Brain Inspired BI 230 Michael Shadlen: How Thoughts Become Conscious
Thoughts As Interrogative Intentions
- Thoughts are structured as interrogations: provisional intentions asking 'might I' about actions or perceptions.
- This frames cognition as active, embodied decision-making rather than passive representation.
Persistent Neural Activity Equals Thought
- A thought in the brain is persistent activity representing a provisional intention that can be changed.
- That persistent activity gives thoughts content and avoids the category error of equating spikes with perception.
Why Many Noisy Neurons Exist
- Many neurons create an analog signal via averaging to give the brain reliable quantities to compute with.
- Noisy spikes arise from balanced excitation and inhibition required for that analog regime.
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Michael Shadlen is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he's the principle investigator of the Shadlen Lab. If you study the neural basis of decision making, you already know Shadlen's extensive research, because you are constantly referring to it if you're not already in his lab doing the work. The name Shadlen adorns many many papers relating the behavior and neural activity during decision-making to mathematical models in the drift diffusion family of models. That's not the only work he is known for,
As you may have gleaned from those little intro clips, Michael is with me today to discuss his account of what makes a thought conscious, in the hopes to inspire neuroscience research to eventually tackle the hard problem of consciousness - why and how we have subjective experience.
But Mike's account isn't an account of just consciousness. It's an account of nonconscious thought and conscious thought, and how thoughts go from non-conscious to conscious
His account is inspired by multiple sources and lines of reasoning.
Partly, Shadlen refers to philosophical accounts of cognition by people like Marleau-Ponty and James Gibson, appreciating the embodied and ecological aspects of cognition.
And much of his account derives from his own decades of research studying the neural basis of decision-making mostly using perceptual choice tasks where animals make eye movements to report their decisions.
So we discuss some of that, including what we continue to learn about neurobiological, neurophysiological, and anatomical details of brains, and the possibility of AI consciousness, given Shadlen's account.
- Shadlen Lab.
- Twitter: @shadlen.
- Decision Making and Consciousness (Chapter in upcoming Principles of Neuroscience textbook).
- Talk: Decision Making as a Model of thought
Read the transcript.
0:00 - Intro 7:05 - Overview of Mike's account 9:10 - Thought as interrogation 21:03 - Neurons and thoughts 27:05 - Why so many neurons? 36:21 - Evolution of Mike's thinking 39:48 - Marleau-Ponty, cognition, and meaning 44:54 - Naturalistic tasks 51:11 - Consciousness 58:01 - Martin Buber and relational consciousness 1:00:18 - Social and conscious phenomena correlated 1:04:17 - Function vs. nature of consciousness 1:06:05 - Did language evolve because of consciousness? 1:11:11 - Weak phenomenology and long-range feedback 1:22:02 - How does interrogation work in the brain? 1:26:18 - AI consciousness 1:35:49 - The hard problem of consciousness 1:39:34 - Meditation and flow