research that John Flavell did, where you ask kids things like, "Ellie is looking at the wall in the corner, are things happening inside of her mind?" It’s not until about eight or nine, until late from a developmental perspective, that they say something’s going on in her mind when she’s sitting there and not acting.

You can show that even if you give the introspective example; for example, if you ring a bell regularly—every minute the bell rings—and then it doesn’t, and you say to the kid, "What were you thinking about just now?" The kids say, "Nothing." You ask them if they were thinking about the bell and they just say no. There’s a lovely passage where a kid says that the way your mind works is there are little moments when something happens in your mind, you think, and then nothing happens in there. Their meta view is that it’s consciousness if you’re perceiving, or acting, or imagining to a prompt. But if you don’t, if it’s not connected, then nothing is happening. So, they have a theory of consciousness, but it looks like it’s different. [...]

GOPNIK: Here’s a proposal, David, that’s relevant to kids not wanting to go to sleep. One of the things that’s very characteristic of kids, including babies from an early age, is that at a point when they clearly have an incredibly strong drive to go to sleep, they don’t want to go to sleep. If you talk to kids, even little kids, it’s very hard not to conclude that the reason they don’t want to go to sleep is because they don’t want to lose consciousness. It’s sort of like, "I’ve only been able to do this for two years, I really don’t want to stop." I don't know whether other creatures share that.

CHALMERS: That's an intuition about the idea of consciousness, that it does something special that gives your life value.

GOPNIK: Nick Humphrey has an interesting proposal along these lines that it’s connected to things like not wanting to die, that that's the reason for the meta-intuition.

CHALMERS: So, he thinks that actually generates the problem of consciousness, because we don't want to die.

FRANK WILCZEK: We know we go to sleep, but we’re not so sure we’re going to wake up.

Bonus, how anesthesiologists think about consciousness:

SETH LLOYD: I had a conversation about consciousness with an anesthesiologist and she pointed out that if you’re an anesthesiologist, consciousness is definitely not one thing because you have to have four different drugs to deal with the different aspects of consciousness that you wish to disable. You have one to just knock people out. It's known that people can still experience things and still experience pain, so then you have another to block the sensation of pain. People could still have memories while they’re knocked out and not feeling pain, so you have to give them another one to knock out the memories that you have. Sometimes they give you an extra special one to make you feel good when you wake up. So, each of these drugs are quite different from each other, with different functions, and they’re disabling different aspects of the things that we call "consciousness."

And then we have Sydney Lamb's daughter. Lamb opens his book, Pathways of the Brain, with with this anecdote (p. 1):

Some years ago I asked one of my daughters, as she sat at the piano, "When you hit that piano key with your finger, how does your mind tell your finger what to do?" She thought for a moment, her face brightening with the intellectual challenge, and said, "Well, my brain writes a little note and sends it down my arm to my hand, then my hand reads the note and knows what to do." Not too bad for a five-year old.

Lamb goes on to suggest that an awful lot of professional thinking about the brain takes place in such terms (p. 2):

This mode of theorizing is seen in ... statements about such things as lexical semantic retrieval, and in descriptions of mental processes like that of naming what is in a picture, to the effect that the visual information is transmitted from the visual area to a language area where it gets transformed into a phonological representation so that a spoken description of the picture may be produced....It is the theory of the five-year-old expressed in only slightly more sophisticated terms. This mode of talking about operations in the brain is obscuring just those operations we are most intent in understanding, the fundamental processes of the mind.