Evolutionary Philosophy

North East Humanists — Beliefs and Values

6/1/2021

Hi all! I've got two big posts yet to do to finish up 1) my mini series on free will, and 2) my major series on consciousness. I'm still doing a bit more research on them, but mostly I've been busy over the last several weeks with a big project for North East Humanists, which is a local charity that I am on the board of. Ever since the start of the pandemic, we've been going through some major upgrades including developing a new logo (seen above), moving the management of our supporter emails online (you can now sign up here), and generally reviewing our strategic plan. Now that all of those are more or less complete, I made a major overhaul of the North East Humanists website and launched that to the general public today.

There is a lot of information on that website now, which I think will be of interest to anyone following an Evolutionary Philosophy blog. Have a look around. I'm not always convinced "Humanism" is the best name for it, or that everyone involved is on board with where I think it is headed, but if you are looking for a worldwide movement of non-believers to come together into a strong coalition that can act to improve life on Earth (and beyond), then I think Humanist organisations are probably best positioned to become a home for that. They have a long history, they are active at the local, national, and international levels, and they have a strong resource base in terms of people and funding. They're also open to changing and adapting their beliefs in response to rational arguments, so if there's something you don't like about Humanism, you can get in there and change it!

As evidence, the North East Humanists just changed our own official statement of our beliefs and values. And I have to say, I'm quite proud at how they've come out. The six main statements, followed up by their brief explanations, mirror my own ideas about what comprises a worldview and what evolution can teach Humanism. See what you think of these and let me know in the comments below if they would be something you could sign up to.

What do North East Humanists say?

Humanists have no official dogma, sacred texts, or infallible leaders, and we aren’t required to believe the same things. However, Humanists generally share some very basic but important commitments. In 2021, the trustees of North East Humanists developed the following list of beliefs and values that currently represent what we are committed to.

1. We only live once so we want to make the best of our lives. As far as we can tell, our life here is the only one we will ever have. We are part of an evolutionary process on Earth where all life is related and shares the same genetic building blocks. We see no evidence that anything supernatural affects our existence. It is up to us to give our lives purpose and to make them the best that we can for ourselves and others.

2. Our behaviour is guided by reason and empathy with concern for the welfare of all people and the entire planet. Morality is the product of our experience as evolved social animals. It is developed using natural capacities such as reason and empathy. Humanists believe that the underlying principle governing morality is a desire for the flourishing of all life.

3. Our knowledge of the world comes from experience and is aided by the sciences and humanities. Humanists ask questions and seek evidence to support their beliefs about the world. Our theories become robust in this way but must change when new information and better arguments become available.

4. We support democratic participation, secularism, and human rights. Humanists are committed to a pluralist, secular society. Whilst generally respecting the right of people to have different beliefs, Humanists will challenge ideas and practices which threaten harm to others or undermine their human rights.

5. Conflicts of interest require negotiated resolution and cooperation. Disputes at all levels, from the personal to the international, should be resolved through reasoned argument and negotiation, rather than through the use of power. We cooperate with others to address problems and reduce pain and suffering in the world.

6. Creativity and physical expression are key parts of our humanity. Humanists recognise that art, sports, practical skills, socialising, and mutual support meet innate needs in human beings. These things make our lives enjoyable and worth living. We believe that everyone deserves to have opportunities to express and experience their unique array of interests and capabilities.

For more information about North East Humanists and Humanism in general, see:
www.northeast-humanists.org.uk

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Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will

4/19/2021

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In my last two posts (1, 2), I examined Sam Harris' long appearance on The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman. Shortly after those aired, Sam released his Final Thoughts on Free Will on his own Making Sense podcast, which I thought I should take a look at before summing up my own current thoughts on this matter. I didn't find Sam to be very persuasive in his conversation with Scott, but let's see if he's had any better thoughts upon reflection (and in sole control). Since I've already spent a lot of time on Sam's ideas, I'll try to be quick about it and just pick out any new points that need to be made.

The concept of free will touches nearly everything we care about: morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment. But the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. It is built on two things: the ability to choose otherwise and being the source of conscious awareness. But these are both wrong.

There are more things bound up in "free will" than just these two points. In particular, there's the question of avoiding external coercion, as well as the ability to carry out actions and plans that were made using conscious considerations. Both of those do a lot of work in building up feelings about the term free will. But even leaving those points aside for now, Sam's discussion of "the ability to choose otherwise" is a flawed repetition of ideas that have already been debunked. Dan Dennett knocked these down in his review of Sam's book, when he said:

"You can't assess any ability by 'replaying the tape.' ... This is as true of the abilities of automobiles as of people. Suppose I am driving along at 60 MPH and am asked if my car can also go 80 MPH. Yes, I reply, but not in precisely the same conditions; I have to press harder on the accelerator. In fact, I add, it can also go 40 MPH, but not with conditions precisely as they are. Replay the tape till eternity, and it will never go 40MPH in just these conditions."

So, looking backwards at decisions that were made just doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the ability to make decisions going forward. As for what Sam means about "being the source of conscious awareness", I'll have to hear more to understand his claims.

There’s no place for you to stand outside of the causal structure of the universe.

Agreed. But my unique genetic and environmental history forms its own cause. We witness that from the inside as we act. That is consistent with the embodied view of consciousness. As I said in my review of Just Deserts, we may not have free will, as that makes it sound like free will is a possession that could be separated from our selves. But we are a will that has degrees of freedom.

You aren’t a self. You’re not a subject in the middle of experience. You’re not on the riverbank watching the stream of consciousness. As a matter of experience, there is only the stream, and you are identical to it.

That’s right that we aren’t a homunculus watching the Cartesian theatre unspool before us in some ethereal mind space. But that stream that we are identical to is something. It exists. And I don’t see why we can’t call that an everchanging, unique, and personal self.

[Sam asks for you to choose a film. Any film.] We can’t see how those choices are made. If free will isn’t there, then it’s not anywhere.

Bollocks! This is just like the point I made in my last post about looking for a decisive moment in the random noise of choosing when to drink water. Sam is stacking the deck in his favour by asking for a random film choice, but there are no identifiable interior mechanisms to make random choices. If, instead, I asked you to choose the top 20 films of all time in terms of their return on investment, you would immediately be flooded with ideas on how to act to solve that problem. (And if you are JT Velikovsky, you will have already written a PhD thesis on this subject!) Where did those thoughts come from? From some mysterious darkness that we have no access to? No! They would come from learned experience that I myself have experienced, plus maybe some creativity at putting together bits of experiences that I haven’t thought about putting together before. This type of problem solving is one of the 13 types of cognition that we have evolved to have. And that feels very much like a self acting in its own self-interest.

Everything is springing to mind. What could free will possibly refer to?

To the ability to hold onto a train of thought rather than pinging among these random upsurges?

Letting go of free will is the only thing that cuts through the desire to retributively punish people.

Not so! The fact that you can’t change the past is another perfectly good reason to get rid of the desire to retributively punish people. From a consequentialist point of view, retributivism makes no sense.

People ask, “if there’s no free will, then why are you trying to convince anyone of anything? … Your very effort to convince people that they don’t have free will is proof that you think they have it.” Again, this is confusion between determinism and fatalism. Reasoning is possible. Not because you are free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all. To be convinced by an argument is to be subjugated by it. It’s to be forced to believe it, regardless of your preferences.

Well, this certainly doesn’t track with the history of reasoning with people about their beliefs. Sam hasn’t responded to any of Dan Dennett’s very good arguments. Why not? Because people have their own unique personal histories, which drive their passions and their reasoning. These people are selves who act for their own self-determination.

Not thinking about this clearly has consequences. In the United States, there are 13-year-olds serving life sentences in prison. Not because we have determined that they can’t be rehabilitated, but because some judge or jury felt that they truly deserved this punishment as retribution because they were the true independent cause of their actions.

This is an abhorrent shame and it definitely needs to be corrected. It’s possible that making the argument that “we don’t have free will” could actually open many people’s eyes to the problems with their retributivist thinking. But it’s also possible that such arguments close off many people’s minds because they think they definitely are autonomous agents, so free will skeptics must be out of touch with reality.

At the moment, the only philosophically respectable way to defend free will is to endorse a view known as compatibilism and argue, in essence, that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism. Compatibilists like my friend the philosopher Dan Dennett generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsion that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. So, if a man wants to commit murder, and does so because of this desire, then that’s all the free will you need. But from both a moral and scientific perspective, this seems to miss the point. Where is the freedom in doing what one wants, when one's very desires are the product of prior events that one had absolutely no hand in creating? From my point of view, compatibilism is just a way of saying that a puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Well, there are definitely strings from our evolutionary history. And natural selection has generally produced beings who love them. The ones that don’t tend to go extinct. In fact, in Just Deserts, Dan agrees with this and says, “I have adopted [this] sentence and reinterpreted it as indeed a pretty good definition of free will. … If you are lucky enough to be a responsible agent, you have an obligation to love your strings, protecting them from would-be puppeteers.”

Compatibilists tend to push back here. They say even if our thoughts and actions are the products of unconscious causes, they are still our thoughts and actions. Anything that your brain does or decides, consciously or not, is something that you have done or decided. So, on this account, the fact that we can’t always be aware of the causes of our actions does not negate free will. Our unconscious neurophysiology is just as much us as our conscious thoughts are. But this seems like a bait and switch that trades a psychological fact, the subjective experience of being a conscious agent, for an abstract idea of ourselves as persons. The psychological truth is that most of us feel identical to or in control of a certain channel of information in our conscious minds, but we are wrong about this. The you that you take yourself to be isn’t in control of anything.

This is not a bait and switch by compatibilists. It’s a holistic understanding of our evolved and embodied selves. What’s wrong with that? Sam is the one who insists on fighting a straw man by merely picking on the worst kind of dualist, Cartesian, libertarian free will.

Compatibilists try to save free will by asserting that you are more than your conscious self. You’re identical to the totality of what goes on inside your body, whether you are conscious of it or not. But you can’t honestly take credit for your unconscious mental life. In fact, you are making countless decisions at this moment with organs other than your brain, but you don’t feel responsible for these decisions. Are you producing red blood cells right now? If your body decided to stop doing this, you would be the victim of this change, not its cause. To say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it’s all “you” is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings of agency and moral responsibility that have made the idea of free will a problem for philosophy in the first place.

And to treat red blood cell production the exact same way you treat conscious deliberation by human beings is (as I said in my last post) to sink to a level of dehumanisation that is truly troubling. To say no one is responsible for anything that goes on inside your skin also bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings and facts that have made free will a problem for philosophy. Guess what. We aren't responsible for it all. And we aren't responsible for nothing. Let the hard work of philosophy begin.

Okay, that’s enough from Sam. He has helped me see more issues that need to be discussed, but it’s time for me to put them all on the table in my next and final post in this short series about free will.

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Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 2/2)

4/7/2021

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In the last post, I covered Part 1 of Sam Harris' recent conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman. Sam didn't come off very well in that one, but Scott left him with an excellent cliffhanger question so maybe he can redeem himself. Let's remind ourselves what that question was and then jump right into Part 2 and pick out some interesting bits from the rest of their conversation.

Scott: Of course we are just our biology. What else would we be? But isn’t it the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are? You could still say that it means something for the robot to be a unique robot. But don’t you think that the interesting thing is that the biology encompasses all the unique aspects of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is including your unconsciousness and your consciousness?
Sam: Hmmm. I’m trying to think of how to make this point land…
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<<< NEXT EPISODE PICKS UP RIGHT FROM THERE >>>
Sam: All of the causes of what I’m conscious of were first unconscious. I’m not aware of what my brain is doing at the synaptic level. I’m not a dogmatic materialist [but] let’s just talk in terms of materialism. ... So, my mind is what my brain is doing. … What we’re talking about is information processing in a physical system. In my case, the computer is made of meat. In a robot’s case, it’s silicone. In neither case is there something extra which is emerging or being added which gives a degree of freedom beyond just the impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment.
Scott: I think there is. Let me try to pinpoint precisely what I think that extra thing is. Cognitive control includes things like implementation of intentions. ... You are right, in the moment we don’t really have free will but we have the capacity to shift our behaviour in the future so that we can learn from our mistakes so that we can even make moral reasoning decisions. Turtles, chimps, apes, and robots right now don’t have a great capacity for moral reasoning about an action they already made so that they can change their behaviour in the future. To me, that conscious control is free will. But I don’t think I can convince you to use that label for that phenomenon.

I think Sam is correct here, but the "impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment" is actually just a very good description of what Dan Dennett calls "the free will worth wanting." And Scott's "cognitive control" and "implementation of intentions" is just more of the same. In my Summary of My Evolutionary Theory of Consciousness, I gave the following short definition:

Consciousness, according to this evolutionary theory, is an infinitesimally growing ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival. These forces and needs can vary from the immediate present to infinite timelines and affect anything from the smallest individual to the broadest concerns (both real and imagined) for all of life.

So, when Scott notes that the capacity of humans to change their behaviour is much greater than the capacity for turtles, chimps, and robots, I would say he's describing points on the spectrum of what all of these (living or non-living) systems are able to process with their levels of consciousness. The more you can sense, and the more responses that are available to you, the more degrees of freedom you have. And compatibilists may wish to call this your free will. Much like consciousness, this isn't an on/off switch. It's an infinitesimally growing (or shrinking) amount of freedom. As Dan Dennett said towards the end of his review of Sam's book, "You can't be 'ultimately responsible' (as Galen Strawson has argued) but so what? You can be partially, largely responsible." Equivalently, you can't have Ultimate Libertarian Free Will, but so what? There is a growing sense of freedom along the way towards that, which we might agree to call free will.

But Sam doesn't think we actually have that sense! And that is a big part of his argument that needs to be addressed.

Sam: [People] think they are having an experience of being a self that can author its own actions. The experience of having free will and the experience of being a self...are two sides of the same coin. ... Meditation, successful meditation, absolutely proves to you from the first-person side that that is a false point of view. [The] point of view that gives motivation to this claim about free will [is] how you feel when you feel that you are the conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do. [But that is] because you are not noticing that the next thing you think or intend to do is simply coming out of the darkness behind you which you can’t inspect. It is genuinely mysterious.

This is the kind of argument you make when you see consciousness as an on/off switch and you put far too much stock in meditating on conscious awareness (which is actually level 5 in my hierarchy of consciousness). Sam is right that "you" are not "the" conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do. But I would say that "you" are also an unconscious upstream cause! And these bleed back and forth into one another. There is bi-directional feedback between our unconscious activities and our conscious activities. If this was genuinely mysterious, the thoughts that came out of the darkness would be shocking and unrecognisable to us. But, of course, that's not what we experience. That only appears to happen in genuine cases of psychosis, which we diagnose and try to treat if that occurs. Why exactly does Sam think this way? He draws on two examples over the rest of the talk, so let's present them both at once and consider them together.

First Example:

Sam: Take a moment of conscious deliberation. I have a glass of water and I can decide to pick it up and have a drink now or I can decide to wait. This is a prototypical case of me being in the driver’s seat. I’m free to do this. No one’s got a gun to my head. I don’t have some kind of compulsive water-drinking behaviour. I’m a little bit thirsty, I’m conscious of thirst, but I can choose to resist my thirst. That seems to be me prosecuting my freedom there. But the more you pay attention to what it’s like to make that choice out of your own free will, the more you will discover that it is absolutely mysterious, in every particular, why and how you do what you do and when and how you do it. Subjectively, I have no idea why or how I do any of these things. I have no idea why or how one particular moment becomes decisive.

Second Example:

Sam: [I can provide a long description of someone becoming a classically trained musician because of a love of Bach.] That’s true of somebody. But not me. Why not? Why don’t I care about Bach? All of these things have reasons, they have explanations, causally...
Scott: Those are the things that make you who you are, even if you don’t know why they were caused. [They are part of your] environmental and biological confluence.
Sam: Yes. It’s deterministic or random, but it’s some pattern of causation. But so what does it mean to say that I am free to take a deep and all-encompassing interest in classical music? … The problem is, I have almost no interest in playing the cello. The fact that I don’t is something that I did not author. ... I am as I am with respect to classical music. Now, just imagine that by force of this conversation, you said something that inspired me to be different than I’m tending to be, this would really be the ultimate instance of free will because this would be kind of a surmounting of all my prior tendencies into this new commitment. What would it be like for me to experience that awakening in my own consciousness? That would be totally compatible with the evil genius in the next room saying “We’re going to give him the cello desire here.” It would not demonstrate anything like free will. It would be like, “What came over me?” This would have come from outside of consciousness. It’s not me.

These are not persuasive. In the first case, facts from our evolutionary history show that we humans are animals who only generally need water. We don't need to constantly drink, and there is a large range of hydration within which we can function perfectly well. Therefore, there is rarely, if ever, one instantaneous all-encompassing need to drink NOW. When Sam says he has "no idea why or how one particular moment becomes decisive," he is looking for something that just isn't there. Why not? Because it doesn't need to be there! Like Buridan's Ass, random noise is all that's necessary to decide to drink at any one second vs. another. However, let's say I'm a spy and I pre-arrange to have a drink in a bar at precisely 15 seconds after 8:00PM because that will be a signal to my counterpart that "everything has been arranged." Guess what. As long as everything goes as planned, I'm going to have that drink at precisely that time. And that particular action is going to feel very authored. Sam is trying to stack the deck with his meaningless example, but a meaningful counterexample drives an entirely different intuition.

Similarly, the second example isn't as mysterious as Sam claims either. A love for classical music and a drive to play the cello are very clearly driven by a bit of genetic variance (constitutive luck) and a bit of environmental conditions (situational luck). If you were born tone deaf and 500 years before the invention of the cello, you aren't going to have a drive to play the cello. If you are born with perfect pitch into a family of professional musicians who lead happy lives and have instruments all over the house, you may very easily develop a drive to play the cello. If your situation is somewhere in between these extremes but, at some point along the path of your life, cello-playing looks like a promising path to meet one or several of your Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then it is very possible a drive will develop to lead you down that path. That's how one might convince Sam to play the cello—by showing him he can, and that doing so would solve a very important need he has, over and above all the other need-fulfilling activities he already undertakes. That's a pretty high bar at this point in Sam's life because of his particular path dependence. But if we managed it, these causal explanations would be nothing at all like an "evil genius in the next room saying 'We're going to give him the cello desire here.'"

Are we "Ultimately Free" to choose all of these factors in our lives? No. No one should ever think that we are. But is there freedom in discovering who we are and exploring the "impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment"? Yes. And I think that's a satisfying way to look at life. What is stopping Sam from taking this big picture perspective? Towards the end of the podcast, Sam shows that it comes from his personal history placing a laser focus on meditation and the tiniest details of neuroscience.

Sam: In certain cases, [conscious experience is] not descriptively mysterious at all. We know causally that we can tell a story about it. It’s just two different levels of connecting to the phenomenology here. When I say mysterious, I mean like, I can move my hand, right. This is one of the most prosaic things about me that I can move my hand. I can do this. I have no insight into how I do this. If I suddenly couldn’t do this, that would be flabbergasting. But the fact that I can do it is also flabbergasting. I have literally no insight. I know something about the neurology of this. I can talk about muscle fibres, actin, and the transduction in motor nerves and…I can vomit my concepts.
Scott: You kind of get it.
Sam: So, I’m not saying you can’t have any insight into this, but there is still something, however deep you go, however atomised your experience consciously becomes of a phenomenon, there is just simply this fact of first something wasn’t there and then it’s there. You can shatter your subjective experience down to its atoms and notice that things are just appearing out of the darkness. Sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions, intentions, or their microconstituents. Things can get incredibly pixelated when you spend months on retreats doing nothing but paying attention to mostly sensory perception. It can break down, especially if you are doing it strategically, so as to look for its kind of smallest and briefest aspects, which is one style of meditation. Things become amazingly pixelated. You don’t feel that you have a body anymore. You feel that you have a cloud of sensation, of temperature, and pressure, and movement, which just doesn’t have the shape of a body at all. You don’t feel “hand”, you feel these micro-changes of primary sensation at each moment. But again, whatever you are noticing is there and then it’s not there. And then something else is there and then it’s not there. And “you” are not doing any of it. That’s the crucial point. “You”, the one who is witnessing, aren’t doing any of it.

This perfectly captures Sam's walled-off dualism. If "you" are only "the one who is witnessing" then of course you aren't going to be able to understand everything moving in and out of that perspective. To expect differently would be like what the ecological philosopher Arne Naess calls "trying to blow a bag up from the inside." There are limits to what conscious awareness has access to and you have to examine the facts outside of those limits in order to understand it. And that's okay! The view from the interior—no matter how pixelated—only gives you so much. But a holistic view adds nicely to the picture, and it lets you understand more of the interior even if you don't have access to what is outside of it. For biological phenomena like us, Tinbergen's four considerations of (1) evolutionary histories and (2) personal histories, along with (3) functions and (4) mechanisms, add up to this big and informative picture.

In some ways, it's just philosophical wordplay to decide to call these perspectives free will or not, or free will worth wanting, but whatever label you use, the ideas you attach to that label have real consequences for the way you navigate through life. Let's examine a few of those.

I mentioned in my last post that Sam's views lead him to a very dehumanised place. In this episode, he puts that on display even further. Here are five examples of that which add up to something quite disturbing:

First Example:

Sam: Almost no one understands this. Dan Dennett does not understand this. He obviously doesn’t. He obviously feels like a self. And that is the string upon which all this controversy is strung. Most of the people listening right now are thinking, “what the fuck is he talking about?” But that voice in your head that says, “what the fuck is he talking about?”…that isn’t you! That is not a self.
Scott: What do you mean that’s not you? It’s you! Again, you’re a dualist when you say that.
Sam: It’s no more you than the bead of sweat that drips down your forehead is you. It is an object.
Scott: I disagree! People don’t identify themselves with their hand, but they identify themselves with their conscious desires and motivations so we can have gradations of things, of parts of our body that people identify themselves with.
Sam: From the point of view of consciousness, there is simply consciousness and its contents.

Second Example:

Sam: [Trump’s election] is a little bit analogous to if we elected a rhinoceros to be president. I’d be fucking tearing my hair out over how awful that is. At no point am I imagining that the rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros and at no point am I wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros. I don’t hate the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros just shouldn’t be president of the United States. That’s a catastrophe to do that. And in some sense, we elected a rhinoceros president.

Third Example:

Sam: Someone comes into your house and wants to kill you and your kids. By all means, shoot that person in the head. That is what guns are for. You should do it if it’s a grizzly bear and you should do it if it’s a person who seems to think he has free will to kill you and your kids. That’s morally uncomplicated in my view.

Fourth Example:

Sam: Hatred really does require an attribution to someone that they could and should have done otherwise. It’s like you really do believe they are the authors of their bad actions. The moment you find that they have a brain tumour that makes them exculpatory then you change your response. You think, well I did hate Charles Whitman for getting up in that clocktower and killing all those kids but once they performed an autopsy on him and found that massive brain tumour pressing on his amygdala, well then, okay, I have to recognise that I can’t hate the guy. He was as unlucky as the kids he shot. On some level that happens to everybody, once you recognise that free will is an illusion.

Fifth Example:

Sam: Every instance of [voluntary control], the sufficiency of my strength of will in one case, the weakness of my will in another case, every bit of it is being determined by states in my brain which I didn’t author, which I didn’t create.
Scott: It’s still you! It’s still you!
Sam: But my liver is still me and it gives me absolutely no sense of free will. If my liver stops, if my liver is working exactly the way it is in this moment and no other way, if it works better tomorrow, or stops completely on Friday, I am a mere victim of those changes, or witness to their consequences. It’s not within the domain of my autonomy or agency. But so it is with states of my brain. So it is with each instance of neurochemistry in my brain. And yet that produces everything that I experience including my preferences, my goals, my impulses that are in conformity with my goals, and then my sudden subversion of those impulses with some alternate impulse. That’s getting piped up from below and ... the fact that that comes online in that moment and doesn’t in another, that’s mysterious. The fact that it comes on to the degree that it does, and not one degree further, is also mysterious. It’s probably dependent on other things that seem completely adventitious to my character like whether I got enough sleep the night before or whether I had a full lunch or whether I got enough sunlight.

Bollocks! There are hard evolutionary facts that differentiate human minds from beads of sweat, rhinoceroses, bears, and brain tumors. Dan Dennett already answered this with an extended reply in his podcast conversation with Sam. It's helpful to read that in its entirety:

That’s very useful. Tom Wolfe has this passage where he says what we’ve learned from neuroscience is that we’re wired wrong. Don’t blame me. Don’t blame us. We’re wired wrong. No! What neuroscience shows us is that we’re wired. It doesn’t show us we’re wired wrong. Some people like poor Whitman are wired wrong. ... You’re saying it’s brain tumours all the way down. Well, I find that extrapolation doesn’t move me at all. I don’t think it’s a logical argument. I think it is a mistaken extrapolation. It’s like a mathematical induction gone wrong. [Free will libertarians also] say, we're all that way. Well, no. That’s precisely what we understand — that we are not all disabled. Nobody’s an angel. Nobody’s perfect. So, if anything short of perfection counts as being disabled to the point of being exculpatorily disabled, then you’re right. But that’s a very strange view. The idea that you couldn’t be able enough to be held responsible is the crux of the issue right now between us. I say that the boundaries are always porous, and as we learn more about neuroscience, we may very well move some people that are exculpated into the guilty / not excusable category and others will move in the other direction. But we’ll still keep the distinction between those who are basically wired right and those that are wired wrong.

This is similar to a point I made in my review of Just Deserts about how a Tinbergen view of free will challenges the view that luck "swallows everything" in our considerations.

It isn’t luck that I grew up to be a person rather than a horse. Once I was conceived, the evolutionary history (phylogeny) that led up to me put a lot of constraints on my personal development (ontogeny). Luck may explain all the differences between me and every other person out there, but we needn’t worry about luck when describing all the things we have in common. There are hordes of characteristics that all humans share, but the one that is most important for this debate is our capacity to learn. The extreme neuroplasticity we have (a mechanism of free will) is what enables all but the most unfortunate humans to sense and respond to their environments (a function for free will) to the point where they slowly, slowly become a unique self.

Sam has taken the giant step-change introduced by Charles Whitman's brain tumor and tried to apply its conclusion to each and every step-change up or down the evolutionary ladder from there. To him, nothing is responsible all the way down to beads of sweat, and nothing is responsible all the way up to billions of average humans. This is a very blunt and useless view of the world. And in the wrong hands, it could be used to wipe away humans as easily as one would wipe away a bead of sweat. I'm not at all suggesting Sam is that kind of a monster, but it would take a weird view of morality to intervene here and save us from such dehumanisation. As you might expect, Sam has exactly that kind of weird view.

[Scott and Sam start to have a giant discussion about the is-ought divide. Sam thinks it’s a language trick we should just ignore. He thinks the only thing you need to boot up morality is to agree that “we don’t want the worst possible misery for everyone.”]
Scott: The way I think about it is that there is no “should” without “in order to,” which is a goal. If someone says you should do X, that necessarily implies that you should do X in order to get Y. There can be no should without reference to a goal.
Sam: What if the goal is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone?
Scott: But “better” or “worse” are value judgments. I don’t know why you don’t see that.
Sam: Put your hand on a hot stove and then tell me that.
Scott: If it was in order to achieve a broader goal, and putting my hand on that hot stove would help me to achieve that broader goal, I would do that and deal with the suckiness of the feeling.
Sam: [...stammers, then...] To say that “the worst possible misery for everyone is bad is a value judgment,” is to say nothing!
Scott: You’re accepting a particular definition of well-being.
Sam: No, no, no. You’re just not understanding my claim.
Scott: How are facts going to lead me to action?
Sam: The facts are that there are very different experiences on offer here and you will helplessly find yourself preferring the good day at Esalen over the rat-filled dungeon, just to take the fairly parochial differences that we can notice here on Earth.
Scott: But good can only be used in relation to a goal. How are you divorcing it from the goal? You disagree with that?
Sam: No, it’s just the valence of certain experiences within consciousness that have no necessary reference to a goal. You can be so happy or unhappy that it has no reference point in past or future. You can have the best possible acid trip or the worst possible acid trip and there’s no goal there. The sheer extremis of your physiology pushed to the breaking point.
Scott: There are pleasurable and there’s unpleasant. But I don’t think they map onto good or bad in the way that you claim.
Sam: Dial them up and give them enough time. What if existence was just that? [Sam then presents a poor analogy about how a physicist who doesn’t believe in math doesn’t get to have a vote at a physics conference, and he claims that is the same as the Taliban not getting to have a vote about morality.] They’re imbeciles. They have a shitty culture. We know this. And it shouldn’t be taboo to say this.

Ugh! Scott is 100% right here. His "in order to" is another way of restating my argument on how to bridge the is-ought divide with a want. For example, I say: Life is. Life wants to remain an is. Therefore life ought to act to remain so. Scott would put it: Life is. In order for life to remain an is, life ought to act to remain so. These are equivalent arguments that both require additional arguments as to why the "want" or the "goal" are correct.

Sam, on the other hand, has a viciously circular argument that tells us nothing about hard choices between where we are today and his worst possible outcome. How is one to judge whether one is moving towards or away from "helplessly preferring things that have no reference point"? He has no facts to consider for that! And his worst possible outcome is wrong too. I wrote about this in my response to Sam's Moral Landscape challenge, but I don't suppose he saw that. He was too blinded by the kind of thinking you get when you mistake a meaningless acid trip for profundity and then add in the woo-ey Buddhist claptrap that emotions should only flow through you. Sam wants to divorce morality from consequences but that's just not possible. The "valence of certain experiences" were given to us by our evolutionary histories and they help us reach our evolutionary goals. Am I free to choose whether or not I experience Jaak Panksepp's seven basic emotions of FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PANIC, AND PLAY? No, I am not. But they drive competing needs that I must meet if I want to reach my goals (in order to reach my goals), which I have freedom to discover and freedom to choose between.

Are those goals and choices mine? Am I responsible for the choices that get made? Not ultimately, whatever that is supposed to mean. I do not stand outside of life's evolutionary history. But those needs are felt by me, and those choices are not made anywhere else, so I don't see why they're not mine. Sam sees things differently, abdicating all goals, choices, and responsibilities (to the universe?), but that ends up tying him in knots and eventually making Dan Dennett's case even stronger.

Sam: There are paradoxes here. The responsibility paradox is real, and I still don’t know what I think about it. … When you take a truly competent person who then does something horrible, that person is really responsible. That’s the true case of responsibility. But the paradox for me is that the more competent you make the person, the more their failures to behave well become inscrutable. … This is very clear in parenting. I have daughters who I’m certainly not browbeating about the illusoriness of free will. No, I’m trying to raise them to be competent self-regulating human beings. So, when I talk to one of my daughters, if I say, “you really should have done otherwise,” …it’s never a claim that in this instance, if I rewound the universe, they might have done otherwise. No, this is a causally determined outcome that was always the way it was going to be. But, it’s a conversation about what I want them to do next time. And saying that is further input into the clockwork of their lives. So, that will change them. Ultimately, my daughters are going to become civilised human beings who will not behave the way they did at 7-years-old or 12-years-old when they are in their 40s. And those changes will be causally affected on the basis of demands imposed on them. But again, there’s no place for the folk psychological notion of free will to land there.
Scott: You wouldn’t give your daughter any credit if she became president of the United States some day?
Sam: I do feel like pride is a virtue that has an expiration date in a human life. Developmentally, there’s like a critical period where pride is not an ethical error or a sign of psychological confusion. It’s actually something you want to get into the code. … But at a certain point, I think you clearly want to outgrow it. … It’s not a basis for compassion for oneself and others. … I don’t feel pride about anything in my life now. I have all kinds of outcomes I prefer. Sometimes I realise them and sometimes I don’t. And the obverse of pride is something like shame. Again, shame is an important thing to be able to feel, but ultimately, I think it reaches its shelf life. You want to be able to transcend shame. Not too early. This is an interesting topic. I’m not sure what I totally believe about it. … You’re just telling yourself a story about the past in both cases. You’re thinking thoughts in the present that nominally refer to the past and they’re making you feel a certain way. It’s like you are watching a movie about your past and you’re being entranced by it and it’s kindling an emotional response that has a certain half-life and it’s incredibly boring. It’s an incredibly boring thing to do with your attention. It’s masturbatory on the pride side, a pseudo-source of gratification, which sets up a system of comparison between yourself and others that ultimately is not a source of well-being. If you are comparing yourself to others and feeling good about that, then five minutes later you are going to be comparing yourself unfavourably to other people who are doing yet more impressive things and you are going to feel bad about that. That pinballing between those two things is not the right algorithm to live a truly self-actualised life. I do think pride and shame ultimately get outgrown. At what point, that’s an interesting question.

Yes, Sam, that is an interesting question, because you are precisely describing the development of a person into a unique and responsible self. This is what Dan Dennett meant when he said that Freedom Evolves. We have the freedom to learn from our experience. If I rewound the universe so that every brain state and environmental influence was exactly the same, it’s true that “I couldn’t have done otherwise,” but that’s not the point. You will never face the same exact situation twice. The universe moves on. But you can learn from the first instance and do something different the next time in a similar situation. This ability to review the past is one of the most important capabilities of consciousness that has developed. And it does not have to be boring, masturbatory, or self-flagellating when done correctly. You cannot change the past, but you can have a growth mindset about the future. You should not continually cry over spilt milk, but you are not doomed to be clumsy forever either. And the emotional feelings generated from your own introspection (or in reaction to those expressed by others), are mechanical cranes that help make the necessary changes in your neural wiring to help reach our goals. See my post on where emotions come from to understand this in more detail. This larger view renders the "fully competent person who does something horrible" much less inscrutable. They've usually just learned something from the past and decided to pursue a new goal.

Once again, you cannot choose the universe you were born into or the particular characteristics and situations that affect you, but the needs, desires, and goals that you feel do not belong to anyone else, so they are yours to own. The beliefs you hold about this are important drivers of your ability to learn and navigate the world. The emotions that drive us should not be too hot from believing in libertarian free will and ultimate responsibility, but they must not be too cold either, holding no one responsible for anything. Sam’s arguments would literally drain the passion out of compassion for ourselves and others, which removes a crucial tool from our ability to learn and grow.

What terms should be used in the most helpful sets of personal beliefs about these issues? Perhaps the use of “free will” comes down to semantic choices between psychologists and philosophers. That’s something Scott and Sam explored briefly.

Scott: We can want to want things. You’re not distinguishing between first-order goals and second-order goals. What gives us free will as a human species? … It’s the wanting to want. It’s our capacity to use implementation of intentions to get out of the bed in the morning and go to the gym even if we don’t want to. I don’t want to do that, but my freedom lies in my capacity to use my consciousness and change my environment in all sorts of ways so that it’s easier, so that the constraints aren’t as big. Don’t you see that as an important part of free will that matters to people?
Sam: I see no reason to call that free will.
Scott: [After a short digression.] There’s a really interesting paper about smokers and free will by Roy Baumeister. He found that in almost every case, people overestimated the extent to which they wouldn’t be able to quit. They wouldn’t be able to have free will [to eliminate] the urge, but it turns out humans have much more self-control than they realise they are capable of.
Sam: There’s a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. There’s a difference between behavioural self-control and lacking that capacity. Let’s say that…my goal is to stop smoking but I’m completely incapable of not smoking. That’s one way to be. The other way to be is that I have a goal to stop smoking and I can actually veto the impulse and stop smoking when it comes online. But every instance of this, the sufficiency of my strength of will in one case, the weakness of my will in another case, every bit of it is being determined by states in my brain which I didn’t author, which I didn’t create.

There goes Sam again with his dualist "I" sitting outside of his embodied self. But I read the Baumeister paper after I listened to this podcast and found it really interesting. I especially liked the following list of definitions from the front of the paper:

Agency is the capacity to initiate and control action. It is related to the term agent, as in someone who acts. It encompasses choosing, initiating action on one's own, and accepting responsibility for one's chosen actions.
Voluntary control has multiple meanings. For present purposes, it can be understood as indicating that the person is capable of choosing between performing the action and not performing it. Voluntary control means that the power to decide resides within the individual: the person is capable of making a conscious decision and implementing it. Loss of voluntary control means that the person is incapable of acting differently, either because of external forces or unconscious causes. With regard to addictive smoking, loss of voluntary control means that smokers cannot stop themselves from smoking.
Free will is understood as the capability to act in different ways, subject to the person's own control and serving the person's reasons, goals, wishes, and choices. A recent and authoritative definition, based on an interdisciplinary committee working for a granting foundation, defined free will as the capability of performing free actions. Free actions, in turn, were defined in two ways. One was “any intentional action performed on the basis of informed, rational deliberation by a sane person in the absence of compulsion and coercion.” The other invoked multiplicity of possible actions (i.e., the person could do two or more different things) in a given situation as constructed by all prior causes and events. Thus, in simple terms, free will is the capacity to act in different ways in the same situation. It thus overlaps considerably with voluntariness. Shepherd (2012) showed that most people do not accept unconscious free will, so free will entails conscious control of action. The term “free will” is a traditional usage but modern theorists generally do not postulate “will” as a distinct psychological entity, so it would be more precise to speak of free action.

I quite like these definitions. They are thoughtful, careful, fully drained of extreme libertarian notions, and compatible with the facts of a naturalistic and deterministic universe. They also overlap with a lot of what Sam thinks is going on in the world, despite his controversial and confused labelling.

Sam: None of this is to deny that certain outcomes in life are better than others and worth wanting. None of this is to deny that there are ways to get what you want out of life and ways to fail to get what you want. None of this is to deny that there is this vast landscape of experience and we need to navigate one part of it so as to be happy and functional and we should avoid navigating so as to be captured by another part which leads to the worst forms of misery. All of that is true, and we can talk about how to do all of that. And all of that includes the prospect that people can learn, and people can improve themselves.
Scott: I don’t think what you are saying is wrong. I think you are confusing the hell out of people because you make such great points. The kind of free will that matters to humans—we have all of that. … My point is this. The cybernetic system wants to reach a goal that it desires. … Don’t you think that’s a sensible form of the term free will, that you have free will to write a book? You want to do so, and you use your consciousness to make that a reality. You don’t see that as the kind of free will that people truly care about?
Sam: People care about realising their goals in life. And there are causal ways to succeed at that, and causal ways to fail at that. Learning to play the cello is not going to happen by accident. My denying free will is not the same thing as endorsing fatalism. … This is how people misunderstand this criticism of free will. They think, well, if I have no free will, then why do anything? Why not just wait to see what happens? If I accidentally wait to see if I learn to play the cello, we know what’s going to happen there. I’m not going to learn to play the cello. The only way to learn is to intend to learn, to practice, to seek instruction. All of that. People care about outcomes in life that are worth caring about. None of that requires free will to talk about that.

Well, it sure seems like we do need some notion of free will to talk about this stuff. As soon as you deny free will, fatalism, dehumanisation, and coercion creep into the conversation. So, until free will skeptics like Sam come up with a better term, I think we’re stuck with Dan Dennett’s free will worth wanting or the more clinical definitions of free will from psychologists like Scott and Baumeister.

Feel free to propose something different though! I always look forward to the opportunity to learn and improve my own beliefs. Next time, I'll take a brief look at Sam's "final thoughts" on all this and then I ought to be in a good position to offer my own current thoughts.

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Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 1/2)

4/5/2021

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On March 22nd, 3 Quarks Daily published my review of Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett's new book Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. Ten days earlier, Sam Harris released his Final Thoughts on Free Will on his Making Sense podcast. Was he trying to scoop me? I wish! Did he even mention Just Deserts in his podcast? Surprisingly no! Why not? Probably because he and Dan Dennett have already had several heated conversations about free will. There was Dan's dismissive review of one of Sam's books, Sam's pissed-off response to that review, and then a 2-hour podcast discussion trying to smooth the water between them. No need to go back to all that!

So, what prompted Sam to speak out about free will now? Well, I think the real reason Sam posted his thoughts when he did was because it was fresh on the heels of a 3-hour discussion he had with Scott Barry Kaufman on The Psychology Podcast. Scott published his amazing book Transcend last year, which has the sub-title "The New Science of Self-Actualization". In other words, having a self that is free to be actualized is kind of an essential part of Scott's project. But Sam is famous for denying these things in his work, including his 2012 book Free Will.

Since I'm deeply immersed in the topic of free will right now, I thought I'd spend a few posts on these recent discussions. I'll get to Sam's "final thoughts" in a few posts, but first, let's take a closer look at Part 1 of Sam's conversation with Scott, which was posted on February 25th. Next time, I'll delve into Part 2, which was posted on March 4th. I won't bother transcribing all three hours of these free podcasts, so please listen to them for yourself for the full story. But here are some important bits that I'd like to comment on.

Sam: When I was in college, a girlfriend broke up with me and I just became this machine that was producing unhappiness until an MDMA experience showed me that that could be interrupted with no reason attached.

Sam has become a strong proponent of psychedelic drug use after this early experience kicked off his life as a contemplative and public intellectual focusing on consciousness and free will. I haven't used such drugs myself personally, but as a 49-year-old-man now, I have to say that every time Sam talks about the important lessons he got from the experience, I think I've already learned those lessons from other experiences. (Notably, in grand nature spots, but also while studying astronomy, geology, and deep evolutionary history.) Could I have learned these lessons earlier in my life on a drug trip? Maybe. But I tend to agree with Abraham Maslow who thought such experiences were cheating to try to get to self-actualization. Better to have reasons for your emotions and learn from those.

[Sam] studied for years with the leading Buddhist meditation thinkers. There are dualistic vs. non-dualistic forms of awareness meditation, with different sets of instructions for each one as to what to pay attention to and why. With these exercises, you aren’t meditating yourself into perfection; you are just learning to recognize something that is already there.

I've not been on any lengthy retreats yet, but I have done a fair bit of reading about meditation, and I have practiced it on my own for nearly 20 years now with the help of many guided meditation sessions along the way (including lots from Sam's Waking Up app). Meditating has been a good and useful experience in my life, but, a bit like using psychedelics, I think it's an artificial experience that doesn't have quite the relevance to everyday life that Sam thinks it does. I'll say more about that in the next post, but I wanted to flag that I have meditated and enjoyed it.

Scott: I want to read a sentence you wrote because I have issues and questions with it “Consider what it would actually take to have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions and you would need to be in complete control of these factors.” This sentence reads like you are an implicit dualist. Who is the “you” in that sentence?

This is a great observation that I also notice whenever I read or listen to Sam. He continually toggles back and forth between his cold declarations about the lack of a self or free will and then his hot instructions about what "you" need to do or notice about "your consciousness and its contents". In Dan Dennett's review of Free Will, Dan pointed this out too. He noted a sentence on p9 that said "I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat." Dan said, "If this isn't pure Cartesianism, I don't know what it is. His prefrontal cortex is part of the I in question." That's exactly right. Consciousness is embodied and should not be spoken of so separately as Sam is wont to do.

What does Sam say about this sentence when Scott asks him how to understand it? He shifts into Zen Koan mode.

Sam: Yeah. It’s not really understandable in that way. What you’ve really just landed on is the problem with the concept of free will. It’s an incoherent idea. ... As you know, Dan Dennett has tried to purify the concept so as to have in his terms a “free will worth wanting”. ... [But] you’re not acknowledging just how many important things shift ethically once you let go of that spooky free will. Things really do change. And they change in ways that are important not just for our justice system and our concept of justice, they are important for ethical intuitions about what it means to be a good person and how we should feel in the presence of all the misadventures we have in life...and Dan Dennett’s project acknowledges none of that. That’s why he and I have never agreed on this topic.

This is an incredibly disingenuous reading of Dan's work and his previous exchanges with Sam. If anything, it's the other way around as Sam has not done the hard work of trying to really see what goes away when the concept of free will disappears. As one example, Dan noted in is review of Free Will that "entirely missing from Harris's account...is any acknowledgement of the morally important difference between...the raving psychopath and us." Perhaps this is why Dan has just moved on to debate Gregg Caruso instead, since he's actually a serious thinker who has tried to develop a Public Health Quarantine Model to replace our current retributive justice system. Poking at the holes in Caruso's model took up a significant portion of Just Desesrts. Sam doesn't even have a model to poke at. And it's not just psychopaths he doesn't see as any different than the rest of us.

Sam: The rules, ethically and psychologically, seem to change entirely for people, when you are talking about [other] people. They don’t think this way about chimpanzees. They don’t think this way about people with certain kinds of brain damage. ...The problem is that it doesn’t make any sense. ... It’s very difficult to make sense of this in terms of the streams of causality that I’m not aware of, in terms of gene transcription, and neurotransmitter behaviour, and all of the causes reaching back to the Big Bang that I didn’t author.

I'll point this out again in the next post, but the way Sam speaks about humans is literally dehumanising. In case it's not obvious how dangerous that is, David Livingstone Smith has done excellent work on the subject. (See this book review by Smith for some examples of Nazi dehumanisation.) I get that Sam is merely recognising here that the "folk" have different intuitions about people compared to their intuitions about chimpanzees and brain damaged people, but by saying this doesn't make sense, he is opening up the door to some very bad attitudes.

Scott: You are really hung up on the magical part of free will.
Sam: It’s not hung up! It is what people mean when they feel that someone should be punished, really punished, because they deserve their punishment. That is “just deserts.” That is someone who feels that the logic of retribution is anchored to libertarian free will.

It's sad to hear that Sam is still stuck repeating these points even though Dan Dennett took them apart several years ago. In his review of Free Will, Dan noted that Sam said, "However, the 'free will' that compatibilists defend is not the free will that most people feel they have" (p16). But Dan countered, "First of all, he doesn't know this. [And experimental philosophy suggests he's wrong.] But even if it is true, maybe all this shows is that most people are suffering from a sort of illusion that could be replaced by wisdom. After all, most people used to believe the sun went around the earth. They were wrong, and it took some heavy lifting to convince them of this." And in Just Deserts, Dan and Gregg do lots of this kind of lifting. Both agree there are reasons to get rid of retribution and libertarian free will, and you can do so as a free will skeptic (Gregg's project) or as a compatibilist (Dan's project).

Scott: It seems like people can do all the things they care about. If they think they care about making choices that are somehow uncaused, they just aren’t literally understanding what that means, as you point out. What people really mean when they insist that free will is important is they don’t want to feel coerced. They think of causes as sources of coercion, but that’s a confusion. I think people want to make choices that are consistent with their own goals and be able to deliberate about the causes where their desires aren’t totally clear, and they can do those things. And it’s pretty clear their consciousness participates causally in that process.
Sam: I would dispute that. ... For much of what we seem to do consciously, it remains mysterious why consciousness need be associated with any of these things. We can imagine building robots that could pass the Turing test that could do all of these things without there being something that it is like to be those robots.

Ah, now we're getting to another root problem with Sam's view of the world. I think that all his meditation training focused on "consciousness and its contents" has left him with his dualist language and a fundamental misunderstanding of what consciousness is. I've spent the past year looking at the definitions and studies of consciousness (summarised here) and found it requires a much more nuanced understanding of how consciousness emerges to varying degrees via a hierarchy of activities. Along the way, there is clear evidence that conscious awareness is required for certain types of learning. (This kind of awareness is possibly what Sam means by "consciousness" but that's not at all clear considering his dabbling in panpsychism.) Also, Dan Dennett's paper on The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies shows just how unimaginable Sam's robots really are.

Scott: Of course we are just our biology. What else would we be? But isn’t it the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are? You could still say that it means something for the robot to be a unique robot. But don’t you think that the interesting thing is that the biology encompasses all the unique aspects of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is, including your unconsciousness and your consciousness?
Sam: Hmmm. I’m trying to think of how to make this point land…
<<< ROLL PODCAST CREDITS >>>

Wow, what a cliffhanger ending! I shouted, "Yes!" to Scott's question, but let's see what Sam says next time.

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A Few Further Thoughts on Just Deserts

3/29/2021

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I got quite a lot of nice comments last week on my review of Just Deserts. The authors of the book—Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett—both told 3 Quarks Daily that it was a good review so I consider that a real feat to have satisfied both sides in such an argumentative book.

One of the comments I saw was a wish to hear a debate between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, who recently posted his "Final Thoughts On Free Will." I can't make that happen, but while I'm focused on this topic, I thought I should write a little something about Sam's position.

I'll get to that soon, but first, I just thought I'd share a quick post with a few of the paragraphs that had to get cut from my 2,500-word review. I may want to refer to these later, and they really were darlings I hated to kill. Enjoy! I'll be back soon with more on this topic.

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The fear of determinism is an ancient one, stretching back to early religious questions about whether gods or the fates foresaw and controlled everything we humans do. When the Enlightenment came along, and Newton showed us the mechanical workings of the cosmos, and Darwin showed us the blind nature of natural selection, our fear of control shifted from warm and (hopefully) friendly gods to the cold and calculating inevitability of logic and mathematics. Dostoyevsky wrote a wonderful passage about this in Notes from Underground in 1864:

“You say, science itself will teach man that he never had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. … [But I] would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, a propos of nothing, [a man were to arise and] say to us all: ‘I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!’”

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If you’d prefer to just form your own opinion and cast your own vote, go read Just Deserts now. If you want to hear what I think, here goes. But it helps to put my cards on the table first, so you know where I’m coming from. I call myself an evolutionary philosopher. I think paying close attention to the history of evolution gives us new insights into age-old philosophical questions. So, I’m obviously a huge fan of Dan Dennett. But I’ve also seen Gregg debate free will at a local event, and I got to have a few beers with him in the pub afterwards while he continued the debate informally. I found him extremely impressive and persuasive. (He’s also just a very nice guy.) When I found out about Just Deserts, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and see how the two of these guys got on with things.

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In some sense, both of these are quite radical positions, and both of them are conservative as well. Gregg is simply doing standard analytic philosophy—dissecting definitions and logically analysing their properties and relationships—while driven by a commonly held desire to reform a prison system we almost all agree is not working. But his conclusions demand that we drop all longstanding usages of free will, desert, responsibility, blame, and punishment. He thinks they are all too tainted and has built an entire replacement for them that he calls a Public Health-Quarantine Model. (There is much more on this in his forthcoming book Rejecting Retributivism.) Dan is never one to shy away from an unpopular opinion (c.f. “consciousness is an illusion”), but he is deeply skeptical of such radicalism here. He maintains that respect for the law “is a foundational requirement of stability in a state” (JD p.164). Instead, he would rather propose deep changes to philosophy “because we cannot do the job right while sequestered in our ivory towers” (JD p.165). He seems to think folk terminology is worth holding onto here, even if their meanings must unavoidably shift.

Ultimately, this may just be a choice in strategy between Dan’s position and Gregg’s. If so, that would mimic a story Dan told in his 2008 essay “Some Observations On the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will.” Regarding Daniel Wegner’s book title The Illusion of Conscious Will, Dan wrote, “Our disagreement was really a matter of expository tactics, not theory. … Should one insist that free, conscious will is real without being magic, without being what people traditionally thought it was (my line)? Or should one concede that traditional free will is an illusion—but not to worry: Life still has meaning, and people can and should be responsible (Wegner's line)? The answer to this question is still not obvious.” Perhaps Dan is still wrestling with this choice, although it’s clear Gregg thinks his choice is the right one judging by the weight of recent books and articles he has put behind it.

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My Review of "Just Deserts" by Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso

3/23/2021

2 Comments

I was very excited to receive my pre-ordered copy of Just Deserts in early 2021. Dan Dennett is an obvious influence and inspiration to all philosophers with an evolutionary view, and I was lucky enough to meet Gregg Caruso a few years ago when he came to Newcastle to debate free will with Christian List. As I raced through JD, I was offered the opportunity to write a review of it, which was subsequently published at 3 Quarks Daily. This book and review really helped me clarify my own position on this metaphysical issue, and I consider it a major accomplishment that both authors have said it was a fine review. Please check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below.

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“Just Deserts: Debating Free Will” By Daniel Dennett And Gregg Caruso

Just Deserts is a surprisingly slim book, only 206 pages long, which could almost be a chapter for one of its authors, let alone a full book from two. It has a whimsical title that hints it might simply be the sweet ending of a multi-course meal cooked up and eaten elsewhere. But don’t be fooled! Just Deserts holds a titanic discussion concerning two huge cracks in the foundations of human thought. The first is the stated crack about the well-known problems of free will, moral responsibility, and social justice. The second crack is an unstated one that only reveals itself in a meta consideration of the styles of the two authors. That shows us there’s a very deep question underneath it all concerning how we should even do philosophy to properly think about these topics.

<<Click here to read the rest of the review at 3 Quarks Daily>>

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Consciousness 23 — Summary of My Evolutionary Theory

2/22/2021

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Time to look over everything.

I started this series on the 15th of March 2020. Looking back, I thought I had an ambitious plan then, but it turned out it wasn’t nearly enough. After thousands of written words (and probably thousands of pages read), I’m finally ready to present a summary of my current evolutionary theory of consciousness. I’ll start with the background of my metaphysical hypotheses. Then I’ll recount the theories that I like best for the two biggest mysteries for this topic — the hard problem of consciousness and the emergence of life. I’ll note how new forces emerge once life enters the universe. Then, this will put me in a position to state an expansive definition of consciousness that fits with all of those pieces of the puzzle. And finally, I’ll finish with a bit more depth on the details and definitions in the theory so that it’s as clear as I can make it in one essay.

I thought I’d be wrapping up this series with this summary, but my research shows that I really ought to have at least one more post after this to go over the traditional objections to a materialist account of consciousness. If my stated theory can answer all of those, then I’ll at least have a case for a coherent (if not correct) theory. On to the summary!

Preface — Epistemological and Metaphysical Background

According to an evolutionary worldview, the universe is always changing, we cannot see what the future will bring, and one can never get outside of it all to gather objective facts about the true state of the world. Therefore, knowledge cannot be justified, true, belief, as Plato thought. Knowledge can only ever be justified, beliefs, that are currently surviving our best rational tests. Knowledge is always provisional, and there is no bedrock upon which certainty can rest. (For now. Even that fact isn’t known for sure.)

To live, we must act. To decide upon actions from this state of fundamental ignorance, we must start with hypotheses and then test them. In evolutionary philosophy, my first tenet is the first hypothesis that is necessary to get us off the ground and running.

1. We live in a rational, knowable, physical universe. Effects have natural causes. No supernatural events have ever been unquestionably documented.

Through the eons of the entire age of life, and over all the instances of individual organisms acting within the universe, the ability of life to predict its environment and continue to survive in it has required that the universe must be singular, objective, and knowable. If it were otherwise, life could not make sense of things and survive here. We may never know if that is absolutely true, but so far that knowledge has survived. The objective, physical, natural, material existence of the universe may indeed be an assumption, but as a starting point, it seems to be the strongest knowledge we have. All previously uncovered mysteries have not changed this fact, so rationality dictates that we ought not to abandon it without good cause.

Before life emerged, all evidence points to a universe made of matter that interacted according to the fundamental laws of physics and then chemistry. All objects were affected by forces, but there were no subjects, minds, intentions, or consciousness. So, how did we get from physics to chemistry to biology? And how might consciousness suddenly appear during that time?

Hypotheses on the Mysteries of Abiogenesis and The Hard Problem

First, let’s look at the emergence of life. We may never know for sure how it actually happened. There may never be a way to find conclusive evidence or rule out all but one possibility. But the hypothesis that is a leading contender and makes the most sense to me right now is known as the “RNA World” hypothesis. Nobel Prize winner Jack Szostak’s work on this is explained very simply in a short video called The Origin of Life, and there is a much longer video series on the topic as well. I’ve covered this in more depth in a previous post, but a quick overview is that polymer chains and membranes form spontaneously in the environment and it’s very plausible to see how a simple 2-component system might form that can eat, grow, contain information, replicate, and evolve, simply through thermodynamic, mechanical, and electrical forces. That would kickstart evolution, which means the development of life would be off and running towards the present day. No ridiculous improbabilities are needed, no supernatural forces, and no lightning striking a mud puddle. Just chemistry and mechanical activity.

This leads us to a simple explanation for life, which is defined as something that preserves, furthers, or reinforces its existence in the given environment. There are seven traits currently considered to enable this kind of self-prolonged existence: organisation, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, adaptation, homeostasis, and metabolism. We can now see how physics plus chemistry plus natural selection might have led to all of these traits. But what about consciousness?

This is basically the hard problem as coined by David Chalmers. We have subjective experience. Evolutionary studies have shown us that there is an unbroken line in the history of life. But water and rocks don’t appear to have anything like consciousness. So, how can inert matter ever evolve into the subjective experience that we humans undoubtedly feel?

Chalmers has proposed that subjective experience may be a fundamental property of the universe, like the spin of electromagnetism. I have come to accept that as a likely hypothesis. All matter is affected by the forces of physics and chemistry. But until that matter is organised into a living subject that is capable of responding to those forces in such a way as to remain alive, it makes no sense to talk of non-living matter as ‘feeling’ or ‘experiencing’ those forces. Inert matter has no structure capable of living through subjective activities. Panpsychism claims that minds (psyche) are everywhere, and they don’t need physics and matter to exist. But this raises innumerable difficulties, including an enormous change to one’s metaphysics that supposedly cannot be detected by science. What I hypothesise instead is that the forces of physics are everywhere, and it is a fundamental property of the universe that these forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge. Since the Greek for force is dynami, I would say the universe has pandynamism rather than panpsychism. The psyche only originates and evolves along with life. This psyche expands as the living structures expand their capabilities of sensing and responding to these forces. And the ‘flavour’ of experiences within this psyche are utterly dependent upon the underlying mechanisms of which particles of matter are being subject to which particular forces.

(For example, the retch of disgust from accidentally eating something harmful maps almost exactly onto the retch of moral disgust from accidentally witnessing something beyond the pale such as a mutilated dead body. These experiences come from very different sources, and they process very different bits of information, so we might expect them to feel very different, but we know from neuroscience that the brain has duct-taped the feelings of moral disgust onto the existing architecture for gustatory disgust and that is what explains the similar conscious experience. This is another striking bit of support for a materialist understanding of consciousness.)

A New Category of Forces Arise

So, the theories of the RNA World and pandynamism get us from the inert landscape of the early universe to the rich and vibrant present-day world with biology and subjective experience. Physicalism still holds as a viable hypothesis for the metaphysics of the universe if these theories are correct. And this view makes it clear that something else also emerges with the emergence of life. Given that living things are (to the best we know) merely structures of matter that have come to be organised so as to be self-sustaining and self-replicating, two new categories of things in the world appear which are related to that: 1) things that help life stay alive, and 2) things that harm life from staying alive. That division has no meaning in physics or chemistry, but they are fundamental once biology emerges. Through the trials and errors of natural selection, living systems become sensitive to these positive and negative aspects of the world and they respond accordingly. In science, something exists to the extent that it exerts causal power over other things. Gravity exists because it exerts power over mass. Electricity exists because it exerts power over charged particles. Similarly, the power these categories exert over living things implies they exist too. I call them ‘biological forces’.

So, what do these biological forces look like? My conception is that they look like Porters Five Forces from the business world, which maps the competitive and cooperative forces that affect any organisation as it tries to stay profitable (aka alive) in its industrial ecosystem. I hypothesise that this framework, taught in MBA curricula around the world, actually works because it is a fractal of the competition and cooperation that all life must navigate in its own ecosystems. These forces can be depicted side by side to make the analogy clear.

Therefore, in biology, there are 1) battles for consumption of upstream inputs of energy, material, or prey (a la suppliers); 2) battles for consumption of downstream outputs by mutualists, micro- or macroscopic predators (a la buyers); 3) battles with potentially invasive species (a la threat of entrants); 4) battles with current niche competitors from heterospecifics in other species (a la substitutes); and 5) the balance between competition and cooperation among conspecifics from the same species (a la competitive rivalry).

In the great interrelated web of life, any individual or species can play any of these parts depending on how you define the circle around an ecosystem for analysis. We all get eaten at some point. If biological behaviour is determined, it is not by the laws of physics and chemistry, but by the unwritten laws of these biological forces. However, just as the complexity in the system makes Porter’s Five Forces seemingly impossible to calculate with precision, this is even more true for anyone hoping to calculate outcomes from biological forces. Still, we can illustrate them and discuss their relative strengths to aid in analysis and understanding of life and its choices. This brings us to a place where we can now propose a new definition for consciousness.

An Evolutionary Theory of Consciousness

In my (sorta) brief history of the definitions of consciousness, I noted that previous attempts stretch all the way from consciousness being something as small as “the private, ineffable, special feeling that only we rational humans have when we think about our thinking,” right on down to it being “a fundamental force of the universe that gives proto-feelings to an electron of what it’s like to be that electron.” That’s why the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes:

“The level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people, or else it encompasses a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.”

I believe the shape of a proper answer comes from Dan Dennett’s 2016 paper “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism,” where he said:

“We should quell our desire to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many millions of years. … The demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”

Indeed. But based on the story of abiogenesis outlined above, I think that a natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm. The emergence of life is sufficiently hazy and fuzzy in its origin so as to cast doubt on any overly specific claim that one particular molecular structure came together and suddenly turned consciousness on like a light switch. But no one needs to find such a grain of sand that turned a pile into a heap. We’re looking for a gradualist theory of the complex phenomena of consciousness, and its development along with life fits that bill.

This binding of consciousness to life also fits the etymological root of the word. The English word ‘conscious’ originally derived from the Latin conscius where con meant ‘together’ and scio meant ‘to know’. According to this literal interpretation, to be conscious would be ‘to know’, which requires a knower. And to ‘know together’, this conscious thing would need to know at least two things. Do sub-atomic particles feeling fundamental forces meet these criteria? No. Do elements from the periodic table feeling intermolecular forces meet these criteria? Also no. Do living things feeling biological forces meet these criteria? Yes. Once chemistry makes the jump to biology, the resulting proto-life forms have a defined self and they begin to compete for resources with other potential entrants, substitutes, or conspecifics in order to self-replicate and survive. They react to the world as if they know what they are and what they need. Thus:

Consciousness, according to this evolutionary theory, is an infinitesimally growing ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival. These forces and needs can vary from the immediate present to infinite timelines and affect anything from the smallest individual to the broadest concerns (both real and imagined) for all of life.

Such a definition accords with our intuitions to exclude non-living matter from consciousness studies. Rocks and water just don’t respond to any threats to their existence. But all living things do. And in an incredibly wide and diverse manner. In order to map the contours of such a broad definition, I spent several posts conducting a Tinbergen analysis of the functions, mechanisms, ontogeny, and phylogeny of consciousness, which is the standard procedure in evolutionary studies for coming to know all of the elements of any biological phenomenon. That massive review resulted in the following four charts:

For more details on each of these charts, read the individual posts where they were developed, which altogether give a full picture of the various aspects of consciousness. The first tier in this hierarchy — 1) Origin of Life — has already been discussed above. The remaining tiers are:

2) Affect: This is the valence, tone, or mood that is capable of distinguishing differences between good stimuli as opposed to bad ones, which results in responses of graduated arousal and intensity. Mark Solms calls this the primary experience and purpose of consciousness. He asks, rhetorically, how can affective arousal (i.e., the arousal of feeling) go on without any inner feel? It cannot. This accords with my theory of pandynamism, where such feelings are felt subjectively as soon as subjects appear and are affected by biological forces. At first, these affects will generate what we think of as instinctual unconscious reactions. These can involve any or all of Jaak Panksepp’s seven basic emotions (in capital letters to denote a distinction between them and their common usage): SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE LUST, PANIC, CARE, and PLAY. Later, once many more structures have evolved, these affects can be registered, and eventually named, in conscious awareness.

3) Intention: This development in consciousness marks the ability of one reaction to interrupt or override others within an organism. From the perspective of an outside observer, choices appear to be made and there is a narrative sequence to life. Like affect, this can take place unconsciously within humans, so presumably it can in other forms of life as well, but it does empirically exist in very simple life using cognitive abilities such as memory, pattern recognition, and learning. Much later in evolutionary history, this can also be accessed and rationally considered in order to create extremely complex and far-ranging intentions.

4) Prediction: Once intentions exist (either one’s own or the intentions of others), the next development in consciousness is to take them into account by predicting how intentions will interact with the world. Organisms no longer just respond to the present by building up memories of the past; they begin to guess the future too. This appears to happen only in animals with brains that have neuroplasticity and can learn from experience. It also would seem that predictions about the intentions of others are particularly vital, which would explain why neurons and brains appear to have emerged during the Cambrian explosion due to the onset of predation. The success or failure of one’s predictions about their predators or prey would have been a powerful driver for change in any arms race occurring in this new dimension of consciousness. Surprise and uncertainty would be a bad emotion for any prediction, which would eventually help to hone the development of feelings of precision to extremely high levels.

5) Awareness: The next level of consciousness comes in now that structures have evolved to trigger affective emotions in the present (level 2), evaluate the past to make complex choices (level 3), and predict further and further into the future what the actions of the self and others may result in (level 4). The interaction and comparison of these three phenomena allows for the dawning of awareness of a self that is different from others. The richness of this distinction grows with the number of sensations that are able to be evaluated against one another within more and more sophisticated models of elements of the world. Studies have shown that conscious awareness is indeed necessary for some types of learning that give organisms additional plasticity to respond to new and novel stimuli in their environment, thus cementing the evolutionary advantage of gaining and retaining this ability.

6) Abstraction: The final level of consciousness in this hierarchy comes when models of reality go beyond mere direct representation and begin to use symbolic representations to evoke, communicate, and manipulate thoughts and feelings about the world. While nonhuman animals have displayed rudimentary or latent abilities for abstraction, the emergence and development of this capability in humans has been of such enormous import that it is considered the latest of the major transitions of evolution. Symbols, art, and language have driven the cultural evolution of memes, writing, mathematics, philosophy, and science that make up all of the powerful products of human culture. The causes for the emergence of this type of consciousness are mysteriously shrouded in the history of one species at the moment, but there is no denying the power, for good or for ill, that this has enabled. May our fuller grasping of the biological forces that affect the consciousness of all of life motivate us to realise what good is and bring it into fruition.

Related Definitions

To wrap up this discussion, and to help avoid some confusion, here are a few definitions of common terms in consciousness studies which sometimes differ between technical and folk usages. Where such differences exist, I have chosen a definition that best fits with my concept of consciousness as outlined above.

Accessible: This adjective is used to refer to the contents of consciousness that humans are able to recall and report upon. It is contrasted against the unconscious and inaccessible contents that may still drive behaviour.

Attention: According to Michael Graziano and his attention schema theory, attention is the basic ability of a nervous system to focus on a few things at a time and process them deeply. Some forms of attention go back possibly all the way to the beginnings of nervous systems. Graziano thinks attention comes in very early in evolution, and over time it becomes more and more complex. There’s central attention, sensory attention, more cognitive kinds of attention, and they emerge gradually over this sweep of history from about half a billion years ago up to the present. Global Workspace Theory says attention is achieved by attending to signals as they become stronger and stronger compared to other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called ‘ignition’ when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Once that occurs, we humans can talk about that signal, we can move toward it, and we can remember it later.

Bottom-up vs. Top-down: In neuroscience, these terms describe specific directions of information processing. Sensory input is typically considered bottom-up, while higher cognitive processes, which have more information from other sources, are considered top-down. A bottom-up process is characterized by an absence of higher-level direction, whereas a top-down process is driven by other cognition, such as from goals or targets. In reality, there is a multi-directional feedback loop among these systems, and any talk of top-down control should not be meant to signify a homunculus in the brain, a designer from on high, or a skyhook that acts independently from all other causes.

Cognition: Pamela Lyon lists 13 functional abilities of cognition that help organisms adapt to their environment. I have found that these are distributed throughout my hierarchy of consciousness and they have developed in a logical fashion that is also supported by empirical evidence from evolutionary history. These are: (1) sense perception — ability to recognize existentially salient features of the external or internal milieu; (2) affect — valence, attraction, repulsion, neutrality / indifference (hedonic response); (3) discrimination — ability to determine that a state of affairs affords an existential opportunity or presents a challenge, requiring a change in internal state of behaviour; (4) motivation — teleonomic striving; implicit goals arising from existential conditions; (5) attention — awareness, orienting response; ability to selectively attend to aspects of the external and/or internal milieu; (6) memory — retention of information about a state of affairs for a non-zero period; (7) pattern recognition — intentionality, directedness towards an object; (8) learning — experience-modulated behaviour change; (9) communication — mechanism for initiating purposive interaction with conspecifics (or non-conspecific others) to fulfil an existentially salient goal; (10) anticipation — behavioural change based on experience-based expectancy (i.e. if X is happening, then Y should happen), possibly evolved across generations, and which is implicit to the agent’s functioning; (11) problem solving — decision making, behaviour selection in circumstances with multiple, potentially conflicting parameters and varying degrees of uncertainty; (12) error detection — normativity, behavioural correction, value assignment based on motivational state; and (13) self-reference— mechanisms for distinguishing “self” or “like self” from “non-self” or “not like self”.

Communication: This is described as, “an act of interchanging ideas, information, or messages, via words or signs, which are understood to both parties. Every living thing communicates in some way. Fish jump, sometimes for sheer joy. Birds sing their cadences to communicate a variety of purposes. Dogs bark, cats meow, cows moo, and horses whinny. These noises, or other interactions, communicate or transfer information of some kind. Communication is, at its core, a two-way activity, consisting of seven major elements: sender, message, encoding, channel, receiver, decoding, and feedback.” Note that this is distinct from language. See the definition of language below for comparison.

Conscious vs. Unconscious: These terms are generally used more like medical descriptions, corresponding to awake and aware (conscious) vs. asleep or unresponsive (unconscious). They can both be described using various scales of physical attributes (cf. the Glasgow Coma Scale) and both fit within my hierarchy of consciousness as being more or less able to sense and respond to the needs of remaining alive. (Note that I generally stay away from Freud’s usage of the unconscious mind as it is a mixed bag of insight and imagination that would take a lot of patience to unpack.)

Emotions vs. Feelings: In my previous writings on emotion, I noted that this is a complex psychophysiological experience where an individual's state of mind interacts with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences. Emotions can be seen as mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (for example, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures. An influential theory of emotion is that of Lazarus: emotion is a disturbance that occurs in the following order: 1) cognitive appraisal—the individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues the emotion; 2) physiological changes—the cognitive reaction starts biological changes such as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response; 3) action—the individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react. Lazarus stressed that the quality and intensity of emotions are controlled through cognitive processes. I think these descriptions cover the broad evolutionary emergence and growth of affective feeling from the most basic valence in organisms even simpler than bacteria all the way to the sophisticated naming and therapeutic modification of human moods. Antonio Damasio tries to separate emotions from feelings, saying emotions are chemical reactions, while feelings are the conscious experience of emotions. This is overly confusing and unnecessary to me, and apparently Damasio is not always consistent with this usage either. If you consciously feel an emotion, you feel affect (level 2 in my hierarchy) and you have awareness (level 5 in my hierarchy). I find that easier to understand.

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs: When I define consciousness as the ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival, these are the needs that I am talking about. For full details, see my article about Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs, but here are some important points to consider. There are many ways that the ultimate question of survival can be determined, and life has been slowly learning to sense and understand these over billions of years. For example, there are so many things that can kill you, your genes, your kin, or your species, and they can all do so in the immediate, medium, or very long term. Living organisms that can sense and respond to more and more of these threats are the ones that will last and emerge over time. Such organisms will sense many, many needs to meet all of the threats (and exploit all of the opportunities) in its environment. Each living organism’s unique genetic, environmental, and evolutionary histories are constantly leading to changes in the relative strengths of these needs, but at no point does something outside of the physical realm enter into the equation. All of these needs can be described through physical properties, even if the magnitude of their felt force cannot yet be calculated. The ever-growing list of threats and opportunities is why the needs of life are ever-growing too. The psychologist Abraham Maslow studied these for individual humans and produced his famous Hierarchy of Needs. I have generalised these and adapted them to apply to all of life, thereby producing something I call an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs. Starting at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, we see that the ‘physiological’ needs of the human are merely the brute ingredients necessary for ‘existence’ that any form of life might have. In order for that existence to survive through time, the second-level needs for ‘safety and security’ can be understood as promoting ‘durability’ in living things. The third-tier requirements for ‘love and belonging’ are necessary outcomes from the unavoidable ‘interactions’ that take place in our deeply interconnected biome of Earth. The ‘self-esteem’ needs of individuals could be seen merely as ways for organisms to carve out a useful ‘identity’ within the chaos of competition and cooperation that characterises the struggle for survival. And finally, the ‘self-actualisation’ that Maslow struggled to define could be seen as the end, goal, or purpose that an individual takes on so that they may (consciously or unconsciously) have an ultimate arbiter for the choices that have to be made during their lifetime. This is something Aristotle called ‘telos’. Taken as a whole, these are the needs that life must evolve to become more and more conscious of if it is to survive over longer and longer spans of time.

Evolutionary Epistemology Mechanisms: As part of Donald Campbell’s work defining the field of evolutionary epistemology, he settled on a 10-step outline that showed the broad categories of mechanisms that biological life has used to gain knowledge. I have found that these fit well within my hierarchy and in the same order along with my map of the phylogenetic history of consciousness (see chart above). These EEMs start with the earliest origins of life where problems were solved over generations through mere genetic variance alone, without any aids from motion or the formation of memories. That earliest slow accrual of genetic knowledge eventually led, according to Campbell, to the other mechanisms: movement, habit, instinct, visually-supported decisions, memory-supported decisions, observational learning from social interactions, language, cultural transmissions, and finally, scientific accumulations of knowledge.

Exteroception vs. Interoception: Exteroception is any form of sensation that results from stimuli located outside the body and is detected by exteroceptors, including vision, hearing, touch or pressure, heat, cold, pain, smell, and taste. Interoception is any form of sensation arising from stimulation of interoceptors and conveying information about the state of the internal organs and tissues, blood pressure, and the fluid, salt, and sugar levels in the blood.

Intentionality vs. Intentional Stance: Intentionality is a technical term in philosophy that was introduced by Franz Brentano in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It should not be confused with the ordinary meaning of the word intention. While an intention is just an internal aim or goal, intentionality refers to mental directedness towards objects, as if the mind were a bow whose arrows could be properly aimed at different targets. It is also sometimes referred to as aboutness. On the other hand, the intentional stance has been defined by Daniel Dennett as an understanding that others' actions are goal-directed and arise from particular beliefs or desires. It is intentionality aimed at subjects. The understanding of others' intentions is a critical precursor to understanding other minds. Since the seminal (1978) paper by primatologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff entitled “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?”, much empirical research has been devoted to the question of whether non-human primates can ascribe psychological states with intentionality to others. Call and Tomasello concluded in 2008 that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception-goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief-desire psychology. This is an interesting distinction in the way that minds may work.

Involuntary vs. Voluntary: In biology, involuntary control refers to bodily activity “not
under the control of the will of an individual.” These involuntary responses by muscles, glands, etc., occur automatically when required; many such responses, such as gland secretion, heartbeat, and peristalsis, are controlled by the autonomic nervous system and effected by involuntary muscle. Voluntary muscles, by contrast, are under our conscious control so we can move these muscles when we want to. These are the muscles we use to make all the movements needed in physical activity. Note that these two physiological terms are not concerned with the question of free will and whether ‘conscious control’ is ultimately under our control or not. (That is another large topic in metaphysics for another time.)

Language: This is defined as “a distinctly human activity that aids in the transmission of feelings and thoughts from one person to another. It is how we express what we think or feel—through sounds and/or symbols (spoken or written words), signs, posture, and gestures that convey a certain meaning. The purpose of language is making sense of complex and abstract thought. Whereas communication is an experience, language is a tool.” Language allows for much greater scale and scope in cognition. It increases our ability to make sense of the world compared to working memory alone. It vastly enlarges the recognition of patterns in the world. And language enables deep and precise exploration of the self and the world around us. The power of language is perhaps best displayed by Hellen Keller who did not always have it. She said, “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. (…) Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”

Mind: The mind is “the set of faculties including cognitive aspects such as consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, intelligence, judgement, language and memory, as well as noncognitive aspects such as emotion and instinct. Under the scientific physicalist interpretation, the mind is produced at least in part by the brain. The primary competitors to the physicalist interpretations of the mind are idealism, substance dualism, types of property dualism, eliminative materialism, and anomalous monism. There is a lengthy tradition in philosophy, religion, psychology, and cognitive science about what constitutes a mind and what are its distinguishing properties.” In this series, I have done my best to describe and defend a physicalist interpretation of all of these aspects of mind.

Qualia vs. Something-it-is-like vs. Subjective Experience: The term qualia derives from the Latin adjective qualis meaning “of what sort” or “of what kind” in a specific instance, such as “what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now.” There are many definitions of qualia, but one of the simpler and broader definitions is: “The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.” This ‘what it is like’ is also a reference to Thomas Nagel’s paper What is it Like to Be a Bat? in which Nagel famously asserts that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” In other words, it is the experience of being a subject, hence the other term for this phenomenon as subjective experience. The supposed ineffableness of qualia, the purported inability to describe “the redness” of a rose, is completely effable within the evolutionary theory of consciousness presented above. The hard problem of why the experience happens at all is assumed just to be a fundamental property of the universe, which arises in subjects once they evolve the structure to sense and respond to stimuli. After that, the “redness” is completely described by the Tinbergen analysis which shows the adaptive functions of seeing red, the mechanisms involved in sensing wavelengths of light in the red spectrum, the general phylogenetic history of how sensing red has evolved in our species, and the specific ontogenetic history of personal experience that the individual has had with different intensities of redness during their life. What else is left to explain?

Conclusion

For thousands of years of human history, including several hundred after the scientific revolution, the existence and diversity of life was a mystery because evolution and the processes of natural selection were unknown. Once Darwin gathered the evidence to make his case for the theory of evolution, much of that mystery evaporated and any hazy fog that obscured what life is all about has been slowly evaporating with more and more scientific exploration. Within such research, consciousness has remained behind a stubborn patch of murkiness, even after several decades of dedicated consciousness studies. Perhaps this has remained so because of the invisibility of biological forces (like the proverbial water surrounding a fish). Or perhaps it was because consciousness as a fundamental part of the physical universe (like gravity or electromagnetism) just hasn’t been accepted or explained via a hypothesis like pandynamism. Or perhaps consciousness just hasn’t been properly illuminated by a comprehensive analysis using Tinbergen’s framework for all biological phenomena. Now that I have gone through all three of these additions, however, perhaps the view of consciousness might finally become a bit clearer.

What do you think? Does this theory of consciousness make sense to you? What questions has it left unanswered? In my next post, I will check these ideas against the traditional objections to physicalist conceptions of consciousness, but please share your own in the comments below so I might consider them as well.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions
Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology
Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions
Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness
Consciousness 20 — The Mechanisms of Consciousness
Consciousness 21 — Development Over a Lifetime (Ontogeny)
Consciousness 22 — Our Shared History (Phylogeny)

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The Michael Shermer Show with David Sloan Wilson

1/31/2021

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The founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, had the eminent biologist David Sloan Wilson on his podcast recently to discuss David's new novel Atlas Hugged. During a wide-ranging 2-hour discussion, Michael asked him about bridging the is-ought divide and David responded by bringing up my published paper on that subject. The whole podcast is excellent (as is pretty much anything with David Sloan Wilson), but if you just want to listen to the segment about me, that starts at 23:54. I thought that section was also worth transcribing here, however, and writing a short response. Here goes:

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DSW: If we want to eliminate suffering from the whole word, we need to turn the whole world into a single organism. So that is something which is entirely within the bounds of hard science, methodological naturalism, no mythic, no nothing. There is actually an agenda which we can pursue. I think that’s a pretty big deal. Not just in the novel, but in the real world. This motivates a whole earth ethic and a path for expanding what we mean by organism to larger and larger scales.

MS: Just to put a pin on that, you are doing what I have been trying to do, and Sam Harris, and to a slightly lesser degree Steven Pinker, and that is bridging the is-ought barrier. As you know, Hume famously said you can’t go from an is to an ought. But in a way, that sounds exactly like what you are doing. Like, “We ought to structure society based on some way nature is (in this case, human nature).” And you’re comfortable doing that?

DSW: Yeah, I am. I’ve been having a wonderful conversation with an evolutionary philosopher named Ed Gibney. It’s actually on Letter Wiki. If your audience doesn’t know about Letter.Wiki, it’s a wonderful forum for respectful conversations where two people get together and they write letters to each other which are available to the public, but it has the respectful quality of two friends communicating with each other in a respectful fashion as they would if they were writing letters to each other. And Ed I think did something brilliant. I don’t think it was necessarily something original, and he wouldn’t say that it was, but he says let’s add a third word to is and ought. That third word is want. And so although ought cannot be derived from is, it can be derived from is plus want. So if I want a glass of water and the only water is available in a spring a mile up the road, I ought to go to that spring to satisfy my want. This is what Hume meant perhaps when he said reason is the slave of the passions. We can’t really employ reason unless we want something. And so I think that that really is brilliant given all of the press that’s given to the so-called naturalistic fallacy. To think that all we need to do is to add a third component, the desire component, and it’s at that point, if we want to do something, we need to consult the world as it is in order to achieve that want. Have you encountered that? Don’t you think that’s kinda good?

MS: Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. But I don’t have any trouble going from is to ought because if you study human nature and social science it seems like it’s pretty clear, at least in the general form of things, it’s better to be free than enslaved, it’s better to be satiated than hungry, it’s better not to be tortured, it’s better to be healthy rather than diseased and so on. And once you recognise that that’s human nature, that’s a universal, then we ought to strive for that. I think that’s what the liberal tradition ever since the Enlightenment has been moving toward: this kind of more universal ethic that borders more on utilitarianism and consequentialism than say a Kantian rule-based deontology.
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How cool is that! It's great to see philosophy make it into real world discussions. (Particularly for me, my own little independent philosophy!) To follow up on this, I told Michael and David on Twitter that using any old wants to get from any old is to some specific oughts is not my invention, but trying to find the right wants that give us moral oughts does seem to be my unique contribution (as far as I know). To illustrate this using David's example, if you want a glass of water, and the only water is in a spring up the road, then yes, you ought to go to the spring. This is just a simple logical argument using a conditional premise (i.e. if x, then y). But the real question is how do you justify that first premise? In this case, how do you know it's okay for you to want water? We surely don't think all of our wants justify oughts as good ones to fulfil.

Readers of my original paper on this will know that I trace it all back to the survival of life. That's the most fundamental want that exists, which turns it into a need. Without life, there are no oughts at all. And so just as Darwin flipped the design of life on its head in a strange inversion, which replaced a designer from on high with a relentless bottom-up blind process, I believe morality should be looked at the same way. Moral oughts grow more and more complex for life as more and more knowledge and choices become available and more and more robustness becomes possible. As I told Michael and David on Twitter, I believe the next trick is to recognise that these wants and needs are being selected for and have grown over time. I believe they have grown into something like my evolutionary hierarchy of needs, which replaces Maslow's needs that were narrowly focused on human individuals alone.

All of this is stands on much firmer ground than Michael Shermer's proposed guidance that "It's better to be free than enslaved, it's better to be satiated than hungry...and so on." First of all, it's not always better to be satiated than hungry. If that rule were always followed, obesity would follow soon thereafter. Secondly, the "and so on" is where the rub lies. Morality is not about the easy choices; it's about the hard ones. And Shermer offers no guiding principles for that here. (Maybe he does elsewhere?) In fact, he sorta makes a bad blunder by saying "that's human nature, that's a universal...we ought to strive for that." Almost by definition, there's not that much of significance that is universal in human nature. If anything is truly universal, then there is no choice about it. But there are plenty of possible things in all of our natures, and some of those are grand some of the time, and some of those are abhorrent some of the time. We need a guiding principle to know which ones are which and why.

I go into this in some more detail in my 9th letter to David in our Wiki conversation, where I describe how to reconcile the three main traditions of moral philosophy—consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology—but I'll leave that discussion for another time as I'm working on turning that into a published paper later this year. For now, I just wanted to draw some attention to this discussion.

What do you think? Is David right that my is-want-ought formula is something "brilliant" in the struggle to decide what we ought to do? Let me know in the comments below.

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Two Recent EvPhil Discussions

1/9/2021

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Hey all! Here's a quick note just to let you know that I've updated my list of "other publications" to include two discussions of evolutionary philosophy that have popped up elsewhere over the last few weeks.

The most recent is the conclusion of the exchange of letters I had with David Sloan Wilson about his new novel Atlas Hugged. I asked David about the philosophy behind the novel (which you don't have to have read to enjoy the exchange, but you should definitely go get it), and his responses, as expected, were deep and illuminating. I was particularly happy with my 9th letter in which I was driven to express my evolutionary ethics in a new and I hope powerful way, which I hope to expand upon soon. If you get the chance, let me know what you think of that, and of the exchange in general. I was pretty thrilled to have it!

The second item is a long review titled "In Praise of Evolutionary Philosophy (Gibney 2012)". It was written by Joe Velikovsky who is a writer, independent scholar, and member of the Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab. Joe came across my original philosophy book recently and as you can tell from the title, he wrote a glowing review of it. His in-depth coverage has so many details in it, and adds so many of his own thoughts, that it's basically a #longread version of the book. Here are a couple of blurbs I pulled from Joe's review, but if you want a quick(ish) dose of my thinking, combined with lots of Joe's own original (and good!) ideas, then be sure to check it out.

"...there are some other pre-existing books on Evolutionary Philosophy...but, they're not as accessible, and easy-to-read."

"In short: Brilliant! Remarkable. Bravo!"

That's all for now. Happy New Year! Here's to things getting better from here on out.

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Consciousness 22 — Our Shared History (Phylogeny)

12/24/2020

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Almost done now…

Finally, we come to the fourth of Tinbergen’s four questions. His framework for analysing all biological phenomena has proven to be extremely useful. The first two questions represented the two static elements of Tinbergen’s model. They tell the “contemporary” accounts of the current form of a behaviour in its present condition. For consciousness, that helped me develop my hierarchy by looking at the functions of consciousness, and then I saw that this hierarchy held up well as I went through a physicalist account of the mechanisms of consciousness. The next two questions move on to the dynamic elements, or the “chronicle” accounts that explain a biological phenomenon in terms of the sequence that got it there. In the last post, I looked at ontogeny, or the development of consciousness over a (human) lifetime. Now, we can look at the ultimate tale of consciousness—its phylogenetic history.

I noted at the end of my last post about ontogeny that I wasn’t sure how well my hierarchy would continue to hold up, but it was extremely exciting to see that the biological and psychological research into human development conformed perfectly well with my hierarchy. This was a great example of consilience where multiple streams of evidence are all pointing to the same thing. Now, it’s time for one final check. But before I can go through the details of the hierarchical development of consciousness, I have to lay the groundwork with a general overview of the phylogeny of life.

General notes about phylogeny

David Christian has perhaps developed the most well-known sweeping story of existence with his groundbreaking Big History project. He divides the history of the universe into eight fundamental thresholds.

The Big Bang kicked off the origins of all cosmology about 13.7 billion years ago.
The first stars and galaxies appeared perhaps 100 million years later.
Chemical elements were created inside dying stars just 1 or 2 million years after that.
The Earth and the Solar System were created about 4.5 billion years ago.
The first evidence of life on Earth comes about 3.8 billion years ago.
The creation of our own species, Homo sapiens, happened about 300,000 years ago.
The emergence of agriculture occurred about 11,000 years ago.
Finally, the Modern era of human history covers the last three or four centuries.

That’s a nice and simple outline. Bill Gates liked it so much he invested $10 million into the Big History Project in 2011 to help try it out in actual classrooms. But for understanding the growth of consciousness during the evolutionary history of life, Big History is pretty weak. A panpsychist might like the fact that 4 of the 8 phases occur before life, but as Dan Dennett said, “Electrons can’t accrue memories. They do not change over billions of years. They do not participatein the arrow of time, so there is no way for them to be said to have intentions, feelings, purposes, or goals.” I agree. To me, you need a subject to have a subjective experience. Therefore, we need a lot more detail about the 5th threshold covering the 3.6 billion years of life before Homo sapiens.

The most common way to do this is with a tree of life. There are literally hundreds of them out there, all of which were inspired by the only illustration that appeared in Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Many of us will know the branches of these trees by a mnemonic such as “King Phillip came over for great spaghetti.” (Or, if you are a fan of Community, “Kevin, please come over for gay sex.”) But after 1990, three domains were identified on top of all this, which necessitated a new phrase like “Do kindly place candy out for good students.” This, of course, stands for:

Domain --> Kingdom --> Phylum --> Class --> Order --> Family --> Genus --> Species

Here’s a simple phylogenetic tree showing the current three-domain system where all smaller branches can be considered kingdoms.

Note how plants, animals, and fungi are just three twigs on the far upper right of this tree. An even more humbling depiction was produced by David Mark Hillis in 2008 based on completely sequenced genomes. See his popular “Hillis Plot” depiction below, where Homo sapiens are just one twig placed two ticks before midnight. Take a moment to google a few of our closest relatives. It’s only 10 steps to brewer’s yeast!

In 2015, the first draft of the Open Tree of Life was published, in which information from nearly 500 previously published trees was combined into a single free online database. The first draft included 2.3 million species, mainly composed of bacteria.

We now know that horizontal gene transfer may mean that these trees are more of a tangled thicket than neatly branching pyramids, but the most important points still stand. All of life is related, and we all share the same building blocks. And this is important to the understanding of consciousness because of everything these building blocks do.

In neuroscientist Peter Sterling’s new book What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design, Sterling details the evolutionary continuity from earlier life forms to humans. He breaks our evolutionary past into four epochs — single cell life, multicellular organisms, mammals, and humans. What’s important for him as a neuroscientist, though, is just how much went on during that first epoch. Single cell life evolved the core metabolic processes such as using ATP for energy as well as the genetic code that enables all life to share the same proteins and enzymes. A full 75% of our proteins are homologues (similar in position, structure, and origin but not necessarily in function) to those seen in prokaryotes, the first life forms.

Another neuroscientist, Seth Grant, notes that “all of the proteins that are in our synapses evolved before the brain and before multi-cellular organisms. They evolved in unicellular organisms that have lived on the planet for several billion years before the first multi-cellular animal. [T]hose proteins are controlling the behaviour of unicellular organisms. They control how they adapt and respond to their environment. They are involved in how they learn responses to their environment. And this tells us then that the fundamental molecular machinery of the behaviour of the human brain is actually the fundamental molecular machinery of behaviour in unicellular organisms, and some of those molecules go all the way back to the last universal common ancestor, which is about 3.5 billion years ago.”

So, through a variety of methods, we have an incredibly detailed picture of the interrelated lines of descent for all of life. When did these changes happen? Well, you can look into any one species to know more about its heritage, but here is a general timeline:

Okay. So where is consciousness??

As Dan Dennett said, “The search for the simplest form of consciousness is a snipe hunt. Starfish have some elements of consciousness, so do trees, and bacteria. (But not electrons.) We can argue about motor proteins. The question of ‘where do you draw the line?’ is an ill-motivated question. Where do you draw the line between night and day?”

Dennett’s pithy quote echoes comments made in the Wikipedia entry for Consciousness.

“Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. Some argue that consciousness is a by-product of evolution. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (i) exclusively with the first humans, (ii) exclusively with the first mammals, (iii) independently in mammals and birds, or (iv) with the first reptiles. Other authors date the origins of consciousness to the first animals with nervous systems or early vertebrates in the Cambrian over 500 million years ago. Donald Griffin suggests in his book Animal Minds a gradual evolution of consciousness.”

Basically, and unsurprisingly, seeing the emergence of consciousness depends on your definition of consciousness. I myself believe that the amorphous concept of consciousness can best be understood as the collection of processes that enable living organisms (governed by the various laws of selection) to sense and respond to biological forces. This leads us to another of “Darwin’s strange inversions” where, rather than looking for a single set of essential criteria that tells us whether consciousness is on or off, we are much better served by considering all of the tiny incremental additions of capabilities that has led to everything we now call consciousness. In this way, I think my theory brings other definitions of consciousness together under one umbrella and it matches the biological history of life. Having a dynamic picture, in the form of a growing hierarchy, mimics the growing tree of life. And this makes thinking about consciousness much clearer. (At least it does for me.)

So, let’s look at how my hierarchy lays on top of all of this. Just as before, during the examination of the first three Tinbergen questions, there are lot of intricate details to consider. Therefore, I’ll once again write simple numbered statements in bold, followed by their justifications in bullet point format, so you can quickly read the statements to get the gist of my arguments. This allows you to dip into any of the details for each statement if you want further information. Or you can click on the links provided for even more. Since my hierarchy has proven to work well so far, I’ll continue to work within it and hope that it proves to be an effective guide to consciousness this one last time. Here goes!

1.0 Origin of Life. The first three criteria for life are: organisation, growth, and reproduction.

1.1 Our best hypothesis for the initial creation of life is that it emerged from basic chemical processes alone. Our best estimate is that this occurred in the form of microbes somewhere between 3.8 and 4.4 billion years ago.

Just like RNA, early nucleotides could both store information and function as enzymes. Early polymer enzymes would: enhance replication, use high energy molecules in the environment (near thermal vents) to recharge monomers, synthesize lipids from other molecules in the environment, and modify your lipids so they don’t leave your membrane. And that’s it. A simple 2-component system that spontaneously forms in the pre-biotic environment can eat, grow, contain information, replicate, and evolve, simply through thermodynamic, mechanical, and electrical forces. No ridiculous improbability, no supernatural forces, no lightening striking a mud puddle. Just chemistry. (Abiogenesis)
The earliest known life forms on Earth are putative fossilized microorganisms found in hydrothermal vent precipitates. The earliest time that life forms first appeared on Earth is at least 3.77 billion years ago, possibly as early as 4.28 billion years, or even 4.5 billion years — not long after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago. (Earliest Known Life Forms)

2.0 Affect. The first four cognitive abilities—response to stimuli, adaptation, homeostasis, and metabolism—enable the fulfilment of the final four criteria for life: sense perception, valence, discrimination, and motivation.

2.1 As soon as life begins (by organising, growing, and reproducing), a subject emerges. Since physical forces act on all physical matter, these subjects will be affected. Since change is inevitable in a dynamic universe, they will face selection pressures. These forces and pressures are the initial core of subjectivity that affect life right from the very beginning.

How far back in evolution does the ability to detect and respond to danger go? Other nonhuman animals do this. Even bees. But it’s much older still. Protozoa like paramecia or amoeba do it. Even bacteria do. In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning of life. (Post 12)
Higher cortical regions add much to consciousness. Of course they do. But the evolutionary “roots” of consciousness are to be found elsewhere, and they are probably affective. (Solms and Panksepp)

2.2 Once life is faced with selection pressures, tiny lifespans with even minimal variability will produce incredibly vast numbers of trials and errors over millions and billions of years. This evolutionary process will produce all sorts of solutions that will, logically, result in longer and/or more stable forms of survival.

It's not just detecting danger either — incorporating nutrients, balancing fluids and ions, thermoregulation, reproduction for the species to survive — all of these behaviours exist in animals, but also in single-cell microbes. Value / valence / affect has been present since the beginning of life. (Post 12)
Organisms evolve digestive vs. respiratory vs. thermoregulatory vs. immune systems. Each such specialized system is governed by a homeostatic imperative of its own. Metabolic energy balance, oxygenation, hydration, and thermoregulation (for example) are not the same things, although each of them contributes to the overall imperative of organism-wide [optimization]. (Solms)

2.3 This affective core of consciousness, driven by chemistry alone, is the simplest version of the objective chemical changes we call emotions. Note that these are embodied moods, which are separate from the subjective mental feelings that some individuals later evolve to have.

I like Damasio's distinctions between emotions, feelings, and valences. This fits very well with my own system for mapping cognitive appraisals (i.e. judging if something is good, bad, or unknown, aka valanced) onto different events in the past, present, or future, in order to generate the things we typically call emotions (but which Damasio would distinguish as feelings). I can certainly get behind his distinction here. I could also adopt his labelling. I think he's got “the strange order of things” right by saying the chemical emotional responses would have come first before the feelings in our self became able to identify them. (Post 10)

2.4 In humans, we know that the earliest emotional responses differentiated into four basic drives over 300 million years ago. They keep individuals alive. Later, between 55 and 85 million years ago, they differentiated further into three more basic drives that benefit social groups.

Evolutionary neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University has identified seven emotional systems in humans that originated deeper in our evolutionary past than the Pleistocene era (over 2.5 million years ago). The emotional systems that Panskepp terms CARE (tenderness for others), PANIC (from loneliness), and PLAY (social joy) date back to early primate evolutionary history (55-85 million years ago), whereas the systems of FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, and LUST, which govern survival instincts for the individual, have even earlier, premammalian origins (older than 300 million years ago). (Gibney)(Panksepp)

2.5 The full history of the development of affect in living organisms is of course too long and varied to give in detail. But here are some interesting highlights from the rough timeline along the way as the final four criteria for life have developed — sense perception, valence, discrimination, and motivation.

The emergence of nervous systems has been linked to the evolution of voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels. The Nav channels allow for communication between cells over long distances through the propagation of action potentials, whereas voltage-gated calcium (Cav) channels allow for unmodulated intercellular signaling. It has been hypothesized that Nav channels differentiated from Cav channels either at the emergence of nervous systems or before the emergence of multicellular organisms, although the origin of Nav channels in history remains unknown. (Nervous System)
A voltage-gated sodium channel is present in members of the choanoflagellates, thought to be the closest living, unicellular relative of animals. This suggests that an ancestral form of the animal channel was among the many proteins that play central roles in animal life, but which are thought to have evolved before multicellularity. (Sodium Channel)
Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 25 times in eukaryotes, and also in some prokaryotes. The first evidence of multicellularity is from cyanobacteria-like organisms that lived 3–3.5 billion years ago. (Multicellular organism)
Sponges were first to branch off the evolutionary tree from the common ancestor of all animals (roughly 580 to 750 million years ago), making them the sister group of all other animals. Sponges have no cells connected to each other by synaptic junctions, that is, no neurons, and therefore no nervous system. Unlike other animals, they lack true tissues and organs. Sponges do not have nervous, digestive, or circulatory systems. Instead, most rely on maintaining a constant water flow through their bodies to obtain food and oxygen and to remove wastes. Sponge cells have the ability to communicate with each other via calcium signalling or by other means. Sponge larvae differentiate sensory cells which respond to stimuli including light, gravity, and water movement, all of which increase the fitness of the organism. (Sponge)
The nerve net is the simplest form of a nervous system found in multicellular organisms. Unlike central nervous systems, where neurons are typically grouped together, neurons found in nerve nets are spread apart. This nervous system allows cnidarians to respond to physical contact. They can detect food and other chemicals in a rudimentary way. While the nerve net allows the organism to respond to its environment, it does not serve as a means by which the organism can detect the source of the stimulus. For this reason, simple animals with nerve nets, such as Hydra, will typically produce the same motor output in response to contact with a stimulus regardless of the point of contact. (Nervous System)
Nerve nets are found in species in the phyla Cnidaria (e.g. scyphozoa, box jellyfish, and sea anemones), Ctenophora, and Echinodermata. Cnidaria and Ctenophora both exhibit radial symmetry and are collectively known as coelenterates. Coelenterates diverged 570 million years ago, prior to the Cambrian explosion, and they are the first two phyla to possess nervous systems which differentiate during development and communicate by synaptic conduction. The nervous systems of coelenterates allow for sensation, contraction, locomotion, and hunting/feeding behaviors. (Nervous System)
The vast majority of existing animals are bilaterians, meaning animals with left and right sides that are approximate mirror images of each other. All bilateria are thought to have descended from a common wormlike ancestor that appeared in the Ediacaran period, 550–600 million years ago. The fundamental bilaterian body form is a tube with a hollow gut cavity running from mouth to anus, and a nerve cord with an enlargement (a “ganglion”) for each body segment, with an especially large ganglion at the front, called the “brain”. (Nervous System)
Neo-Piagetian stages have been applied to the maximum stage attained by various animals. For example, spiders (an order of arthropods) attain the circular sensory motor stage, coordinating actions and perceptions. (Piaget)
The evolutionary ancestry of arthropods dates back to the Cambrian period. Small arthropods with bivalve-like shells have been found in Early Cambrian fossil beds dating 541 to 539 million years ago. (Arthropod)
Vertebrates originated about 525 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion, which saw a rise in organism diversity. (Vertebrate)
When we look at all of the proteins in mammals or vertebrate species, we find that there are a lot more of them than we find in invertebrate species. So, how could that be? It turned out that the genomes of some animal that is the ancestor of all vertebrates underwent an entire genome duplication event that was the biggest mutation of them all. It inherited an extra copy of its entire genome. And one of its descendants after that did the same thing all over again so that this animal had four copies more than the invertebrate ancestor. And it is that organism that gave rise to all of the vertebrate species on the planet. And that’s why vertebrates have much more complex genomes because they’ve had these genome duplication events. They have more genes in all their families. And as a result of that, you have more synapse proteins, which give the animals a more complex behavioural repertoire. (Seth Grant)

3.0 Intention. Five more cognitive abilities—attention, memory, pattern recognition, learning, and communication—enable intentional actions of the core self, eventually including the delay of reflexes.

3.1 The five cognitive abilities that drive intention do not leave fossil records. But we know from the types of organisms that exhibit them now that they will have emerged and grown since at least the rise of complex multicellularity starting possibly 1.6 billion years ago.

It's not just detecting danger either — incorporating nutrients, balancing fluids and ions, thermoregulation, reproduction for the species to survive — all of these behaviours exist in animals, but also in single-cell microbes. So, behaviour and even learning and memory do not require nervous systems. (Post 12)
Chemical building blocks provide the ability to process information, which enables the repeatable decisions (cognition) necessary to remain alive. (Post 20)
A candidate mechanism that may serve as the biological basis of the continuum of cognitive function [is] the chemistry of protein networks, whose potential information-processing power and similarity to neural networks in single cells was first described by Cambridge zoologist Dennis Bray, who noticed that “many proteins in living cells appear to have as their primary function the transfer and processing of information, rather than the chemical transformation of metabolic intermediates or the building of cellular structure.” (Lyon)
Plant cognition is a field of research directed at experimentally testing the cognitive abilities of plants, including perception, learning processes, memory, and consciousness. Although they lack a brain and the function of a conscious working nervous system, plants are still somehow capable of being able to adapt to their environment and change the integration pathway that would ultimately lead to how a plant “decides” to take response to a presented stimulus. (Plant Cognition)
A plant known as the Mimosa pudica was tested for the ability to adapt to closing its leaves upon repeated drops with no apparent harm appointed to the plant. The results showed that with repeated drops, the Mimosa pudica eventually stopped closing its leaves or opened its leaves quicker. This behaviour exhibited a trait in which the plant has adapted to not closing, or showing minimal closing, when repeated exposure to a non-harming situation is coupled with its own defence behaviour. (Plant Cognition)
Complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: red algae, green algae, fungi, animals, land plants, and brown algae. (Multicellular organism)
Red algae appeared perhaps 1.6 billion years ago. (Red algae)
Green algae appeared between 1.6 and 1 billion years ago. (Green algae)
Fungi appeared perhaps 1 billion years ago. (Fungi)
Animals appeared between 1 billion and 600 million years ago. (Animal)
Land plants appeared perhaps 500 million years ago. (Land plants)
Brown algae appeared between 200 and 150 million years ago. (Brown algae)
Attention comes in very early in evolution, and over time it becomes more and more complex. There’s central attention, sensory attention, more cognitive kinds of attention, and they emerge gradually over this sweep of history from about half a billion years ago up to the present. (Post 13)

4.0 Prediction. This level in the hierarchy of consciousness is enabled by mechanisms for the cognitive abilities of anticipation, problem solving, and error detection.

4.1 Once actions become intentional, they and their effects in the world can be modelled so as to improve outcomes and avoid miscues. This appears to only happen in animals with brains that have neuroplasticity and can learn from experience.

A neuron is called “identified” if it has properties that distinguish it from every other neuron in the same animal and if every individual organism belonging to the same species has one and only one neuron with the same set of properties. In vertebrate nervous systems, very few neurons are “identified” in this sense—in humans, there are believed to be none—but in simpler nervous systems, some or all neurons may be thus unique. In the roundworm C. elegans, whose nervous system is the most thoroughly described of any animal's, every neuron in the body is uniquely identifiable. One notable consequence of this fact is that the form of the C. elegans nervous system is completely specified by the genome, with no experience-dependent plasticity. (Nervous Systems)
Animals encounter so many unpredictable challenges under natural conditions that it would be very difficult if not impossible for any combination of genetic instructions and individual experience to specify in advance the entire set of actions that are appropriate. But thinking about alternative actions and selecting one believed to be best is an efficient way to cope with unexpected dangers and opportunities. In theory such versatility might result from nonconscious information processing in the brain. But conscious thinking may well be the most efficient way for a central nervous system to weigh different possibilities and evaluate their relative advantages. (Griffin)
Cues are enough to stimulate the behaviour independent of the presence of the stimuli themselves. The representation alone is enough to guide the behaviour. That capacity exists in invertebrates, and on into all vertebrates, e.g. fish and reptiles. When you get to mammals, you have a much more complex form of cognitive representation, where it begins to look deliberative, i.e. the ability to form mental models that can be predictive of things not existing. It’s a much more complicated thing than having a static memory of what was there. (Post 12)

4.2 Before brains emerged, more sophisticated cognition came from the emergence of faster internal communication systems built using neurons. These first appeared, driven by predation, during the ‘Cambrian explosion’ approximately 525 million years ago.

Trails left by the early grazers were straight and simple, but they became more circuitous in later times (550–540 million years ago), and finally showed signs of digging into the substratum by the beginning of the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of fossils (~540 million years ago). These trails disappeared by 525 million years ago and were replaced by animals with hard coverings shaped into a wide variety of spikes, shells, and plates. The rich array of external armor and weapons in the fossil record strongly suggests that animals started to prey upon each other. The larger size of these animals put a premium on keeping different parts of the body coordinated, and their predatory behavior favored animals capable of making quick movements to obtain food, and to avoid becoming someone else’s food. Both demands favored the evolution of a fast-conducting system like neurons. The first clear indication of nervous tissue was the appearance of well-formed eyes and faint outlines of nervous systems in fossils from ~525 million years ago. (Evolution of neurons)
Isomorphic maps are the cornerstone of image-based sensory consciousness. These maps evolved in early vertebrates more than 520 million years ago, and this process was the natural result of the extraordinary innovations of the camera eye, neural crest, and placodes. (Post 11)

4.3 Neurons soon bundled together into simple brains, which then developed more features, complexity, and cognitive abilities over the last 520 million years.

A central, brain-like structure was present in the ancestors of the vertebrates. These primitive, fish-like creatures probably resembled the living lancelet, a jawless filter-feeder. The brain of the lancelet barely stands out from the rest of the spinal cord, but specialised regions are apparent: the hindbrain controls its swimming movements, for instance, while the forebrain is involved in vision. (A brief history of the brain)
As early fish struggled to find food and mates, and dodge predators, many of the core structures still found in our brains evolved: the optic tectum, involved in tracking moving objects with the eyes; the amygdala, which helps us to respond to fearful situations; parts of the limbic system, which gives us our feelings of reward and helps to lay down memories; and the basal ganglia, which control patterns of movements. (A brief history of the brain)
By 360 million years ago, our ancestors had colonised the land, eventually giving rise to the first mammals about 200 million years ago. These creatures already had a small neocortex – extra layers of neural tissue on the surface of the brain responsible for the complexity and flexibility of mammalian behaviour. (A brief history of the brain)
The first big increases in brain size were in the olfactory bulb, suggesting mammals came to rely heavily on their noses to sniff out food. There were also big increases in the regions of the neocortex that map tactile sensations – probably the ruffling of hair in particular – which suggests the sense of touch was vital too. (A brief history of the brain)
Why did we become social? It started when we became warm blooded. Warm blooded creatures need about 10 times more nutrition though. One way to compensate for this requirement was for mammals to develop a new structure in the brain—a cortex—which allowed them to store a tremendous amount of information in the brain and to integrate it. The cortex relied on the subcortical parts of the brain for motivations, sleep/wake patterns, etc., but the cortex allowed for a kind of predictive prowess that had not been seen on the planet before. (Post 8)
Traditionally, scientists believed that the first true warm-blooded animals were mammal ancestors that appeared around 270 million years ago. … The discovery of [a] special kind of bone in Ophiacodon fossils is evidence that it could also grow rapidly, which in turn means that it probably had an endothermic metabolism to sustain this growth spurt. Ophiacodon lived 300 million years ago, during the Carboniferous period. That was at least 30 million years before the appearance of the first true known mammals, indicating that the furry creatures did not invent warm-bloodedness but rather inherited it from their more reptile-like forefathers. (Lacerda)
After the dinosaurs were wiped out, about 65 million years ago, some of the mammals that survived took to the trees – the ancestors of the primates. Good eyesight helped them chase insects around trees, which led to an expansion of the visual part of the neocortex. (A brief history of the brain)
Mastering the social niceties of group living requires a lot of brain power. Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford thinks this might explain the enormous expansion of the frontal regions of the primate neocortex, particularly in the apes. … Besides increasing in size, these frontal regions also became better connected, both within themselves, and to other parts of the brain that deal with sensory input and motor control. (A brief history of the brain)
Our conclusion for the moment is, this, that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception-goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief-desire psychology. (Call and Tomasello)
All of [this brain development] equipped the later primates with an extraordinary ability to integrate and process the information reaching their bodies, and then control their actions based on this kind of deliberative reasoning. Besides increasing their overall intelligence, this eventually leads to some kind of abstract thought: the more the brain processes incoming information, the more it starts to identify and search for overarching patterns that are a step away from the concrete, physical objects in front of the eyes. Which brings us neatly to an ape that lived about 14 million years ago in Africa. It was a very smart ape but the brains of most of its descendants – orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees – do not appear to have changed greatly compared with the branch of its family that led to us. (A brief history of the brain)
Millions of years after early hominids became bipedal, they still had small brains. We can only speculate about why their brains began to grow bigger around 2.5 million years ago, but it is possible that serendipity played a part. In other primates, the “bite” muscle exerts a strong force across the whole of the skull, constraining its growth. In our forebears, this muscle was weakened by a single mutation, perhaps opening the way for the skull to expand. This mutation occurred around the same time as the first hominids with weaker jaws and bigger skulls and brains appeared. (A brief history of the brain)
Once we got smart enough to innovate and adopt smarter lifestyles, a positive feedback effect may have kicked in, leading to further brain expansion. … The development of tools to kill and butcher animals around 2 million years ago would have been essential for the expansion of the human brain, since meat is such a rich source of nutrients. A richer diet, in turn, would have opened the door to further brain growth. Primatologist Richard Wrangham at Harvard University thinks that fire played a similar role by allowing us to get more nutrients from our food. Eating cooked food led to the shrinking of our guts, he suggests. Since gut tissue is expensive to grow and maintain, this loss would have freed up precious resources, again favouring further brain growth. (A brief history of the brain)
Humans (species in the genus Homo) are the only animals that cook their food, and Wrangham argues Homo erectus emerged about two million years ago as a result of this unique trait. Cooking had profound evolutionary effect because it increased food efficiency, which allowed human ancestors to spend less time foraging, chewing, and digesting. H. erectus developed a smaller, more efficient digestive tract, which freed up energy to enable larger brain growth. Wrangham also argues that cooking and control of fire generally affected species development by providing warmth and helping to fend off predators, which helped human ancestors adapt to a ground-based lifestyle. Wrangham points out that humans are highly evolved for eating cooked food and cannot maintain reproductive fitness with raw food. (Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human)
The overall picture is one of a virtuous cycle involving our diet, culture, technology, social relationships, and genes. It led to the modern human brain coming into existence in Africa by about 200,000 years ago. (A brief history of the brain)

4.4 As you would expect from the blind trials and errors of evolution, the development of intelligent predictions is not linear. Parallel examples of the emergence of traits are numerous. An excellent example of this is found in cephalopods whose intelligence is utterly alien to us vertebrates.

Other Minds is a 2016 bestseller by Peter Godfrey-Smith on the evolution and nature of consciousness. … Godfrey-Smith's premise in this book is the fact that intelligence has evolved separately in two groups of animals: in cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish, and in vertebrates like birds and humans. He notes that studying cephalopods is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”, but that “the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.” (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness)
Godfrey-Smith disagrees with an old philosophical idea that consciousness suddenly emerged from unthinking matter; it is an active relationship with the world, built up in small steps with separate capabilities for perceiving the world, taking action with muscles, remembering the simplest of events. Such capabilities, in Godfrey-Smith's view, are present in some degree even in bacteria, which detect chemicals in their environment, and in insects such as bees, which recall the locations of food sources. (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness)
Since most of the animals' neurons are in their partly-autonomous arms, “for an octopus, its arms are partly self – they can be directed and used to manipulate things. But from the central brain's perspective they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own. This is as alien a mind as we could hope to encounter.” (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness)

5.0 Awareness. This level in the hierarchy of consciousness is enabled by mechanisms for the cognitive abilities of self-reference.

5.1 Awareness is also called reflective consciousness as it involves thinking about thoughts or feelings themselves. These models of thinking about the self may simply arise by turning predictive models of others towards the sensory input of the self.

It is important to distinguish between perceptual and reflective consciousness. The former, called “primary consciousness” by Farthing (1992), Lloyd (1989), and others, includes all sorts of awareness, whereas the latter is a subset of conscious experiences in which the content is conscious experience itself. Reflective consciousness is thinking, or experiencing feelings, about thoughts or feelings themselves, and it is often held to include self-awareness. (Griffin)
[At first,] the external body is not a subject but an object, and it is perceived in the same register as other objects. Something has to be added to simple perception before one’s own body is differentiated from others. This level of representation (a.k.a. higher-order thought) enables the subject of consciousness to separate itself as an object from other objects. We envisage the process involving three levels of experience: (a) the subjective or phenomenal level of the anoetic self as affect, a.k.a. first-person perspective; (b) the perceptual or representational level of the noetic self as an object, no different from other objects, a.k.a. second-person perspective; (c) the conceptual or re-representational level of the autonoetic self in relation to other objects, i.e., perceived from an external perspective, a.k.a. third-person perspective. (Solms and Panksepp)

5.2 Like all complex phenomena that evolve over time, awareness does not just “turn on” like a light bulb. There are many intermediate steps of many types of awareness that many different animals likely possess.

The very difficulty of detecting whether animals experience reflective consciousness should make us cautious about concluding that it is impossible. Most of the suggestive evidence that will be discussed in this book points toward perceptual rather than reflective consciousness. The relation between these two general categories of consciousness can be illustrated by considering a class of intermediate cases, namely, an animal's awareness of its own body—for example, the appearance of its feet or the feeling of cold as a winter wind ruffles its fur. This tends to become an intermediate category between perceptual and reflective consciousness, for an animal might be consciously aware not only of some part of its body but also of what that structure was doing. It might not only feel its teeth crunching on food but also realize that it tastes good. Or it might not only feel the ground under its feet but also recognize that it is running in order to escape from a threatening predator. Furthermore, an animal capable of perceptual consciousness must often be aware that a particular companion is eating or fleeing. This means that it is consciously aware of both the action and of who is performing it. These would all be special cases of perceptual consciousness. This leads to inquiring how likely it is that such an animal would be incapable of thinking that it, itself, was eating or fleeing. If we grant an animal perceptual consciousness of its own actions, the prohibition against conscious awareness of who is eating or fleeing becomes a somewhat strained and artificial restriction. Furthermore, a perceptually conscious animal could scarcely be unaware of its own enjoyment of eating or its fear of the predator from which it is trying desperately to escape. One could argue that perceptually conscious animals are aware of their actions but not of the thoughts and feelings that motivate them. But emotional experiences are often so vivid and intense that it seems unlikely that when an animal is conscious of its actions it could somehow be unaware of its emotions. (Griffin)

5.3 Trace conditioning appears to be a type of learning that requires conscious awareness. We know this from the self-report of humans who do or do not learn during trace conditioning trials. But we see that some animals are also capable of trace conditioning. This is a strong indicator of awareness in non-human animals.

Robert Clark and Larry Squire published the results of a classical Pavlovian conditioning experiment in humans. Two different test conditions were employed, both using the eye-blink response to an air puff applied to the eye, but with different temporal intervals between the air puff and a preceding, predictive stimulus (a tone). In one condition, the tone remained on until the air puff was presented and both coterminated (delay conditioning). In the other, a delay (500 or 1000 ms) was used between the offset of the tone and the onset of the air puff (trace conditioning). In both conditions, experimental subjects were watching a silent movie while the stimuli were applied, and questions regarding the contents of the silent movie and test conditions were asked after test completion. In the delay conditioning task, subjects acquired a conditioned response over 6 blocks of 20 trials: as soon as the tone appeared they showed the eye-blink response before the air puff arrived. This is a classical Pavlovian response in which a shift is noted from reaction to action, also known as specific anticipatory behaviour. This shift occurred whether subjects had knowledge of the temporal relationship between tone and air puff or not: both subjects who were aware of the temporal relationship—as judged by their answers to questions regarding this relationship after test completion—and subjects who were unaware of the relationship learned this experimental task. One could say that this type of conditioning occurs automatically, reflex-like, or implicitly. In contrast, the trace conditioning task required that the subjects explicitly knew or realized the temporal relationship between the tone and air puff. Only those subjects knowing this relationship explicitly—as judged by their answers to questions regarding this relationship—succeeded in performing the task; those that were not, failed. In other words, subjects had to be explicitly aware or have conscious knowledge of the task at hand in order to bring the shift about, that is, to respond after the tone and before the air puff. This is called explicit or declarative knowledge. Interestingly, amnesia patients could perform the delay conditioning task, but not the trace conditioning task. These patients suffer from damage to the hippocampal formation or medial temporal lobe, suggesting that such an intact structure is a necessary condition for trace but not for delay conditioning to occur. Now what do animals do in this task? Interestingly, the same difference in task procedure and effects of hippocampal lesion is found in, for instance, rabbits: intact rabbits acquire both tasks, hippocampal lesioned rabbits only the delay conditioning task (Clark & Squire, 1998; Wallenstein et al., 1998). So, this would suggest that rabbits—like humans—are aware of the temporal relationship between the stimuli or have conscious knowledge of this temporal relationship and act on this. In other words, it would seem that a classical Pavlovian task might reveal aspects of awareness or consciousness in animals and “raise[s] the intriguing possibility that delay and trace conditioning could be used to study aspects of awareness in nonhuman animals.” (van den Bos)

5.4 The most well-known test for conscious awareness is the mirror self-recognition test. Several non-human animal species appear to pass this test, including mammals, birds, and fish. This would indicate that awareness may have arisen as long ago as early vertebrates (which, as noted above, first appeared approximately 525 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion).

The Mirror Self-Recognition test is the traditional method for attempting to measure self-awareness. However, agreement has been reached that animals can be self-aware in ways not measured by the mirror test, such as distinguishing between their own and others' songs and scents. … Very few species have passed the MSR test. Species that have include the great apes (including humans), a single Asiatic elephant, dolphins, orcas, the Eurasian magpie, and the cleaner wrasse. A wide range of species has been reported to fail the test, including several species of monkeys, giant pandas, and sea lions. (Mirror Test)
Until the 2008 study on magpies, self-recognition was thought to reside in the neocortex area of the brain. However, this brain region is absent in nonmammals. Self-recognition may be a case of convergent evolution, where similar evolutionary pressures result in similar behaviors or traits, although species arrive at them by different routes, and the underlying mechanism may be different. (Mirror Test)

5.5 Awareness may have evolved independently in cephalopods too, which would mean it may be very widespread in the animal kingdom.

Godfrey-Smith follows the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene in suggesting that “there's a particular style of processing—one that we use to deal especially with time, sequences, and novelty—that brings with it conscious awareness, while a lot of other quite complex activities do not.” The ability of octopuses to learn new skills, of the kind that may demand consciousness, indicates the possibility of “an awareness that in some ways resembles our own.” (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness)

6.0 Abstraction. This level in the hierarchy of consciousness is enabled by mechanisms for understanding and creating symbols, art, language, memes, writing, mathematics, philosophy, and science, which all act to expand culture.

6.1 Language is the vital element for abstract consciousness. It is the ability to evoke something that isn’t present in the senses by the use of another sound or movement. Its evolutionary origins are unknown and said to be one of the hardest problems in science. It may have originated in humans somewhere between 2.3 and 6 million years ago.

“I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries.” — Charles Darwin, 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Origin of Language)
Today, there are various hypotheses about how, why, when, and where language might have emerged. Despite this, there is scarcely more agreement today than a hundred years ago, when Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection provoked a rash of armchair speculation on the topic. Since the early 1990s, however, a number of linguists, archaeologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and others have attempted to address with new methods what some consider one of the hardest problems in science. (Origin of Language)
How [do we] get from blind genetic evolution to Bach? The first step is synanthropic words. Synanthropic means things that thrive along with humans (e.g. seagulls, cockroaches, etc.). Nobody owned the first words; they were just habits that developed. [E.g. screeching for certain predators or specific dangers.] Next are domesticated words. Domesticated means the reproduction is controlled. For words, this means conscious choosing of one over the other. This leads to differential replication. Meanings or pronunciations can change over time, but the best ones survive, usually without even noticing why. The next step are coined words, deliberately designed, although their survival is still down to selection. Then there are technical terms, which are very carefully designed, and curated under strong group pressure. E.g. phenotype vs. genotype. These are hyper-domesticated words. (Post 6)
The time range for the evolution of language and /or its anatomical prerequisites extends, at least in principle, from the phylogenetic divergence of Homo (2.3 to 2.4 million years ago) from Pan (5 to 6 million years ago) to the emergence of full behavioral modernity some 50,000–150,000 years ago. Few dispute that Australopithecus probably lacked vocal communication significantly more sophisticated than that of great apes in general, but scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis, while others place the development of symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or with Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago) and the development of language proper with Homo sapiens, currently estimated at less than 200,000 years ago. (Origin of Language)
Once early humans started speaking, there would be strong selection for mutations that improved this ability, such as the famous FOXP2 gene, which enables the basal ganglia and the cerebellum to lay down the complex motor memories necessary for complex speech. (A brief history of the brain)

6.2 A host of abstractions emerged as Homo sapiens developed. Language, art, and storytelling all appeared from 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. More advanced abstractions and technologies have emerged steadily since then.

Bones of primitive Homo sapiens first appear 300,000 years ago in Africa, with brains as large or larger than ours. They’re followed by anatomically modern Homo sapiens at least 200,000 years ago, and brain shape became essentially modern by at least 100,000 years ago. (Longrich)
Starting about 65,000 to 50,000 years ago, more advanced technology started appearing: complex projectile weapons such as bows and spear-throwers, fishhooks, ceramics, sewing needles. People made representational art—cave paintings of horses, ivory goddesses, lion-headed idols, showing artistic flair and imagination. A bird-bone flute hints at music. Meanwhile, arrival of humans in Australia 65,000 years ago shows we’d mastered seafaring. This sudden flourishing of technology is called the “great leap forward,” supposedly reflecting the evolution of a fully modern human brain. (Longrich)

6.3 The study of language abilities in nonhuman animals is now a fast-growing field. Many examples have recently become available which show that simple forms of language are present in nonhuman animals, meaning the origins of abstract thinking may stretch back much further in time than originally thought.

The gestural theory states that human language developed from gestures that were used for simple communication. Research has found strong support for the idea that verbal language and sign language depend on similar neural structures. Nonhuman primates can use gestures or symbols for at least primitive communication, and some of their gestures resemble those of humans, such as the “begging posture”, with the hands stretched out, which humans share with chimpanzees. (Origin of Language)
In the wild, the communication of vervet monkeys has been the most extensively studied. They are known to make up to ten different vocalizations. Many of these are used to warn other members of the group about approaching predators. They include a “leopard call”, a “snake call”, and an “eagle call”. Each call triggers a different defensive strategy in the monkeys who hear the call and scientists were able to elicit predictable responses from the monkeys using loudspeakers and prerecorded sounds. (Origin of Language)
In experiments on 100 study participants across age groups, cultures, and species, researchers found that indigenous Tsimane' people in Bolivia's Amazon rainforest, American adults and preschoolers, and macaque monkeys all show, to varying degrees, a knack for “recursion”, a cognitive process of arranging words, phrases or symbols in a way that helps convey complex commands, sentiments, and ideas. The findings, published today (26 June 2020) in the journal Science Advances, shed new light on our understanding of the evolution of language, researchers said. (Anwar)
In an online event with Eva Meijer about her book When Animals Speak, Meijer discussed studies that show dolphins and bats use names for each other and chickens even create names for the people they regularly interact with.
Jays and crows choose particular gifts they believe will appeal to their partners, and so have a “theory of mind” — they can see things from another’s point of view. Prairie dogs use chattering calls to describe different intruders — not only a human, but how large he or she is, the colour of their clothes, and whether they are carrying an umbrella or a gun. Many mammals can learn human words, produce new sounds, or acquire other languages: orcas, for example, can imitate the cries of dolphins. (Meijer)
Neo-Piagetian stages have been applied to the maximum stage attained by various animals. For example, … pigeons attain the sensory motor stage, forming concepts. (Piaget)
Birds are descendants of the primitive avialans which first appeared about 160 million years ago in China. (Bird)

6.4 Spoken languages among animals are therefore a difference of degree rather than kind. Written language, however, appears to be a uniquely human phenomenon. This capability in humans first emerged less than 6,000 years ago and would appear to be the technology that is most responsible for our cultural evolution accelerating to the point that humans now dominate the planet.

Cuneiform is an ancient writing system that was first used in around 3400 BC. Distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, cuneiform script is the oldest form of writing in the world. (Origin of Language)
The MacCready Explosion: 10,000 years ago, human population plus livestock and pets were approximately 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today, it is 98%. This is probably the biggest, fastest, biological change on the planet ever. Genes don’t explain it. Technology does. (Post 6)

6.5 This completes the final Evolutionary Epistemological Mechanisms (EEMs) from Donald Campbell, which have been slowly accruing during this evolutionary history.

Campbell settled on a 10-step outline that showed the broad categories of mechanisms that biological life has used to gain knowledge. This starts with the earliest origins of life where problems were solved over generations through mere genetic variance alone, without any aids from motion or the formation of memories. This earliest slow accrual of genetic knowledge eventually led, according to Campbell, to the other mechanisms: movement, habit, instinct, visually-supported decisions, memory-supported decisions, observational learning from social interactions, language, cultural transmissions, and finally, scientific accumulations of knowledge. (Gibney)

Brief comments to close

This may have been the hardest of the 4 Tinbergen questions to answer. Our scientific explorations into this realm have left us with vast ranges for when different cognitive abilities may have emerged and slowly grown. But summarising the findings above, and focusing simply on the emergence of each level, we find this final chart for my hierarchies of consciousness:

So, that’s just about it in this long series on consciousness. Once again, we have excellent consilience where multiple streams of evidence are all pointing to the same thing. All that is left for me now is to put together one final summary and see how my new definition and mapping of the features of consciousness might help us answer the most stubborn problems the field has previously acknowledged. I can hardly wait.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions
Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology
Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions
Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness
Consciousness 20 — The Mechanisms of Consciousness
Consciousness 21 — Development Over a Lifetime (Ontogeny)