Evolutionary Philosophy

Consciousness 21 — Development Over a Lifetime (Ontogeny)

11/20/2020

Time now to tackle the third of Tinbergen’s four questions. His framework for analysing all biological phenomena is definitely helping me shed light on the multifaceted concept of consciousness. So far, my hierarchical definition was rounded into shape by looking at the functions of consciousness, and then that hierarchy held up well as I went through a physicalist account of the mechanisms of consciousness. These two tables summarise my findings so far:

These first two questions represent the two static elements of Tinbergen’s model. They are “contemporary” accounts that explain the current form of a behaviour in its present condition. The next two questions move on to the dynamic elements, or the “chronicle” accounts that explain the biological phenomenon in terms of the sequence that got it there. For example, you wouldn’t have a complete understanding of a frog without exploring both its tadpole phase as well as the evolutionary history of amphibians. The species history is known as the tale of phylogeny, which I’ll leave for last. In this post, I’ll look at the local / proximate tale of an individual, which is called ontogeny. And in particular, I’ll confine myself to the ontogeny of human consciousness, since that’s the only form of consciousness that we have first-hand experience of.Before I get to the details of that, let me give a few general notes.

General notes about ontogeny

As Dan Dennett has noted, an evolutionary view of history requires one to drop any essentialised views. There just aren’t any eternal essences in nature that suddenly turn on or off. Likewise, everything in biology has changed slowly over billions of years in tiny increments. Viewing consciousness through this lens helps you see it as a slowly growing phenomenon over the life of an individual. (We’ll get to how it has slowly grown over the development of species in the next post.) This is precisely why a hierarchical definition of consciousness is required—to mimic the evolutionary change and growth of nature.

In an earlier post, I said this reminded me of “the parable of the immune system” that the evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson likes to use. On an episode of The Psychology Podcast, Wilson said: “The human immune system is immensely modular. We inherit it, and it does not change during our lifetime. It is something that evolved by genetic evolution, but it is triggered by environmental circumstances. [This] adaptive component of the immune system is highly evolutionary. That’s the ability of antibodies to vary and for the successful antigens to be ramped up. So that’s an evolutionary process that takes place during the lifetime of the organism. The whole thing is densely modular but also amazingly open-ended. Why can’t we say the same thing about the human behavioural system?” Well, it seems obvious (to me anyway) that we can say the same thing about our behaviour—that it adapts during our lifetimes to successful and unsuccessful interactions with the environment. And the same thing applies to our growing powers of consciousness—they give life more and more degrees of freedom as they help an organism make more and more sense of its environment.

In a recent Brain Science Podcast, the neuroscientist Seth Grant discussed how we are beginning to see neurological evidence for this kind of development of consciousness over a lifetime. He noted,

“We all know that humans and every other animal go through a stereotypical trajectory of lifespan behavioural changes. When a human baby is born, they have a very limited set of behavioural responses. But they very rapidly, over the course of months and years, develop an increasingly complex behavioural repertoire. They also go through phases, famously described by Piaget and others. … These lifespan trajectories have been well documented before, but the question is, why do we have them? Why do they come about? In this paper that we’ve just published, we found that there was a remarkable set of changes [in synapses] across the lifespan. The synaptome map of the brain and its architecture changes at every age throughout life. In other words, our brain is always changing. Over the first few months of the mouse, which is the equivalent of the first few decades of a human, there was a remarkable explosion of synaptic diversity. Just as the behavioural repertoire was very limited in the new-born animal, so was the synaptic diversity. This fits well with our earlier work linking the two.”

This neurological evidence is just beginning to come in, so I can’t say much more than this about the ontology of mechanisms for consciousness, but as Grant noted, the psychologist Jean Piaget spent a lifetime studying the behavioural development of children. He argued that intelligence develops in a series of stages that are related to age and are progressive because one stage must be accomplished before the next can occur. By the end of the 20th century, Piaget was second only to B. F. Skinner as the most cited psychologist of that era. Although his ideas were subjected to massive scrutiny, Piaget's original model “has proved to be remarkably robust.” I don’t want to pretend that there haven’t been “innumerable improvements and qualifications of his work, coming from a plethora of neo-Piagetian and post-Piagetian variants,” but for the purposes of sketching out the ontology of consciousness, Piaget proves invaluable and I’ll rely on him heavily.

Just as before, during the examination of the first two Tinbergen questions, there are lot of intricate details to consider. So, I’ll continue to write simple numbered statements followed by their justifications so you can quickly read the statements to get the gist of my arguments. You can dip into any of the details for each statement if you want further information. Or click on the links there for even more. I’ll also continue to work within the structure of my hierarchy since it is proving to be an effective guide to consciousness. Here goes!

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

1.1 The genetic makeup for each new human is determined at conception. Fertilisation kicks off biological processes that, when successful, eventually lead to a life. The first three criteria for life are gradually met during the early stages of prenatal development.

The first sperm cell to successfully penetrate the egg cell donates its genetic material (DNA) to combine with the DNA of the egg cell resulting in a new organism called the zygote. The term “conception” refers variably to either fertilization or to formation of the conceptus after its implantation in the uterus, and this terminology is controversial. (Prenatal Development)
The first two weeks from fertilization is referred to as the germinal stage or pre-embryonic stage. The zygote spends the next few days traveling down the fallopian tube dividing several times to form a ball of cells called a morula. Further cellular division is accompanied by the formation of a small cavity between the cells. This stage is called a blastocyst. Up to this point there is no growth in the overall size of the embryo, as it is confined within a glycoprotein shell, known as the zona pellucida. Instead, each division produces successively smaller cells. (Prenatal Development)
The blastocyst reaches the uterus at roughly the fifth day after fertilization. It is here that disintegration of the zona pellucida occurs. This process is analogous to hatching. This allows cells of the blastocyst to come into contact with, and adhere to, cells of the uterus. In most successful pregnancies, the embryo implants 8 to 10 days after ovulation. Rapid growth occurs and the embryo's main features begin to take form. This process is called differentiation, which produces the varied cell types, such as blood cells, kidney cells, and nerve cells. (Prenatal Development)

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 The final four criteria for life are met in the next stages of prenatal development. A viable fetus will, on its own, display the first four cognitive abilities in order to remain alive and begin to adapt to its environment.

Following fertilization, the embryonic stage of development continues until the end of the 10th week. By the end of the tenth week of gestational age the embryo has acquired its basic form and is referred to as a fetus. The next period is that of fetal development where many organs become fully developed. Development continues throughout the life of the fetus and through into life after birth. Significant changes occur to many systems in the period after birth as they adapt to life outside the uterus. (Prenatal Development)
The perinatal period is “around the time of birth.” In developed countries and at facilities where expert neonatal care is available, it is considered from 22 completed weeks of gestation (the time when birth weight is normally 500 g) to 7 completed days after birth. In many of the developing countries the starting point of this period is considered 28 completed weeks of gestation (or weight more than 1000 g). (Prenatal Development)
While there is no sharp limit of development, gestational age, or weight at which a human fetus automatically becomes viable, a 2013 study found that “While only a small proportion of births occur before 24 completed weeks of gestation (about 1 per 1000), survival is rare and most of them are either fetal deaths or live births followed by a neonatal death.” According to studies between 2003 and 2005, 20 to 35 percent of babies born at 24 weeks of gestation survived, while 50 to 70 percent of babies born at 25 weeks, and more than 90 percent born at 26 to 27 weeks, survived. (Fetal Viability)
One 2018 study showed that there was a significant difference between countries in what was considered to be the “grey zone”: the “grey zone” was considered to be 22.0 - 22.6/23 weeks in Sweden, 23.0 – 23.6/24 weeks in the UK, and 24.0-25.6/26 weeks in Netherlands. (Fetal Viability)
Viability, as the word has been used in United States constitutional law since Roe v. Wade, is the potential of the fetus to survive outside the uterus after birth, natural or induced, when supported by up-to-date medicine. Fetal viability depends largely on the fetal organ maturity, and environmental conditions. (Fetal Viability)
The United States Supreme Court stated in Roe v. Wade (1973) that viability “is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.” The 28-week definition became part of the “trimester framework” marking the point at which the “compelling state interest” (under the doctrine of strict scrutiny) in preserving potential life became possibly controlling, permitting states to freely regulate and even ban abortion after the 28th week. (Fetal Viability)

2.2 In addition to the basic physical stimuli that a fetus responds to, language also induces changes in brain states at this early stage of life.

There is evidence that the acquisition of language begins in the prenatal stage. After 26 weeks of gestation, the peripheral auditory system is already fully formed. Also, most low-frequency sounds (less than 300 Hz) can reach the fetal inner ear in the womb of mammals. Those low-frequency sounds include pitch, rhythm, and phonetic information related to language. Studies have indicated that fetuses react to and recognize differences between sounds. Such ideas are further reinforced by the fact that newborns present a preference for their mother's voice, present behavioural recognition of stories only heard during gestation, and (in monolingual mothers) present preference for their native language. A more recent study with EEG demonstrated different brain activation in newborns hearing their native language compared to when they were presented with a different language, further supporting the idea that language learning starts while in gestation. (Prenatal Development)

2.3 Some abilities associated with the final criteria for life are an innate part of humans, hardwired by our genetic evolution. Much behaviour is plastic, however, and must be learned through experience.

Fortunately, living organisms are not required to learn everything about the world from scratch. Each phenotype is endowed with innate predictions concerning biologically significant situations it is certain to encounter. Fear behaviors (freezing and fleeing), for example, are innate predictions; but each individual has to learn what to fear and what else might be done in response. What vertebrates do to meet their needs always consists in a combination of innate and learned behaviors. (Solms)
As far as we know, all cortical functional specializations are developmental/epigenetic. The columns of cortex are initially almost identical in neuronal architecture, and the famous differences in Brodmann’s areas probably arise from use-dependent plasticity. (Solms and Panksepp)
Much of what we have traditionally thought to be unconditioned about exteroceptive consciousness is actually learned. This has been well demonstrated by the research of Mriganka Sur, which shows that total removal of “visual” cortex in fetal mice (in utero) does not impair their adult vision at all, and redirecting visual input from occipital cortex to auditory cortex in ferrets leads to reorganization of the latter tissue to support completely competent vision. Clearly, from a corticocentric viewpoint, this either means that sensory perception is completely learned, or that perceptual functionality is completely controlled by subcortical structures, with subtle developmental extensions of affective experience perhaps being the foremost vehicle. In short, one of the great mistakes of modern cognitive neuroscience may be the assumption that cortical consciousness is built on intrinsic “hard-wired” cognitive computational principles. The resolution of conscious experiences in the neocortex may be largely learned developmental/epigenetic functions of the brain. (Solms and Panksepp)

2.4 The first mechanism for learning is experiencing which actions or situations lead directly to states of mind that are rewarding or punishing. This innate experience of “good” or “bad” affect drives behaviour towards survival. This is the base underpinning all consciousness.

Interoceptive consciousness is phenomenal; it “feels like” something. Above all, the phenomenal states of the body-as-subject are experienced affectively. Affects, rather than representing discrete external events, are experienced as positively and negatively valenced states. Their valence is determined by how changing internal conditions relate to the probability of survival and reproductive success. The empirical evidence for the feeling component are simply based on the highly replicable fact that wherever in the brain one can artificially evoke coherent emotional response patterns with deep brain stimulation, those shifting states uniformly are accompanied by “rewarding” and “punishing” states of mind. By attributing valence to experience—determining whether something is “good” or “bad” for the subject, within a biological system of values—affective consciousness (and the behaviours it gives rise to) intrinsically promotes survival and reproductive success. This is what consciousness is for. (Solms and Panksepp)

2.5 The first stages of childhood development explore the environment with very rudimentary behaviours and reflexes.

Stage 1.1 of Piaget’s Four Stages (0–1 months): Reflex schema stage—Babies learn how the body can move and work. Vision is blurred and attention spans remain short through infancy. They are not particularly aware of objects to know they have disappeared from sight. However, babies as young as seven minutes old prefer to look at faces. The three primary achievements of this stage are: sucking, visual tracking, and hand closure. (Object Permanence)

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 As babies interact with the environment and further develop their cognitive capabilities, they begin to act with intentions rather than mere reflexes. They pay attention, build memories, and learn, but the classic A-not-B error shows they have not yet built prediction models in their consciousness.

To start out, infants only engaged in primarily reflex actions such as sucking, but not long after, they would pick up objects and put them in their mouths. When they do this, they modify their reflex response to accommodate the external objects into reflex actions. Because the two are often in conflict, they provide the impetus for intellectual development. The constant need to balance the two triggers intellectual growth. (Piaget)
Stage 1.2 of Piaget’s Four Stages (1–4 months): Primary circular reactions—Babies notice objects and start following their movements. They continue to look where an object was, but for only a few moments. They “discover” their eyes, arms, hands, and feet in the course of acting on objects. This stage is marked by responses to familiar images and sounds (including parents’ faces) and anticipatory responses to familiar events (such as opening the mouth for a spoon). The infant's actions become less reflexive and intentionality emerges. (Object Permanence)
Stage 1.3 of Piaget’s Four Stages (4–8 months): Secondary circular reactions—Babies will reach for an object that is partially hidden, indicating knowledge that the whole object is still there. If an object is completely hidden, however, the baby makes no attempt to retrieve it. The infant learns to coordinate vision and comprehension. Actions are intentional, but the child tends to repeat similar actions on the same object. Novel behaviours are not yet imitated. (Object Permanence)
Stage 1.4 of Piaget’s Four Stages (8–12 months): Coordination of secondary circular reactions—This is deemed the most important for the cognitive development of the child. At this stage the child understands causality and is goal-directed. The very earliest understanding of object permanence emerges, as the child is now able to retrieve an object when its concealment is observed. This stage is associated with the classic A-not-B error. After successfully retrieving a hidden object at one location (A), the child fails to retrieve it at a second location (B). (Object Permanence)

3.2 Actions gradually become more complex through the integration of more information, including the formation of memories. It is our neuroplasticity that enables each individual to learn from their particular lived experience.

At first glance, it may seem that the reason we don’t remember being babies is because infants and toddlers don’t have a fully developed memory. But babies as young as six months can form both short-term memories that last for minutes, and long-term memories that last weeks, if not months. (Shinskey)
Neural plasticity is the ability of the brain to change continuously throughout an individual's life, e.g., brain activity associated with a given function can be transferred to a different location, the proportion of grey matter can change, and synapses may strengthen or weaken over time. Neuroplasticity can be observed at multiple scales, from microscopic changes in individual neurons to larger-scale changes such as cortical remapping in response to injury. Behavior, environmental stimuli, thought, and emotions may also cause neuroplastic change through activity-dependent plasticity, which has significant implications for healthy development, learning, memory, and recovery from brain damage. (Neuroplasticity)
Hebbian theory is a neuroscientific theory claiming that an increase in synaptic efficacy arises from a presynaptic cell's repeated and persistent stimulation of a postsynaptic cell. It is an attempt to explain synaptic plasticity, the adaptation of brain neurons during the learning process. The theory is often summarized as “Cells that fire together wire together.” (Neuroplasticity)

3.3 As babies begin to understand more and more about their environment, early forms of communication with them becomes possible.

Joint attention refers to when two people look at and attend to the same thing; parents often use the act of pointing to prompt infants to engage in joint attention. The inclination to spontaneously reference an object in the world as of interest, via pointing, and to likewise appreciate the directed attention of another, may be the underlying motive behind all human communication. (Theory of Mind Wikipedia)

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 intentions exist (either one’s own or the intentions of others), they can be taken into account. To do so is to use prediction to think through what the result will be from any intentions. This requires three more cognitive capacities from Lyon’s list: anticipation, problem solving, and error detection.

Infants' understanding of attention in others acts as a “critical precursor” to the development of theory of mind. Understanding attention involves understanding that seeing can be directed selectively as attention, that the looker assesses the seen object as “of interest”, and that seeing can induce beliefs. (Theory of Mind)
In this process, the organism must stay “ahead of the wave” of the biological consequences of its choices (to use the analogy that gave Andy Clark's (2016) book its wonderful title: Surfing Uncertainty): “To deal rapidly and fluently with an uncertain and noisy world, brains like ours have become masters of prediction—surfing the waves of noisy and ambiguous sensory stimulation by, in effect, trying to stay just ahead of the place where the wave is breaking (p. xiv).” (Solms)
The Bayesian brain is [optimized] through the encoding of better models of the world leading to better predictions. It is important to note that in this model, prediction error (mediated by the sensory affect of surprise), is a “bad” thing, biologically speaking. The more veridical the brain’s generative model of the world, the less surprise (the less salience, the less consciousness, the more automaticity), the better. Freud called this the “Nirvana principle”. [In simpler terms,] the goal of all learning is automatised mental processes, increased predictability, and reduced uncertainty or surprise. (Solms and Panksepp)

4.2 The ability of brains to predict the world is signalled by the full grasping of object permanence. Human babies generally reach this level of development around the age of two. From then on, they operate according to schemata, which are continually refined throughout life.

Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or sensed in any way. It is one of an infant's most important accomplishments, as, without this concept, objects would have no separate, permanent existence. In Piaget's theory of cognitive development, infants develop this understanding by the end of the “sensorimotor stage”, which lasts from birth to about two years of age. (Object Permanence)
Stage 1.5 of Piaget’s Four Stages (12–18 months): Tertiary circular reaction—The child gains means-end knowledge and is able to solve new problems. The child is now able to retrieve an object when it is hidden several times within their view but cannot locate it when it is outside their perceptual field. (Object Permanence) During this stage infants explore new possibilities of objects; they try different things to get different results. (Piaget)
Stage 1.6 of Piaget’s Four Stages (18–24 months): Invention of new means through mental combination—The child fully understands object permanence. They will not fall for A-not-B errors. Also, a baby is able to understand the concept of items that are hidden in containers. If a toy is hidden in a matchbox then the matchbox put under a pillow and then, without the child seeing, the toy is slipped out of the matchbox and the matchbox then given to the child, the child will look under the pillow upon discovery that it is not in the matchbox. The child is able to develop a mental image, hold it in mind, and manipulate it to solve problems, including object permanence problems that are not based solely on perception. The child can now reason about where the object may be when invisible displacement occurs. (Object Permanence) [In other words, this stage involves] internalization of schemata. (Piaget)
A Schema is a structured cluster of concepts, it can be used to represent objects, scenarios, or sequences of events or relations. The original idea was proposed by philosopher Immanuel Kant as innate structures used to help us perceive the world. A schema (pl. schemata) is the mental framework that is created as children interact with their physical and social environments. (Piaget)
While much research has been done on infants, theory of mind develops continuously throughout childhood and into late adolescence as the synapses (neuronal connections) in the prefrontal cortex develop. Children seem to develop theory of mind skills sequentially. The first skill to develop is the ability to recognize that others have diverse desires. Children are able to recognize that others have diverse beliefs soon after. The next skill to develop is recognizing that others have access to different knowledge bases. Finally, children are able to understand that others may have false beliefs and that others are capable of hiding emotions. (Theory of Mind)

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

5.1 By making cognitive connections between intentions, predictions, and internal affective feelings, the development of self-awareness slowly arises.

[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. The self of everyday cognition is therefore largely an abstraction. That is why the self is so effortlessly able to think about itself in relation to objects, in such everyday situations as “I am currently experiencing myself looking at an object.” (Solms and Panksepp)
As predictions and perceptions improve, organisms eventually make the connection that there is a self which has its own mind. Awareness is achieved. This development is covered by the final cognitive capacity from Lyon’s list: self-reference. Such conscious cognition allows memories and thoughts built from the lived past and the anticipated future to create the autonoetic, autobiographical self. (Post 19)

5.2 Mirror Self-Recognition tests currently act as our best marker for the attainment of this level of consciousness. Passing this test is correlated with object permanence, and similarly occurs in humans around the age of two, although there are differences in this timeline that appear to be related to rearing behaviours.

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 have been reported to fail the test, including several species of monkeys, giant pandas, and sea lions. … A strong correlation between self-concept and object permanence has been demonstrated. (Mirror Test)
From the ages of 6 to 12 months, the child typically sees a “sociable playmate” in the mirror's reflection. Self-admiring and embarrassment usually begin at 12 months, and at 14 to 20 months, most children demonstrate avoidance behaviors. Finally, at 18 months, half of children recognize the reflection in the mirror as their own and by 20 to 24 months, self-recognition climbs to 65%. (Mirror Test)
A 2010 cross-cultural study observed variations in the presence of self-oriented behaviors exhibited by children (ranging from 18 to 55 months old) from non-Western rural communities and Western urban and rural communities when each was given the mark test. They found that children from Western communities showed earlier signs of self-oriented behaviors toward the mark when given the mirror mark test, whereas an absence of this behavior was seen in children from non-Western communities. Such results do not suggest a delayed development in cognition in the latter group, but rather the potential of how differences in parenting styles (as influenced by culture) impact the way children express self-concept. … For example, a Cameroonian Nso sample of infants 18 to 20 months of age had an extremely low amount of self-recognition outcomes at 3.2%. The study also found two strong predictors of self-recognition: object stimulation (maternal effort of attracting the attention of the infant to an object either person touched) and mutual eye contact. (Mirror Test)

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 Passing through the first five levels of consciousness in this hierarchy creates a very aware living being that is rare in the animal kingdom. And yet, we don’t remember any of the steps it took to get us there.

Most of us don’t have any memories from the first three to four years of our lives—in fact, we tend to remember very little of life before the age of seven. The phenomenon, known as “childhood amnesia”, has been puzzling psychologists for more than a century—and we still don’t fully understand it. (Shinskey)
Virtually nobody has memories from very early childhood. It's clear that young children do remember facts in the moment such as who their parents are, or that one must say “please” before mom will give you candy. This is called “semantic memory.” Until sometime between the ages two and four, however, children lack “episodic memory”—memory regarding the details of a specific event. (Shouse)
The typical boundary for the offset of childhood amnesia—three and a half years—shifts with age. Children and teenagers have earlier memories than adults do. This suggests that the problem may be less with forming memories than with maintaining them. (Shinskey)
[There is a] theory that we can’t remember our first years simply because our brains hadn’t developed the necessary equipment. The explanation emerges from the most famous man in the history of neuroscience, known simply as patient HM. After a botched operation to cure his epilepsy damaged his hippocampus, HM was unable to recall any new events. Intriguingly, however, he was still able to learn other kinds of information—just like babies. When scientists asked him to copy a drawing of a five-pointed star by looking at it in a mirror (harder than it sounds), he improved with each round of practise—despite the fact the experience itself felt completely new to him. Perhaps, when we’re very young, the hippocampus simply isn’t developed enough to build a rich memory of an event. Baby rats, monkeys and humans all continue to add new neurons to the hippocampus for the first few years of life and we are all unable to form lasting memories as infants—and it seems that the moment we stop creating new neurons, we’re suddenly able to form long-term memories. (Gorvett)
While the neurological explanation does account for blanks in very young children's memories, it does not give a full explanation for childhood amnesia because it fails to account for the years after the age of four. It also fails to address the issue that children themselves do not show childhood amnesia. Children around the age of two to three have been found to remember things that occurred when they were only one to two years old. This discovery that three-year-olds can retrieve memories from earlier in their life implies that all necessary neurological structures are in place to recall episodic information over the short-term, but evidently not over the long-term into adulthood. (Childhood Amnesia)

6.2 It may be that this lack of memory is precisely because one must pass through the first five levels of consciousness in order to begin recording an autobiographical self.

The development of a cognitive self is also thought by some to have a strong effect on encoding and storing early memories. As toddlers grow, a developing sense of the self begins to emerge as they realize that they are a person with unique and defining characteristics and have individual thoughts and feelings separate from others. As they gain a sense of the self, they can begin to organize autobiographical experiences and retain memories of past events. This is also known as the development of a theory of mind which refers to a child's acceptance that they have beliefs, knowledge, and thoughts that no one else has access to. The developmental explanation asserts that young children have a good concept of semantic information but lack the retrieval processes necessary to link past and present episodic events to create an autobiographical self. Young children do not seem to have a sense of a continuous self over time until they develop awareness for themselves as an individual human being. (Childhood Amnesia)

6.3 The development of language is key to this ability to think about the world, to recall past events, or to imagine future possibilities. Language is an abstract representation of these things, which allows them to be repeatedly brought into the present tense of a mind, which is how memories are formed and reformed.

Another factor that we know plays a role is language. From the ages of one to six, children progress from the one-word stage of speaking to becoming fluent in their native language(s), so there are major changes in their verbal ability that overlap with the childhood amnesia period. This includes using the past tense, memory-related words such as “remember” and “forget”, and personal pronouns, a favourite being “mine”. A child’s ability to verbalise about an event at the time that it happened predicts how well they remember it months or years later. One lab group conducted this work by interviewing toddlers brought to accident and emergency departments for common childhood injuries. Toddlers over 26 months, who could verbalise about the event at the time, recalled it up to five years later, whereas those under 26 months, who could not talk about it, recalled little or nothing. (Shinskey)
On the “self-awareness being tied to language” note, I found this quote from Helen Keller interesting: “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.” (Hellen Keller, 1908: quoted by Daniel Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained. p 227) (Hiskey)
If I ask you to picture a rope and climbing up it, you can do it. I specifically chose those objects and actions because it is exactly what a chimp in a zoo is familiar with. If I asked a chimp to do the same thing, could it? We don’t know, but I suspect not, because you can’t do it wordlessly. You need to be able to interact using language. Without language, I don’t think you have the cognitive systems for self-simulation and self-probing that we have. … Language allows us to be conscious of things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to be conscious of. (Dennett)

6.4 Language also vastly enlarges our abilities to recognise patterns in the world. This is vital for understanding and predicting events.

Differences in knowledge yield striking differences in the capacity to pick up patterns. Expert chess players can instantly perceive (and subsequently recall with high accuracy) the total board position in a real game but are much worse at recall if the same chess pieces are randomly placed on the board, even though to a novice both boards are equally hard to recall. This should not surprise anyone who considers that an expert speaker of English would have much less difficulty perceiving and recalling: “The frightened cat struggled to get loose” than “Te serioghehnde t srugfcalde go tgtt ohle” which contains the same pieces, now somewhat disordered. Expert chess players, unlike novices, not only know how to Play chess; they know how to read chess—how to see the patterns at a glance. (Dennett)

6.5 The development of language occurs gradually over the last three of Piaget’s stages. This drastically expands the use of symbols and logic, which are the hallmarks of this sixth level of abstract consciousness.

Stage 2 of Piaget’s Four Stages—Preoperational stage: starts when the child begins to learn to speak at age two and lasts up until the age of seven. During the pre-operational stage of cognitive development, Piaget noted that children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information. Children's increase in playing and pretending takes place in this stage. However, the child still has trouble seeing things from different points of view. The Pre-operational Stage is split into two substages: the symbolic function substage, and the intuitive thought substage. (Piaget)
Stage 2.1 of Piaget’s Four Stages—Symbolic Function Substage: from two to four years of age children find themselves using symbols to represent physical models of the world around them. Children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them. Play is demonstrated by the idea of checkers being snacks, pieces of paper being plates, and a box being a table. (Piaget)
Stage 2.2 of Piaget’s Four Stages—Intuitive Thought Substage: between about the ages of four and seven, children tend to become very curious and ask many questions, beginning the use of primitive reasoning. Children tend to propose the questions of “why?” and “how come?” This stage is when children want the knowledge of knowing everything. Piaget called it the “intuitive substage” because children realize they have a vast amount of knowledge, but they are unaware of how they acquired it. (Piaget)
Stage 3 of Piaget’s Four Stages—Concrete operational stage: from ages seven to eleven. Children can now conserve and think logically (they understand reversibility) but are limited to what they can physically manipulate. They are no longer egocentric. During this stage, children become more aware of logic and conservation, topics previously foreign to them. Children also improve drastically with their classification skills. (Piaget)
Stage 4 of Piaget’s Four Stages—Formal operational stage: from age eleven to sixteen and onwards. Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind. Abstract thought is newly present during this stage of development. Children are now able to utilize metacognition. Along with this, the children in the formal operational stage display more skills oriented towards problem solving, often in multiple steps. The child is able to identify the properties of objects by the way different kinds of actions affect them. This is the process of “empirical abstraction.” By repeating this process across a wide range of objects and actions, the child establishes a new level of knowledge and insight. Once the child has constructed these new kinds of knowledge, he or she starts to use them to create still more complex objects and to carry out still more complex actions. As a result, the child starts to recognize still more complex patterns and to construct still more complex objects. (Piaget)

6.6 Beyond Piaget’s examination of childhood, human consciousness can continue to expand by integrating more and more information. An objectively good criterion for this expansion of consciousness would evaluate whether it created better and better models for surviving and thriving.

Piaget's theory stops at the formal operational stage, but other researchers have observed the thinking of adults is more nuanced than formal operational thought. This fifth stage has been named post formal thought or operation. There are many theorists, however, who have criticized “post formal thinking,” because the concept lacks both theoretical and empirical verification. The term “integrative thinking” has been suggested for use instead. (Piaget's theory of cognitive development)
Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development constitute an adaptation of a psychological theory originally conceived by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. The theory holds that moral reasoning, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for ethical behavior, has six developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor. Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgment far beyond the ages studied earlier by Piaget, who also claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages. The six stages of moral development occur in three levels. Level 1, Pre-Conventional, consists of: Stage 1—obedience and punishment orientation (How can I avoid punishment?); and Stage 2—self-interest orientation (What's in it for me?). Level 2, Conventional, consists of Stage 3—interpersonal accord and conformity (The good boy/girl attitude); and Stage 4—authority and social-order maintaining orientation (Law and order morality). Finally, level 3, Post-Conventional, consists of Stage 5—social contract orientation; and Stage 6—universal ethical principles. (Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development)

Brief comments to close:

I didn’t know how this post was going to go, but it is extremely exciting to see the biological and psychological research conform perfectly to my hierarchy. It’s a great example of consilience where multiple streams of evidence are all pointing to the same thing. So, riding high, I’ll close now with my third summary chart and look forward to completing my examination of consciousness next time with the fourth of Tinbergen’s four questions. I can hardly wait for that.

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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

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Consciousness 20 — The Mechanisms of Consciousness

9/23/2020

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On to the next of Tinbergen’s four questions!

As a quick reminder (since I am really dragging this series out now), I have previously defined consciousness very broadly. I posit that this still amorphous concept can best be understood as the set of processes where living organisms (governed by the various laws of selection) sense and respond to biological forces. This is currently only achieved by carbon-based life, but there’s no reason that artificial life couldn’t conceivably fulfil these criteria too.

I first described this definition in my brief history of everything that has ever existed. To fully grasp any biological phenomenon (which consciousness surely is in a natural view of the universe), Nikolaas Tinbergen developed a 2x2 matrix of things to consider, which has since become the standard in evolutionary studies. His four items are: 1) function (adaptation), 2) mechanism (causation), 3) ontogeny (development), and 4) phylogeny (evolution). In my last post, I covered the first of these items--the functions of consciousness—which led to the following hierarchical table:

Now that we are clear about all of the biological functions we are talking about in the multi-faceted and complex concept of consciousness, we can try to answer Tinbergen’s next three questions by looking for the current mechanisms and the personal and evolutionary histories that are associated with these functions. Let’s do the mechanisms first and see how they fit within the hierarchy shown above.

Just like last time, there are lot of intricate details for this large and unwieldy topic, so I’ll write simple numbered statements followed by their justifications so you can quickly read the statements to get the gist of the argument, or you can dip into any of the details you might want for further information (with links there to even more). Unlike last time, however, we now have a structure to work within, so I’ll try to abide by that. I should also note that it is impossible to cover the details of all of the mechanisms of all of the facets of consciousness for all of the living creatures that have ever experienced it. This post topped out at nearly 13,000 words when I included all of the details I had gathered to help me understand the mechanisms, but I have shortened it considerably (around 8,000 words now) to merely focus on the general gist of the types of mechanisms that are out there. I’m confident you can always find more from there on any specific mechanisms that interest you. Okay. Here we go!

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

1.01 Our current best guess for the origin of life involves lipid vesicles containing polymers that can grow and divide. The chemical structures describe the organisation. Osmotic pressure and new bonds caused growth. Mechanical forces split these growing vesicles, which led to reproduction and thus evolution.

Let’s review: Monomers diffuse into a fatty acid vesicle. Monomers spontaneously polymerize and copy any template. Heat separates strands and increases membrane permeability to monomers. Polymer backbones attract ions, increasing osmotic pressure. Pressure on the membrane drives its growth at the expense of nearby vesicles containing less polymer. Vesicles grow into tubular structures. Mechanical forces cause vesicles to divide. Daughter vesicles inherit polymers from the parent vesicle. Polymer sequences that replicate faster will dominate the population. Thus beginning evolution! (Post 17)

1.02 These are the specific forms of early chemical life, but what defines them can be generalised into abstract terms. The border between any self and non-self has thus been defined as a Markov blanket. Markov blankets have three characteristics—a physical boundary, sensory systems on the boundary, and internal mechanisms that enable the self to exist and persist.

For a system to resist entropy, three conditions must be met: (i) There must be a boundary which separates the internal and external states of the system, and thereby insulates the system from the world. Let's call the former states “the system” and the latter states “the not-system.” (ii) There must be a mechanism which registers the influence of dissipative external forces—i.e. the free energy. Let's call this mechanism the “sensory states” of the system. (iii) There must be a mechanism which counteracts these dissipative forces—i.e. which binds the free energy. Let's call this mechanism the “active states” of the system, such as motor and autonomic reflexes. … According to Friston (2013), these functional conditions—which enable self-organizing systems to exist and persist over time—emerge naturally (indeed necessarily) within any ergodic random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This blanket establishes the boundary conditions above. (Solms)

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.)

2.01 For the earliest forms of biological life, changes to their molecular structures exert forces on those molecules. Being surrounded by stronger or weaker osmotic forces defines the presence of others. Identical osmotic forces indicate groups of the same entities. Growth is good for survival. Loss is bad for it. This is how the first subjects begin to sense change in their environments, assign valence to these changes, and discriminate between selves and not-selves.

Molecules are held together by covalent bonds, which involve the sharing of electron pairs between atoms. … Intermolecular forces are the forces which mediate interactions between molecules and other types of neighbouring particles such as atoms or ions. … The four key intermolecular forces are: 1) Ionic bonds; 2) Hydrogen bonding; 3) Van der Waals dipole-dipole interactions; and 4) Van der Waals dispersion forces. (Post 17)
Any changes to biological molecules would generate forces. These forces are exerted on singularly identifiable objects. (Post 19)
I propose that these chemical forces, once in service of biological needs, are the defined starting point for turning objects into subjects. (Post 19)

2.02 Changes in the organisational structure of living molecules are due to the action potentials of ion flows across cell membranes. A few kinds of ions have evolved to be especially important in life’s current biochemistry for controlling basic stimulus-response mechanisms. These may be able to be mimicked in artificial life, but it would take much more diversity than is often considered.

Membrane potential is the difference in electric potential between the interior and the exterior of a biological cell. All animal cells are surrounded by a membrane composed of a lipid bilayer with proteins embedded in it. The membrane serves as both an insulator and a diffusion barrier to the movement of ions. Transmembrane proteins, also known as ion transporter or ion pump proteins, actively push ions across the membrane and establish concentration gradients across the membrane, and ion channels allow ions to move across the membrane down those concentration gradients. Ion pumps and ion channels are electrically equivalent to a set of batteries and resistors inserted in the membrane, and therefore create a voltage between the two sides of the membrane. The membrane potential has two basic functions. First, it allows a cell to function as a battery, providing power to operate a variety of “molecular devices” embedded in the membrane. Second, in electrically excitable cells such as neurons and muscle cells, it is used for transmitting signals between different parts of a cell. (Membrane potential)
In physiology, an action potential occurs when the membrane potential of a specific cell location rapidly rises and falls: this depolarization then causes adjacent locations to similarly depolarize. Action potentials occur in some plant cells and in several types of animal cells, called excitable cells, which include neurons, muscle cells, endocrine cells, and glomus cells. (Action potential)
Voltage-gated-calcium-channels (VGCCs) are normally closed. They are activated (i.e., opened) at depolarized membrane potentials. The concentration of calcium (Ca2+ ions) is normally several thousand times higher outside the cell than inside. Activation of particular VGCCs allows a Ca2+ influx into the cell, which, depending on the cell type, results in activation of calcium-sensitive potassium channels, muscular contraction, excitation of neurons, up-regulation of gene expression, or release of hormones or neurotransmitters. (Voltage-gated Calcium Channel)
Voltage-gated sodium channels play an important role in action potentials. If enough channels open when there is a change in the cell's membrane potential, a small but significant number of Na+ ions will move into the cell down their electrochemical gradient, further depolarizing the cell. Thus, the more Na+ channels localized in a region of a cell's membrane the faster the action potential will propagate and the more excitable that area of the cell will be. The ability of these channels to assume a closed-inactivated state causes the refractory period and is critical for the propagation of action potentials down an axon. (Sodium Channel)
A refractory period is a period of time during which an organ or cell is incapable of repeating a particular action, or (more precisely) the amount of time it takes for an excitable membrane to be ready for a second stimulus once it returns to its resting state following an excitation. It most commonly refers to electrically excitable muscle cells or neurons. (Refractory period)
There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each of which forms synapses with many other neurons. A synapse is the gap between two neurons (known as the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons). The presynaptic neuron releases neurotransmitters, such as glutamate and GABA, which bind to receptors on the postsynaptic cell membrane, activating ion channels. Opening and closing those channels changes the cell's electrical potential. If the potential changes dramatically enough, the cell fires an electrical impulse called an action potential. (Mimicking the Brain in Silicon)
MIT researchers designed a computer chip so that the transistors could mimic the activity of different ion channels. While most chips operate in a binary, on/off mode, current flows through the transistors on the new brain chip in analogue, not digital, fashion. A gradient of electrical potential drives current to flow through the transistors just as ions flow through ion channels in a cell. (Mimicking the Brain in Silicon)
This synapse diversity could have implications for the prospect of creating artificial consciousness. (Not intelligence, but consciousness.) No computer has synapse diversity. I have met numerous people who are experts in building computers based on neural principles. As interesting as I find their presentations, they typically have built them on principles that are several decades out of date. There’s no concept of the molecular organisation. It’s based on a few electrophysiological parameters that are known about neurons. which comes from the era of cells and electrophysiology. Those are sort of pre-1990’s stuff. (Seth Grant)

2.03 Chemical building blocks provide the ability to process information, which enables the repeatable decisions (cognition) necessary to remain alive.

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)
Protein signal transduction networks should be considered the basis of cognitive function. Neurons and the electrical properties of neurons come first to mind in discussions of the brain, but chemical protein networks are also widely used in that organ because, energetically, they are the cheapest way of sending and receiving information. (Lyon)
In biological systems, information is transmitted “whenever a source’s change in state registers as a change in state at a receiver.” The change may be in environmental pH; the availability of nutrients; chemical indicators of conspecifics, predators, or prey; build-up of reactive oxygen species; osmolarity; diffusion potential, and so on. (Lyon)

2.04 In abstract terminology, these particular chemical responses to physical stimuli are the processing of information within Markov Blankets. They are systematically selected for by the natural processes of evolution. Logically, the systems that survive are those that enable survival. The resulting stability is called homeostasis, and the chemical processes that sustain life are its metabolism.

For self-organizing systems—including all living things, like us—to exist, they must resist entropy. That is, self-organizing systems can only persist over time by occupying “preferred” states—as opposed to being dispersed over all possible states, and thereby dissipating. (Solms)
A Markov blanket can only “know” states of the not-system vicariously. In other words, external states can only be “inferred” by the system on the basis of “sensory impressions” upon the Markov blanket. (Solms)
In summary, homeostasis is explained by the causal dynamics mandated by the very existence of Markov blankets; in terms of which self-organizing systems generate a type of work that binds free energy and maintains the system in its typically occupied (“preferred” or “valued”) states. (Solms)
Metabolism is the set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in organisms. The three main purposes of metabolism are: the conversion of food to energy to run cellular processes; the conversion of food/fuel to building blocks for proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and some carbohydrates; and the elimination of metabolic wastes. These enzyme-catalyzed reactions allow organisms to grow and reproduce, maintain their structures, and respond to their environments. (Metabolism)

2.05 Deviations from homeostasis cause internal reactions that are selected to bring systems back to their preferred state. These various reactions are the affective core of consciousness. These reactions diverged over the course of evolution into distinct facets that are recognisable as the seven basic emotions.

[There] are various instinctual motivational circuits. These are also known as the circuits for “basic emotion”. There are several classifications of these emotions. The best-known examples are those that generate (1) appetitive foraging, (2) consummatory reward, (3) freezing and flight, (4) aggressive attack, (5) nurturant care, (6) separation distress, and (7) rough-and-tumble play. It is important to note that each of the instinctual circuits generates not only stereotyped behaviours but also diverse feeling states, such as expectant interest, orgasmic delight, trepidatious fear, destructive rage, loving affection, sorrowful grief, and exuberant joy. The circuits for these basic emotions are conserved across the mammalian series, and they admit of considerable chemical specificity. They are no less innate than the vital evolutionary survival and sexual needs which gave rise to them. They are unconditioned “tools for living”. (Solms and Panksepp)

2.06 Note that the conscious awareness and processing of affective reactions comes later in the hierarchy of consciousness. Such cognition only rides on the affective core and cannot exist in biological systems on its own.

The removal of the neocortex has long been known to spare emotionality. Indeed, not only are the rewarding effects of subcortical brain stimulations demonstrably preserved in decorticated creatures, these animals are actually more emotional than normal. The most strikingly concordant human evidence to emerge in recent years, relevant to this broader question, concerns a condition called hydranencephaly, in which the cerebral cortex as a whole is destroyed in utero. However, the subcortical networks are functional; thus, the children are markedly emotionally functional human beings. “They express pleasure by smiling and laughter, and aversion by ‘fussing’ arching of the back and crying (in many gradations), their faces being animated by these emotional states. A familiar adult can employ this responsiveness to build up play sequences predictably progressing from smiling, through giggling, to laughter and great excitement on the part of the child.” They also show basic emotional learning. Although there is in these children significant degradation of the types of consciousness that are normally associated with external perception, there can be no doubt that they are conscious, both quantitatively and qualitatively. (Solms and Panksepp)
Let us consider a third problem with the cortico-centric approach. The third problem is that there is a brain structure which does pass the critical test just mentioned. This structure is located not in the cortex but the brainstem. Consciousness is obliterated by focal lesions of the brainstem core—in a region conventionally described as the extended reticulothalamic activating system (ERTAS). Recent findings indicate that the smallest lesions within the brainstem which cause total loss of consciousness (i.e., coma) are located in or near the parabrachial nuclei of the pons. (Solms)
Although many cognitive scientists still must be weaned of the view that the cerebral cortex is the seat of consciousness, the weight of evidence for the alternative view that the arousal processes generated in the upper brainstem and limbic system feel like something in and of themselves, is now overwhelming. (Solms)
This conclusion is further supported by the fact that drugs acting on the neuromodulators sourced in the ERTAS nuclei (serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, acetylcholine) have powerful effects on mood and anxiety, etc.—which is why they represent the mainstay of psychopharmacology today. (Solms)

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.)

3.01 Core affect cannot be responded to by internal reactions alone—externally observable behavioural responses must occur as well. Once they do, it can be said that these organisms act with intention. They become driven.

The dynamics of a Markov blanket generate two fundamental properties—namely (elemental forms of) selfhood and intentionality. [T]hese dynamics also generate elemental properties of bodies—namely an insulating membrane and adaptive behaviour. (Solms)
Body-monitoring nuclei…can only go so far in terms of meeting endogenous needs through internal (autonomic) adjustments. Beyond that limit, external action is called for. At that point, autonomic reflexes become drives. [For example], interoceptive “need detectors” trigger not only autonomic reflexes but also feelings of hunger, thirst, etc. These drives typically trigger “foraging” behaviours (“SEEKING”). (Solms)

3.02 Further evolution along this path produces further mechanisms for producing intentions. Once multicellular forms of life evolve sufficient complexity, hormones act for intercellular communication, which allows whole organisms to respond with intent towards naturally selected goals.

At the most basic level, the function of the nervous system is to send signals from one cell to others, or from one part of the body to others. There are multiple ways that a cell can send signals to other cells. One is by releasing chemicals called hormones into the internal circulation, so that they can diffuse to distant sites. (Nervous Systems)
A hormone is any member of a class of signalling molecules, produced by glands in multicellular organisms, that are transported by the circulatory system to target distant organs to regulate physiology and behaviour. The glands that secrete hormones comprise the endocrine signalling system. Hormones affect distant cells by binding to specific receptor proteins in the target cell, resulting in a change in cell function. (Hormones)
Hormones serve to communicate between organs and tissues for physiological regulation and behavioural activities such as digestion, metabolism, respiration, tissue function, sensory perception, sleep, excretion, lactation, stress induction, growth and development, movement, reproduction, and mood manipulation. (Hormones)

3.03 This evolution continues on to produce neurons in some forms of life. These are incredibly diverse and provide an enormous amount of additional abilities, including internally generated actions.

In contrast to the “broadcast” mode of hormone signalling, the nervous system provides “point-to-point” signals—neurons project their axons to specific target areas and make synaptic connections with specific target cells. Thus, neural signalling is capable of a much higher level of specificity than hormonal signalling. It is also much faster: the fastest nerve signals travel at speeds that exceed 100 meters per second. (Nervous Systems)
A cell that receives a synaptic signal from a neuron may be excited, inhibited, or otherwise modulated. (Nervous Systems)
Even in the nervous system of a single species such as humans, hundreds of different types of neurons exist, with a wide variety of morphologies and functions. These include sensory neurons that transmute physical stimuli such as light and sound into neural signals, and motor neurons that transmute neural signals into activation of muscles or glands. (Nervous Systems)
There are literally hundreds of different types of synapses. In fact, there are over a hundred known neurotransmitters, and many of them have multiple types of receptors. Molecular neuroscientists generally divide receptors into two broad groups: chemically gated ion channels and second messenger systems. When a second messenger system is activated, it starts a cascade of molecular interactions inside the target cell, which may ultimately produce a wide variety of complex effects, such as increasing or decreasing the sensitivity of the cell to stimuli, or even altering gene transcription. (Nervous Systems)
Over the 1990’s, there was a general model of synapses which was that they contained very few proteins and those few proteins that were known, which you could count on one hand more or less, were sufficient to produce synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity. People thought that could account for learning, but it wasn’t like that at all. What we found was that on the post-synaptic side of synapses (the side of the synapse where information first comes into a nerve cell), we identified ten times the number of proteins that were previously known, which suddenly revealed a very much unexpected complexity. Quite a lot of people at the time thought that it was some sort of artifact, but it wasn’t. It was actually only 1/10th as complex as what it turned out to be! Over the subsequent years, we found another tenfold more proteins. Many labs have confirmed this now. Essentially, inside a synapse, on the post-synaptic side, you can have more than a thousand types of proteins in the synapse. This really changed the way of thinking, from the synapse being just a “connector” in the nervous system. That’s not a very nice way to talk about a synapse because in fact it’s a super-sophisticated molecular computer. (Seth Grant)
The human brain has a vast number of synapses—somewhere on the order of a million billion of them. So, we have a vast number of synapses, and we have a large number of proteins in the synapses. We have also uncovered evidence that these synapse proteins are not distributed the same across all synapses. In some parts of the brain, some proteins are found. In other parts of the brain, other proteins are found. And that was giving us this clue that there was this synapse diversity at a level that we hadn’t really thought of before. (Seth Grant)
In 2018, we published a paper that had been the first brain-wide survey of synapse diversity using a variety of methods. We now call this diversity the “synaptome.” In the way the “genome” is all of the genes that an animal has, the synaptome is all of the synapses that an animal has. Just as genes have an architecture, synapse diversity has an architecture. We find that different types of synapses are found in different parts of the brain and they have certain proteins. Interestingly, those parts of the brain that are involved in higher cognitive functions—in the cortex and the hippocampus—are the parts where you find the most diversity of the types of synapses. This is telling us something important. Having all of those types of synapses is probably giving very sophisticated computation to the brain circuits for the types of behaviour like language, speech, and memory processing. (Seth Grant)
If you look at the potential of the different combinations of these proteins, it’s very easy to imagine that every single synapse could be different. A mouse has about 10 to the power of 11 synapses. Even with a small number of proteins, say 10, it’s possible to have every one of those synapses be different. But as I’ve already said, there are more than a thousand in there and they also have other post-translation modifications. So, it would be very simple to have a mouse brain where every synapse is actually different. It could also easily be the case that in the human brain, which is much bigger, every synapse could be different. We don’t think that’s going to be the case. We think they are going to be organised and there are going to be abundant classes and non-abundant classes, and some might even have redundant functions meaning they might have different molecular makeups but function the same way. But there is plenty of scope for what you might call species differences in the synapse composition. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were some types of synapses that are unique to mice, and some that are unique to humans. There will also be some that are conserved between the two species. It’s going to be crucial to look at that. (Seth Grant)
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)
One very important subset of synapses is capable of forming memory traces by means of long-lasting activity-dependent changes in synaptic strength. The best-known form of neural memory is a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), which operates at synapses that use the neurotransmitter glutamate acting on a special type of receptor known as the NMDA receptor. Since the discovery of LTP in 1973, many other types of synaptic memory traces have been found, involving increases or decreases in synaptic strength that are induced by varying conditions, and last for variable periods of time. (Nervous Systems)
Because of the variety of voltage-sensitive ion channels that can be embedded in the membrane of a neuron, many types of neurons are capable, even in isolation, of generating rhythmic sequences of action potentials, or rhythmic alternations between high-rate bursting and quiescence. When neurons that are intrinsically rhythmic are connected to each other by excitatory or inhibitory synapses, the resulting networks are capable of a wide variety of dynamical behaviors. (Nervous Systems)

3.04 Neurons proliferate and form nervous systems in animals that enable further reactions to the environment.

The connections between neurons can form neural pathways, neural circuits, and larger networks that generate an organism's perception of the world and determine its behaviour. (Nervous Systems)
The basic neuronal function of sending signals to other cells includes a capability for neurons to exchange signals with each other. Networks formed by interconnected groups of neurons are capable of a wide variety of functions, including feature detection, pattern generation, and timing, and there are seen to be countless types of information processing possible. (Nervous Systems)
The nervous system is a highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. In vertebrates it consists of two main parts, the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord. The PNS consists mainly of nerves, which are enclosed bundles of the long fibers or axons, that connect the CNS to every other part of the body. The PNS is divided into three separate subsystems, the somatic, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems. Somatic nerves mediate voluntary movement. The autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is activated in cases of emergencies to mobilize energy, while the parasympathetic nervous system is activated when organisms are in a relaxed state. The enteric nervous system functions to control the gastrointestinal system. Both autonomic and enteric nervous systems function involuntarily. (Nervous Systems)

3.05 Nervous systems come together into nodes that evolve into more and more sophisticated brains. These are used to coordinate multiple streams of sensory information.

In many species, the great majority of neurons participate in the formation of centralized structures (the brain and ganglia) and they receive all of their input from other neurons and send their output to other neurons. (Nervous Systems)
Nervous systems are found in most multicellular animals but vary greatly in complexity. The only multicellular animals that have no nervous system at all are sponges, placozoans, and mesozoans, which have very simple body plans. The nervous systems of the radially symmetric organisms ctenophores (comb jellies) and cnidarians (which include anemones, hydras, corals and jellyfish) consist of a diffuse nerve net. All other animal species, with the exception of a few types of worm, have a nervous system containing a brain, a central cord (or two cords running in parallel), and nerves radiating from the brain and central cord. The size of the nervous system ranges from a few hundred cells in the simplest worms, to around 300 billion cells in African elephants. (Nervous Systems)

3.06 Evolutionary pressures on organisms led them to develop brain modules, systems, and networks, which work in nested hierarchies to enable more and more complexity and effectiveness in understanding and responding to the world.

The cerebral cortex is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system. It plays a key role in attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness. (Cerebral Cortex)
The Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (from Dehaene) is an intellectual descendent of the Global Workspace Theory (Baars). These theories identify brain modules for: balance and coordination; memory; emotion; language; writing; attention, planning, organisation, reasoning; emotional affect, adaptability; motor / sensory; listening and decoding; reading and interpretation; visual-spatial, visual recognition. (Jerry Fodor called these modules informationally encapsulated, meaning somewhat private within each module.) … For some functions, there may be specific pathways through these modules, e.g. dorsal visual stream. … For general connections between multiple modules there may be a global workspace. This coordinates inputs from evaluative systems (value), attentional systems (focusing), long-term memory (past), and perceptual systems (present), into motor control outputs (future). Information in the global workspace is available from all modules and can be seen by each module. (Introduction to Brain Consciousness)
The default mode network (DMN) is active when we’re internally focused, thinking about ourselves and using our memory and imagination. The dorsal attention network (DAT), on the other hand, is activated when we’re aware of and paying attention to the environment around us. (Ramirez)
A team from the University of Michigan described their finding that the default mode network (DMN) and the dorsal attention network (DAT) are anti-correlated, meaning that when one is active, the other is suppressed. The team also found that neither network was highly active in people who were unconscious. These findings suggest that the interplay of the DMN and the DAT support consciousness by allowing us to interact with our surroundings then to quickly internalize those interactions, essentially turning our experiences into thoughts and memories. (Ramirez)
Figure 1: (Solms and Panksepp)

3.07 In summary, all of these chemical, neuronal, and brain developments have evolved to produce a variety of mechanisms (too numerous to list here) for driving intentional behaviour. This extends from the simplest forms of cognition in plants up to and including the most sophisticated varieties that we are aware of in humans. These mechanisms produce the expanding abilities of functions in the 3rd level of my hierarchy of consciousness (attention, memory, pattern recognition, learning, and communication).

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)
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” (Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness)
Neural circuits supporting behavioural / electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep, and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod molluscs (e.g., octopus). (Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness)
Present-tense emotionality is what communication by animals is mostly about. (Sapolsky)
Joint attention refers to when two people look at and attend to the same thing; parents often use the act of pointing to prompt infants to engage in joint attention. The inclination to spontaneously reference an object in the world as of interest, via pointing, and to likewise appreciate the directed attention of another, may be the underlying motive behind all human communication. (Theory of Mind Wikipedia)

3.08 Note that all of these responses to stimuli are initially observable as reflexes. Later, brain modules and networks evolved that could sense and respond to other parts of the brain, as well as the internal affective moods that influence the entire organism. Such “meta” modules and networks are able to gain control over simpler systems by interrupting their pathways to action. This allows delays to what would otherwise be viewed as automatic responses. In effect, these act as internal (and therefore invisible) reflexes where logical if-then statements control local behaviour based on the wider context that is reported from other senses or memories.

The simplest type of neural circuit is a reflex arc, which begins with a sensory input and ends with a motor output, passing through a sequence of neurons connected in series. This can be shown in the “withdrawal reflex” causing a hand to jerk back after a hot stove is touched. (Nervous Systems)
Although the simplest reflexes may be mediated by circuits lying entirely within the spinal cord, more complex responses rely on signal processing in the brain. For example, when an object in the periphery of the visual field moves, and a person looks toward it, many stages of signal processing are initiated. The initial sensory response, in the retina of the eye, and the final motor response, in the oculomotor nuclei of the brain stem, are not all that different from those in a simple reflex, but the intermediate stages are completely different. Instead of a one- or two-step chain of processing, the visual signals pass through perhaps a dozen stages of integration, involving the thalamus, cerebral cortex, basal ganglia, superior colliculus, cerebellum, and several brainstem nuclei. These areas perform signal-processing functions that include feature detection, perceptual analysis, memory recall, decision-making, and motor planning. (Nervous Systems)

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.)

4.01 Once the mechanisms for memory, pattern recognition, and learning are set in place by the 3rd level of consciousness, animals with brains can begin to analyse current situations in order to predict what will happen next. This ability provides an enormous advantage to those who can master it.

We can only perceive one signal at a time. And there is a 1/3 second time lag. Error prediction makes up for this. (Post 9)

4.02 There are various internal mechanisms that enable prediction. These fall under the general banner of predictive coding and include anticipation, problem solving, error detection, and feelings of precision.

Predictive coding is a theory of brain function in which the brain is constantly generating and updating a mental model of the environment. The model is used to generate predictions of sensory input that are compared to actual sensory input. This comparison results in prediction errors that are then used to update and revise the mental model. (Predictive Coding)
The understanding of perception as the interaction between sensory stimuli (bottom-up) and conceptual knowledge (top-down) continued to be established by Jerome Bruner who, starting in the 1940s, studied the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations influence perception, which came to be known as 'New Look' psychology. (Predictive Coding)
The brain solves the seemingly intractable problem of modelling distal causes of sensory input through a version of Bayesian inference. It does this by modelling predictions of lower-level sensory inputs via backward connections from relatively higher levels in a cortical hierarchy. Constrained by the statistical regularities of the outside world (and certain evolutionarily prepared predictions), the brain encodes top-down generative models at various temporal and spatial scales in order to predict and effectively suppress sensory inputs rising up from lower levels. A comparison between predictions and sensory input yields a difference measure which, if it is sufficiently large beyond the levels of expected statistical noise, will cause the generative model to update so that it better predicts sensory input in the future. (Predictive Coding)
The neural evidence for this is still in its infancy. The empirical evidence for predictive coding is most robust for perceptual processing. (Predictive Coding)
The anterior cingulate is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. (Sapolsky)
Physiologically, precision is usually associated with the postsynaptic gain of cortical neurons reporting prediction errors. This is precisely the function of ERTAS modulatory neurons. (Solms)

4.03 Predictive coding changes living beings. They are no longer simply responders in the present tense to internal drives and external stimuli. Predictive beings are internally active thinkers trying to peer further and further into the future.

Predictive coding inverts the conventional view of perception as a mostly bottom-up process, suggesting that it is largely constrained by prior predictions, where signals from the external world only shape perception to the extent that they are propagated up the cortical hierarchy in the form of prediction error. (Predictive Coding)
Given that the world we live in is loaded with statistical noise, precision expectations must be represented as part of the brain's generative models, and they should be able to flexibly adapt to changing contexts. For instance, the expected precision of visual prediction errors likely varies between dawn and dusk, such that greater conditional confidence is assigned to errors in broad daylight than errors in prediction at nightfall. (Predictive Coding)

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

5.01 Through a mixture of abilities some brain networks gain general awareness of some parts of the self.

[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. The self of everyday cognition is therefore largely an abstraction. That is why the self is so effortlessly able to think about itself in relation to objects, in such everyday situations as “I am currently experiencing myself looking at an object.” (Solms and Panksepp)

5.02 The mechanisms underlying this awareness may be specific to each species. This is a keen area of research, but they appear to just be more and more neuroanatomy.

Another approach to studying consciousness applies specifically to the study of self-awareness, that is, the ability to distinguish oneself from others. The classic example of testing this is known as the mirror test, which involves placing a spot of coloring on the skin or fur near an individual's forehead and seeing if they attempt to remove it or at least touch the spot. Humans (older than 18 months) and other great apes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, pigeons, European magpies, and elephants have all been observed to pass this test. (Consciousness)
Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. (Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness)
When stimuli are presented to patients, but masked so they can’t detect it consciously, the visual cortex and amygdala are activated and that’s it. When the stimulus is not masked, you get activation in the visual cortex, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex as well. ... In order to be conscious of an apple, it not only needs to be represented in your visual cortex, it needs to be re-represented, which involves the prefrontal cortex. … So, the prefrontal cortex is emerging as an important area in the consolidation of our conscious experiences into what they are. (Post 12)
When conscious access occurs, brain activity is strongly activated when a threshold of awareness is crossed. At that point the signal spreads to many brain areas. There are four highly reproducible signals associated with this. Signature 1: activation in parietal and prefrontal circuits. Signature 2: a slow wave called P3 that pairs late, approximately 1/3 second after stimulus (i.e. consciousness lags behind the world). Signature 3: deep brain electrodes detect late and sudden bursts of high frequency oscillations. Signature 4: information exchange across distant brain areas. (Post 9)

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.)

6.01 Once the abstraction of self-awareness is established, further abstractions can also be made. Abstract thinking requires representing something in the brain that does not exist in front of it. Therefore, studying the mechanisms that underlie these abstract representations requires the self-report that is currently only available in humans. This is another area of ongoing research, but it appears that many brain areas are associated with distinct forms of abstract thinking.

The gold standard for whether a response is conscious or not is whether you can talk about it. This doesn’t mean language and consciousness are identical, just that you have access to the experience to think about it (and we use language to discuss that access with one another). In non-human animal research, that doesn’t exist. (Post 12)
Brodmann areas have been discussed, debated, refined, and renamed exhaustively for nearly a century and remain the most widely known and frequently cited cytoarchitectural organization of the human cortex. (Brodmann area)
Many of the brain areas defined by Brodmann have their own complex internal structures. In a number of cases, brain areas are organized into topographic maps, where adjoining bits of the cortex correspond to adjoining parts of the body, or of some more abstract entity. (Brodmann area)
The Broca area is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere of the brain (usually the left) with functions linked to speech production. (Broca’s area)
Wernicke's area is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to Broca's area, which is involved in the production of language. It is traditionally thought to reside in Brodmann area 22. (Wernicke’s area)
Brodmann area 47 has been implicated in the processing of syntax in oral and sign languages, musical syntax, and semantic aspects of language. (Brodmann area)
Higher order functions of the associated cortical areas are consistently localized to the same Brodmann areas by neurophysiological, functional imaging, and other methods. However, functional imaging can only identify the approximate localization of brain activations in terms of Brodmann areas since their actual boundaries in any individual brain requires its histological [post-mortem] examination. (Brodmann area)

6.02 These abstract abilities are useful for grasping all sorts of knowledge about the world. But they also gave humans greater moral capacities for responding to the world. For example, it would be very difficult for evolution to suddenly produce new emotional affects for the feelings of empathy and moral disgust, but human brains have learned to apply old reactions to new circumstances according to abstract rules. This greatly extended the flexibility of human consciousness.

There are still ways that humans appear to stand alone. One of those is hugely important: the human capacity to think symbolically. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. (Sapolsky)
As our hominid ancestors kept getting better at [abstract thinking], great individual and social advantages accrued. We became capable of representing emotions in the past and possible emotions in the future, as well as things that have nothing to do with emotion. We evolved a uniquely dramatic means of separating message from meaning and intent: lying. And we invented aesthetic symbolism; after all, those 30,000-year-old paintings of horses in Chauvet cave are not really horses. (Sapolsky)
In recent years, scientists have made remarkable insights into the neurobiology of symbols. A major finding from their work is that the brain is not very good at distinguishing between the metaphorical and literal. In fact, symbols and metaphors, and the morality they engender, are the product of clunky processes in our brains. (Sapolsky)
The best way to shine a light on this unwieldy process is through metaphors for two feelings critical to survival: pain and disgust. … There are fancier more recently evolved parts of the brain in the frontal cortex that assess the meaning of pain. Maybe [a pain signal is] bad news, or maybe it’s good news. Much of this assessing occurs in a frontal cortical region called the anterior cingulate. This structure is heavily involved in “error detection,” noting discrepancies between what is anticipated and what occurs. … In experimental settings, you’re playing with two [people] and suddenly they start ignoring you and only toss the ball between them. Junior high all over again. And the brain scanner shows that the neurons in your anterior cingulate activate. In other words, rejection hurts. … Both abstract social and literal pain impact the same cingulate neurons. (Sapolsky)
We take things a step further. While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too. As evolution continued to tinker, it did something remarkable with humans. It duct-taped the anterior cingulate’s role in giving context to pain into a profound capacity for empathy. (Sapolsky)
Studies show the human anterior cingulate is more complex than in other species, with more connections to abstract, associational parts of the cortex, regions that can call your attention to the pains of the world, rather than the pain in your big toe. (Sapolsky)
Our brains’ shaky management of symbols adds tremendous power to a unique human quality: morality. You’re in a brain scanner and because of the scientist’s weirdly persuasive request, you bite into some rotten food. Something rancid and fetid and skanky. This activates another part of the frontal cortex, the insula, which, among other functions, processes gustatory and olfactory disgust. It sends neuronal signals to face muscles that reflexively spit out that bite, and to your stomach muscles that make you puke. All mammals have an insula that processes gustatory disgust. But we are the only animal where that process serves something more abstract. … Think about something awful you once did, something deeply shameful. The insula activates. It has been co-opted into processing that human invention: moral disgust. (Sapolsky)

Brief comments to close

Once again, let’s summarise all of the above research into a hierarchical chart. This one mimics the format of the one I produced for the functions of consciousness, but now we have its companion for the mechanisms as well.

Please note once again that these are the mechanisms of consciousness as they now exist in biotic life. As I have said before, there is nothing stopping artificial life from experiencing its own unique feelings of consciousness via new mechanisms. But I maintain that these are still the hierarchies that must be observed if artificial consciousness is become one that we will recognise.

Next up, I’ll tackle the ontogeny of consciousness in a human being. Hopefully that will fit just as well into this hierarchy and my use of Tinbergen’s 4 questions will continue to provide a comprehensive understanding of this complex phenomenon. I’ll bet you can’t 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

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Questions About My Harm Paper

9/13/2020

7 Comments

On September 1st, I had my second academic paper published — Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice. I co-wrote this one with my wife, Tanya Wyatt, a professor of criminology at Northumbria University, and it was published in the top-ranked law journal of Australia, the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Fortunately, this is an open-access journal so you can read the article for free if you like. We’ve been getting some nice feedback on it so far, and I would love to hear more, but I had one extended back and forth about it that I’d particularly like to share.

Larry Rifkin is a fellow evolutionist who has become a friend over the years of sharing our work with one another. He’s a physician, writer, and humanist who shares his articles and (very well made) videos on his website lawrencerifkin.com. In particular, check these out:

Is the Meaning of Life to Make Babies? (Scientific American Guest Blog)
The Survival of Humanity (Scientific American Guest Blog)
Meaning of Life, in 3 Minutes (YouTube Video)
Evolution Will Change How You See the World (YouTube Video)
The Paragraph I Wish Sam Harris Would Write (Free Inquiry)

Last week, Larry generously shared some kind words about my article, and we got into an extensive back and forth over one sticking point that I think is important to talk about. I need to get better at clearing up what I see as a common misconception about my philosophy and I think Larry has really helped me figure out a way to do that. He and I are overwhelmingly on the same page, so I won’t bore you with of all the details of what we agree about, but here is an edited version of our conversation to focus on how we cleared something up. So, thanks to Larry, and I hope you find this illuminating as well.

LR: Hi Ed. That article was great! Thank you and your wife for all the thought, research, and motivation that went into it. For my own understanding, perhaps you can help me work through some clarifications. In arguing for the central organizing moral principle of maximizing the long-term survival of life, do you take into account a valuation of the nature of the beings such a world may maximize? Does a human-level conscious experience grant us any greater value? If not, is there a risk perhaps of a type of new repugnant conclusion? A hypothetical universe absolutely teeming with endless insects and plants but with no chance for evolving greater capacity for conscious experience would be considered as a great moral good as long as it survives, whereas the existence of a small number of beings who can create art, imagine futures, understand science, and perform philanthropy adds marginally if at all to such a universe, given the central priority value of life’s continuity and survival.

Also, if the goal of the survival of life is the flourishing of life and continuing its long-term future potential, then it sounds like survival in-and-of-itself is the goal and moral metric. But is that right? Does the formulation need to focus more on what it is about life that makes survival so important? Isn’t the survival of life a means to the values such as flourishing, experience, and leaving open the possibility of life’s potential and evolution for new and continuing modes of experience without end? If so, then is it perhaps okay to think of your contribution as a form of long-term utilitarianism? Survival of life is a means to maximizing pleasure, minimizing harm, etc. in a way that values and prioritizes the long term ongoing future prospects for life. It’s a consequentialism with future life being given full moral consideration. Can one interpret your contribution as adding a long-term perspective and valuation to utilitarianism, rather than offering something different than utilitarianism?

EG: Hi Larry — thanks for the compliments and for taking the time to read the article and pose your questions. We were really up against a world limit here, so I wasn’t able to expand on our ideas much, but your questions are common ones that I’m happy to address. (I have an FAQ page on my website for my earlier paper on bridging the is-ought divide. I probably need to do the same for this one eventually as questions like yours roll in.)

Since you asked several pointed questions, I’ll answer them directly one by one.

—> In arguing for the central organizing moral principle of maximizing the long-term survival of life, do you take into account a valuation of the nature of the beings such a world may maximize?

Yes, of course. Some ways of living do more to maximize the robustness of all life than other ways of living. For example, I’ve no trouble fighting parasitic viruses (considered among the simplest forms of life by some measures) and even wiping them out entirely where necessary.

—> Does a human-level conscious experience grant us any greater value?

This raises a question about what consciousness is, but I’ll leave that for another time. (I’m writing a monster blog series on it at the moment as you may know.) I also think looking for “greater value” is the wrong question here. (What is the “value” of anything in a godless universe? It’s all either zero in the grand scheme of things or infinite to the individual in question.) But apart from “the hard question” of conscious experience and its value, the ability of human minds to sense, understand, and respond to more existential threats to all life on Earth means that human actions are particularly important. No one else could stop another asteroid from causing a mass extinction. (No other species is causing the Anthropocene’s 6th mass extinction though either.) Humans do have abilities to provide more important actions towards the survival of life and thus it could be better to take steps towards those abilities rather than not to. (This is in line with my definition of consciousness to if you want to get into that.)

—> If not, is there a risk perhaps of a type of new repugnant conclusion?

So no, the universe with “endless insects and plants” is actually a very fragile existence on Earth. The cosmos is a dangerous place (as seen in the previous extinction events) and the survival of life can be made more robust by the actions of species like ours. If art, futures, science, and philanthropy are not used towards this purpose (ultimately not proximately), then they are not helpful. By this I mean that all of those things COULD actually contribute to the extinction of life if they are not well thought out, and in that case they would be wrong. Whose conscious pleasure could ever be worth extinguishing life?

—>Isn’t the survival of life a means to the values such as flourishing, experience, and leaving open the possibility of life’s potential and evolution for new and continuing modes of experience without end?

I think this common way of putting things is backwards. It’s making the same mistake about the goal of life that pre-Darwin thinkers made about the design of life. Before Darwin, we thought design came from on high, from either a God or a Platonic ideal. Darwin showed us that life was built from the bottom up starting with the very simplest life forms. Well, the purpose of life goes in the same direction. There is not some perfect ideal of flourishing that survival strives towards. Quite simply, more and more robust survival IS what flourishing is. Again, if flourishing doesn’t lead towards the more robust survival of life, then it isn’t flourishing! I mean, it may be flourishing for one selfish person, group, or species, but it isn’t objectively flourishing in the long term that you and I are both concerned with. Nor is it flourishing for the completely interrelated web of life that we humans are enmeshed within.

—> If so, then is it perhaps okay to think of your contribution as a form of long-term utilitarianism?

That’s part of it. But as the paper says, I’m reforming all three moral camps and uniting them into one comprehensive view. I do reform consequentialism somewhat in the way you are describing. (Although I want to make sure you are defining pleasure and harm in the right way according to the definitions of good and harm that I give in the paper.) But I’m also reforming virtue ethics, and then the deontological rules that all flow from trying to achieve these consequences in the most virtuous way possible.

LR: Thank you for the full and interesting response. Here’s one small point—in my hypothetical thought experiment of a “universe teeming with insects and plants,” I meant to convey in the question the idea of endless planets throughout the universe teeming with such life (so as to take away the proximate survival component), without any ability to evolve to human-level experience. I was trying to find a way to get you to weigh the relative value of the survival of life itself relative to “types of life/experience”. Sorry if the idea of life on many planets across the universe did not come across clearly in my question.

EG: Sorry, yes, I didn’t get that point about the “lower” forms of life being everywhere as a seemingly robust alternative to “higher” forms of life. This is really getting theoretical now, of course, and only of concern once we get off this planet or know that life is everywhere else too, but one of the ways I’d think about this is by examining the possible ends of the universe which seemingly render the meaning of life as utterly pointless. This is something the philosopher John Messerly talks about in his book The Meaning of Life, much of which you can find on his excellent website Reason and Meaning.

Basically, the two most likely outcomes right now are a Big Crunch of fiery heat death when the universe collapses back on itself, or a Big Freeze of a universe that continues to expand until nothing can hold together anymore. Pretty grim in either case. One thing to hold out hope for, however, is that future beings much smarter than us can figure out a way to stop these endpoints from happening (maybe mastering dark matter or energy? who knows!) and thus allow life and meaning-making to continue. In that case, the insects and plants would still have to give up a bit for those higher kinds of beings to be able to build more flourishing for all. On the other hand, if that’s not possible, maybe highly-conscious life would actually prefer going extinct eventually rather than being tortured by the meaninglessness of their impending doom. Like I said, though, that’s a theoretically long way off so I think it’s safe for us to struggle on in the meantime.

LR: I've connected with John Messerly and really like him and his work. I too think his website and blog are outstanding. One discussion I've had with him is whether an end to the universe would really make existence meaningless. I don't believe so, John leans in the other direction. To me, meaning is additive and cumulative, not judged by a final score.

EG: I had a talk with a Wittgensteinian philosopher in the pub once who tried to convince me to drop my concern with consequences. I just can’t get there. The final score matters. It won’t feel like anything to me here and now if in 200 years the universe was torn up because we’re in a multiverse and another Big Bang was nearby and Bigger, so I take your point about meaning being additive within a life, but I think we operate under an assumption of continuance that is very important. Perhaps you saw my article reviewing Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Mortality Makes us Free. My review was called “Mortality Doesn’t Make Us Free Either” and talks about how this indefiniteness in life is what gives us purpose. No one has to look for any purpose to live their life, of course. And they can choose a purpose that leads towards extinction. But I contend that is wrong once we open our eyes to things.

LR: “Mortality Doesn't Make Us Free Either” was also excellent, Ed! Where I think I part with you and John is the idea that meaning now is lessened by whether or not it will come to an end ultimately. Which is different than saying preserving life (I'd add particularly life that is or can possible evolve into greater awareness, creativity, and fulfilment) should not be our main value.

EG: Can I turn it around and ask you a question? If you don’t think creating more robust survival is what underlies our values (consciously or unconsciously), then what do you think should be our main value? I’m going to guess that anything you offer has a proximate value of feeling fulfilling for us smart humans, but ultimately leads towards more survival and that is why it feels fulfilling. I don’t see where else value can come from in a godless universe. If you tell me these things are independent, I’m going to point out that survival prospects aren’t something that stand still in an always-evolving universe where entropy increases without localized effort. So, every action leads towards or away from survival. If some other main value leads away from survival, I’m going to argue that we wouldn’t value it once we discovered that fact about it. No? This is how I’ve developed my thinking here, but perhaps you have another way of conceiving some value as main.

LR: Thank you for asking. My own views are close to yours. Survival is foundational and essential. There is nothing more important, and it is a moral imperative that we think existentially long-term about survival on the planet and the universe, and judge actions accordingly. Non-human life has intrinsic value and all life on Earth is fundamentally connected (I don’t think it all about “us smart humans”).

I think where I’m differing may be a formulation issue. Survival is ultimate and foundational, yes. But I am not yet fully convinced that thinking of it as the main value is how I’d frame it. We cannot have life without breathing, but I would not call breathing the main value, I’d call it a means to an end, and essential in that fundamental sense. I think this example can be thought of analogously with survival or “robust survival” for me. Why is survival important? Because without it we could not have conscious creatures, experience of beauty, culture, meaning, love, or an unfathomable quantity and diversity of life in future. It is values like these that make survival essential. Survival is necessary and essential, but a means, not the value itself.

Values come from conscious creatures, not from the universe. Yes, we are part of and from nature. So, we can align our values to what in nature allows for existence and flourishing—survival. I’m with you there! Completely. But we also can create values and meanings—we are, as far as we know, the only creatures in the universe that can do so—and in this sense survival is a means. What if our created meanings lead away from survival? I would say this is a fundamental moral wrong, as I think you might. We are aligned there! But I would not, at this point, formulate survival or robust survival as the main value in the universe, for the above reasons. The universe doesn’t have values, we do.

EG: Thanks for continuing to push on this Larry. It’s helpful for people “on the same team” to try to hash out what really, really unites them passionately. When you said this...

"What if our created meanings lead away from survival? I would say this is a fundamental moral wrong, as I think you might. We are aligned there!”

…I could probably bear down on that and philosophically insist that you begrudgingly accept that survival is therefore the main value since it is what adjudicates between any attempts at higher meanings. But I don’t want begrudging acceptance. We evolutionists want people to sing with our vision! So, let me keep working on that.

I’d start with your point about breathing being a means to an end. I’d turn that around and say yes, but they're all means to the end of developing more survival. Breathing was an early step in this, so that’s why it’s at the base of Maslow’s pyramid. (Have you read Scott Barry Kauffman’s Transcend yet, by the way? He’s produced an excellent new metaphor of a sailboat for our hierarchy of human needs.) But as we’ve evolved both our genes and our culture, we’ve discovered more and more ways of living better and better. Maybe someday we’ll discover things far above and beyond art, philosophy, and music. We didn’t always have those. That’s what I mean by the Darwinian inversion of meaning. We’re still building and evolving it.

Here’s how I might express that even more inspirationally. All those things that you say are the ends that survival enables are actually things that make us want to survive….even more! They make our lives more and more precious, which continues to drive us to act for more and more survival. That's how they are related to survival as well. The survival instinct is traditionally expressed as some kind of base, animal level, brute force, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a growing sense that has become bigger and more refined through countless evolutionary steps. That’s my re-conception of survival that I think isn’t quite being picked up. You started off by saying you agree that survival is foundational and essential, but the things that make us want to survive are just more of the same. And we are capable of so much more discovery along that path too! Whenever I think about technological developments towards life without ageing and space exploration of other possible worlds (I’ve been on a Star Wars binge lately, so I think of this a lot), that is what makes me want so badly to live well and live more! More thriving IS more surviving.

What do you think? Is that getting closer to getting an amen? : ) You are right that it may be a formulation and framing matter that is keeping this from taking hold in people and I’m always searching for the right key to unlock that.

LR: I'm on board. This sounds like we are arguing but we are not. I think it may be a semantic rather than substantive or conceptual discussion at this point, around the word “survival”. It seems your survival encompasses flourishing and thriving within the term and concept, beyond just the narrow minimal “base, animal level” needed to stay alive. I've been separating those two ideas. I think you see the two concepts more as seamless, not distinguishable.

EG: Excellent. Yes, I agree it is a semantic difficulty around what all is contained in “survival”. I’m going to work much harder at being clear about that.

As a quick start, I just Googled “etymology survive” and found an interesting root that I can use. It says that survive comes from combining the Latin “super” (meaning “in addition”) with the Latin “vivere” (meaning “live”) to form “supervivere” in Latin and then “sourvivre” in Old French, which morphed into survive in late Middle English. So, “survive” literally comes from something like “in addition to life” which I’m going to highlight from now on as an addition that we can continue to grow and grow. Cool!

You are not alone in separating these ideas. Pursuits of definitions for eudaimonia and flourishing have been around for millennia, and since they were initially pre-Darwinian, they were of course independent of any type of survival-of-life-thinking. I’m unusual in working to overturn that so I need to recognise that and be clearer about it. Thanks for helping me work through this! I’ll turn it into a blog post for sure and see if I get any more feedback on this.

7 Comments

Mortality Doesn't Make Us Free Either

8/5/2020

3 Comments

Here's a quick post to let you know I've just had an article published online with The Philosopher. As some of you may know, I've written a speculative fiction novel about a company in the near future who has developed a cure for ageing. (It's tentatively called The Vitanauts and you can download a preview here.) As such, when Martin Hägglund came to Newcastle to discuss his widely praised new book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, I offered to write a review for The Philosopher since they organised his visit. Martin enjoyed my review and we had a nice discussion about it in the pub afterwards. In his work, Hägglund sets his sights on taking down the fluffy visions of perfect immortality that many religions have for their afterlives. On this, I am in full agreement with Hägglund. However, I argue that this does not prove that the opposite is needed. Certain death doesn't give us the "spiritual freedom" that Hägglund desires, and I think this tells us something deep about the nature of freedom and the meaning of life. Here's the opening to my review:

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In 2005, Aubrey de Grey – a long-haired, long-bearded, Methuselah-looking scientist with a PhD from Cambridge – gave a TED talk called “A roadmap to end aging” that turned into a cult hit. By 2010, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner had turned his eye on this research and published an intriguing and seductive book called Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality. It’s now less than a decade later, and hedge fund managers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have thrown huge amounts of money at this research. Sergey Young created a $100 million Longevity Vision Fund. Google partners have invested over $2.5 billion in an anti-aging joint venture. Mark Zuckerberg recently donated $3 billion to wipe out all disease by the end of the century. And Bank of America predicts the longevity industry could be worth at least $600 billion by 2025.

While scientists and the moneyed elites are racing ahead with this project, philosophers have been reluctant to support it, to say the least. Simone De Beauvoir, for example, published her novel All Men are Mortal in 1946, which portrayed one such immortal man as living a terribly cursed existence. Bernard Williams wrote a much briefer essay along the same vein in 1973 called “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” Now, it would appear that Martin Hägglund has joined this chorus of sceptics with a new book titled This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free.

Continue here to read the full article.

3 Comments

Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness

7/30/2020

38 Comments

What's it all for?

Here goes. In my last post, I reiterated my concept of consciousness as involving living organisms, governed by the laws of natural and sexual selection, sensing and responding to biological forces. With that in mind, I said we could gain a lot of detail about this general definition by stepping through Tinbergen’s four questions one at a time. As a quick reminder, I listed those as: 1) mechanism (causation), 2) ontogeny (development), 3) function (adaptation), and 4) phylogeny (evolution).

So, which one should we tackle first? I believe we have to start by trying to nail down the functions of consciousness. Without that, how would we even know what to look for in terms of mechanisms, ontogeny, and phylogeny? This is a big task though. Remember that Tinbergen carved out the biological view of function in his 2x2 matrix as static (the current form of an organism) and ultimate (why a species evolved the structures that it has). This “static + ultimate” view of a function means that we are looking for a species trait that solves a reproductive or survival problem in the current environment. The problem with trying to do this for “consciousness” is that it is such a multi-faceted complex concept, there are therefore many, many aspects of consciousness that solve many, many reproductive and survival problems. And if we are trying to do so for a general definition of consciousness that applies across all organisms, then we have an even bigger set of possibilities that needs to encompass all of the evolutionary history of life. It’s a good thing we already covered a brief history of everything that has ever existed!

Since a review of the functions of consciousness can quickly get unwieldy, I’m going to write it in a way that helps us (i.e. me) hold onto the thread of the plot. I’m going to write a series of numbered statements (42 in all) with the justification for each one coming after the statement. You can just quickly read the statements to get the gist of the argument if you like. Or you can dip into the rest of the ~10,000 words to find any details you might want. Hopefully that will work well for a variety of readers with lots of differing backgrounds. Let’s begin.

1. Naming an evolved function for consciousness has proven to be very difficult and there is no widely accepted position on this.

If consciousness exists as a complex feature of biological systems, then its adaptive value is likely relevant to explaining its evolutionary origin, though of course its present function, if it has one, need not be the same now as when it first arose. (Consciousness Entry in Stanford Encyclopedia)
Why did evolution result in creatures who were more than just informationally sensitive? [Instead, they are ‘experientially sensitive’ too.] There are, to the best of our knowledge, no good theories about this. … Surely we jest, the reader might think. There must be good theories for why consciousness evolved. Well we have looked far and wide and no credible theories emerge. … There are as yet no credible stories about why subjects of experience emerged, why they might have won—or should have been expected to win—an evolutionary battle against very intelligent zombie-like information sensitive organisms. At least this has not been done in a way that provides a respectable theory for why subjects of experience gained hold in this actual world—for why we are not zombies. (Flanagan and Polger)

2. A common way to express this difficulty is to ask what life would be like without consciousness? Would life as a “zombie” look any different?

Zombie thought experiments highlight the need to explain why consciousness evolved and what function(s) it serves. This is the hardest problem in consciousness studies. … If systems “just like us” could exist without consciousness, then why was this ingredient added? Does consciousness do something that couldn’t be done without it? (Flanagan and Polger)
Why doesn't all this information-processing go on “in the dark,” free of any inner feel? Chalmers (1995) insists that consciousness cannot be explained in functional terms. He claims that reducing consciousness (as we experience it) to a functional mechanism will never solve the hard problem. (Solms)

3. “Zimboes” show the preposterousness of these zombie claims.

Todd Moody [notes that] although “it is true that zombies who grew up in our midst might become glib in the use of our language, including our philosophical talk about consciousness [and other mentalistic concepts], a world of zombies could not originate these exact concepts.” … Zombies, lacking the inner life that is the referent for our mentalistic terms, will not have concepts such as ‘dreaming’, ‘being in pain’, or ‘seeing’. This, Moody says, will reveal itself in the languages spoken on Zombie Earth, where terms for conscious phenomena will never be invented. The inhabitants of Zombie Earth won’t use the relevant mentalistic terms and thus will show “the mark of zombiehood”. (Flanagan and Polger)
Todd Moody's (1994) essay on zombies, and Owen Flanagan and Thomas Polger's commentary on it, vividly illustrate a point I have made before, but now want to drive home: when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably under-estimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition. … Only zimboes could pass a demanding Turing Test, for instance. … Zimboes think they are conscious, think they have qualia, think they suffer pains—they are just ‘wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover! … Zimboes are so complex in their internal cognitive architecture that whenever there is a strong signal in either the pain or the lust circuitry, all these 'merely informational' effects, (and the effects of those effects, etc.) are engendered. That's why zimboes, too, wonder why sex is so sexy for them [but not for simpler zombies, such as insects] and why their pains have to 'hurt'. If you deny that zimboes would wonder such wonders, you contradict the definition of a zombie. … Zombies would pull their hands off hot stoves, and breed like luna moths, but they wouldn't be upset by memories or anticipations of pain, and they wouldn't be apt to engage in sexual fantasies. No. While all this might be true of simple zombies, zimboes would be exactly as engrossed by sexual fantasies as we are, and exactly as unwilling to engage in behaviours they anticipate to be painful. If you imagine them otherwise, you have just not imagined zombies correctly. (Dennett)

4. So, what is the purpose of consciousness? That’s a poorly formed question because there is no one thing that consciousness is, so there is no one purpose that it is for.

The question of adaptive advantage, however, is ill-posed in the first place. If consciousness is (as I argue) not a single wonderful separable thing ('experiential sensitivity') but a huge complex of many different informational capacities that individually arise for a wide variety of reasons, there is no reason to suppose that 'it' is something that stands in need of its own separable status as fitness-enhancing. It is not a separate organ or a separate medium or a separate talent. To see the fallacy, consider the parallel question about what the adaptive advantage of health is. (Dennett)
I am not suggesting that there are not numerous empirical problems about the various forms of consciousness. We should like to understand, not what consciousness is for, but rather what sleep is for. It is of interest to know the neural mechanisms involved in perceptual consciousness (i.e. of having one’s attention caught by something in one’s field of perception). It is important to discover how the brain maintains intransitive consciousness. And so on. My point is merely that the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and the battery of related questions often cited by philosophers are merely conceptual confusions masquerading as empirical questions. (Hacker)

5. We must drop the essentialist language of consciousness. Consciousness isn’t a thing that just turns on. It involves the slow accrual of many properties. I defined it around detecting and responding to biological forces.

I think a more natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm where life responds to biological forces in order to survive. (Post 17)
In the field of strategic management. Harvard business school professor Michael Porter noted that you could map the competitive environment of any industry in order to understand the industry’s attractiveness in terms of profitability. Porter’s five forces are exerted by: 1) suppliers (supplier power), 2) buyers (buyer power), 3) entrants (threat of new entrants), 4) substitutes (threat of substitution), and 5) competitors (competitive rivalry). (Post 17)
In biology, there is 1) consumption of upstream inputs of energy, material, or prey (suppliers); 2) consumption of downstream outputs by mutualists, micro- or macroscopic predators (buyers); 3) potentially invasive species (threat of entrants); 4) current niche competitors from heterospecifics in other species (substitutes); and 5) the balance between competition and cooperation among conspecifics from the same species (competitive rivalry). (Post 17)

6. Defining consciousness this way implies that the processes of consciousness began with the origins of life. Our current best guess for how that occurred involves chemical and physical processes leading to simple constructions that were separable, stable, and replicable.

The pre-biotic environment contained many simple fatty acids. Under a range of pH, they spontaneously form stable vesicles (fluid-filled bladders). When a vesicle encounters free fatty acids in solution, it will incorporate them. Eating and growth are driven purely by thermodynamics. … The pre-biotic environment contained hundreds of types of different nucleotides (not just DNA and RNA). All it took was for one to self-polymerize. … No special sequences are required. It’s just chemistry. … So far, we have lipid vesicles that can grow and divide, and nucleotide polymers that can self-replicate, all on their own. But how does it become life? Here’s how. Our fatty acid vesicles are permeable to nucleotide monomers, but not polymers. (Single chains can get in; bonded ones can’t get out.) Once spontaneous polymerization occurs within the vesicle, the polymer is trapped. Floating though the ocean, the polymer-containing vesicles will encounter convection currents such as those set up by hydrothermal vents. The high temperatures will separate the polymer strands and increase the membrane’s permeability to monomers. Once the temperature cools, spontaneous polymerization can occur. And the cycle repeats. Here’s where it gets cool. The polymer, due to surrounding ions, will increase the osmotic pressure within the vesicle, stretching its membrane. A vesicle with more polymer, through simple thermodynamics, will “steal” lipids from a vesicle with less polymer. This is the origin of competition. They eat each other. A vesicle that contains a polymer that can replicate faster will grow and divide faster, eventually dominating the population. Thus beginning evolution! (Post 17)

7. These earliest structures satisfy at least 3 of the 7 major traits that currently define life: organisation, growth, and reproduction.

The definition of life has long been a challenge for scientists and philosophers, with many varied definitions put forward. This is partially because life is a process, not a substance. Most current definitions in biology are descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of something that preserves, furthers, or reinforces its existence in the given environment. According to this view, life exhibits all or most of the following traits:

Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.
Organisation: being structurally composed of one or more cells—the basic units of life.
Metabolism: transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation: the ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.
Response to stimuli: a response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion; for example, phototropism (the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun), and chemotaxis (movement of a motile cell or organism, or part of one, in a direction corresponding to a gradient of increasing or decreasing concentration of a particular substance).
Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two parent organisms. (Post 17)

8. Within E.O. Wilson’s consilient view of all of life, this gets us from biochemistry to molecular biology.

In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson proposed seven categories to integrate all of the biological sciences. His seven categories describe the study of life in totality, from the smallest atomic building blocks, to the billions of years of life-history that they have all constructed. Therefore, the simple diagram below of these mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive categories is actually an astonishingly broad vision of all of the life that has ever existed or will ever exist. (Post 17)

9. Any changes to these biological molecules would generate forces. These forces are exerted on singularly identifiable objects.

Molecules are held together by covalent bonds, which involve the sharing of electron pairs between atoms. Covalent bonding occurs when these electron pairs form a stable balance between attractive and repulsive forces between atoms. Covalent bonding does not necessarily require that the two atoms be of the same elements, only that they be of comparable electronegativity. … Intermolecular forces are the forces which mediate interactions between molecules and other types of neighbouring particles such as atoms or ions. They are weak relative to the intramolecular forces of covalent bonding which hold a molecule together. … Intermolecular forces are electrostatic in nature; that is, they arise from the interaction between positively and negatively charged molecules. The four key intermolecular forces are: 1) Ionic bonds; 2) Hydrogen bonding; 3) Van der Waals dipole-dipole interactions; and 4) Van der Waals dispersion forces. (Post 17)

10. I propose that these chemical forces, once in service of biological needs, are the defined starting point for turning objects into subjects.

Foundational to what we call psychology is the subjective observational perspective. The fact that self-organizing systems must monitor their own internal states in order to persist (that is, to exist, to survive) is precisely what brings active forms of subjectivity about. The very notion of selfhood is justified by this existential imperative. It is the origin and purpose of mind. (Solms)

11. As these living subjects evolve to survive and reproduce in accordance with the laws of natural and (later) sexual selection, any changes that occur in their makeup will induce chemical forces. Those that lead towards better survival and reproductive chances are objectively good for the subject and take on the affective valence of pleasure. The opposite is objectively bad and painful. Homeostasis is a comfortable stable state in between. These states of affective valence are fundamental components of consciousness.

Consciousness is fundamentally affective (see Panksepp, 1998; Solms, 2013; Damasio, 2018). The arousal processes that produce what is conventionally called “wakefulness” constitute the experiencing subject. In other words, the experiencing subject is constituted by affect. (Solms)
We have seen that minds emerge in consequence of the existential imperative of self-organizing systems to monitor their own internal states in relation to potentially annihilatory, entropic forces. Such monitoring is an inherently value-laden process. It is predicated upon the biological ethic (which underwrites the whole of evolution) to the effect that survival is “good.” (Solms)
Valence / value evolved much earlier. Even bacteria can go toward food and away from danger. (Post 10)
The brainstem structures that generate conscious “state” are not only responsible for the degree but also for the core quality of subjective being. The primal conscious “state” of mammals is intrinsically affective. It is this realization that will revolutionize consciousness studies in future years. (Solms and Panksepp)
Homeostasis is the primary mechanism driving life. Emotions are chemical reactions. The emotive response triggered by sensory stimuli are the qualia of philosophical tradition. This subjectivity is the critical enabler of consciousness. (Post 10)
Affective qualia are accordingly claimed to work like this: deviation away from a homeostatic settling point (increasing uncertainty) is felt as unpleasure, and returning toward it (decreasing uncertainty) is felt as pleasure. There are many types (or “flavours”) of pleasure and unpleasure in the brain (Panksepp, 1998). (Solms)
Interoceptive consciousness is phenomenal; it “feels like” something. Above all, the phenomenal states of the body-as-subject are experienced affectively. Affects, rather than representing discrete external events, are experienced as positively and negatively valenced states. Their valence is determined by how changing internal conditions relate to the probability of survival and reproductive success. The empirical evidence for the feeling component are simply based on the highly replicable fact that wherever in the brain one can artificially evoke coherent emotional response patterns with deep brain stimulation, those shifting states uniformly are accompanied by “rewarding” and “punishing” states of mind. By attributing valence to experience—determining whether something is “good” or “bad” for the subject, within a biological system of values—affective consciousness (and the behaviours it gives rise to) intrinsically promotes survival and reproductive success. This is what consciousness is for. (Solms and Panksepp)
The dumb id, in short, knows more than it can admit. Small wonder, therefore, that it is so regularly overlooked in contemporary cognitive science. But the id, unlike the ego, is only dumb in the glossopharyngeal sense. It constitutes the primary stuff from which minds are made; and cognitive science ignores it at its peril. We may safely say, without fear of contradiction, that were it not for the constant presence of affective feeling, conscious perceiving and thinking would either not exist or would gradually decay. This is just as well, because a mind unmotivated (and unguided) by feelings would be a hapless zombie, incapable of managing the basic tasks of life. (Solms and Panksepp)
An explanation of experience will never be found in the function of vision—or memory, for that matter—or in any function that is not inherently experiential. The function of experience cannot be inferred from perception and memory, but it can be inferred from feeling. There is not necessarily “something it is like” to perceive and to learn, but who ever heard of an unconscious feeling—a feeling that you cannot feel? If we want to identify a mechanism that explains the phenomena of consciousness (in both its psychological and physiological aspects) we must focus on the function of feeling—the technical term for which is “affect.” (Solms)

12. Affective valence can only be felt by the subject experiencing the physical and chemical changes. There is, therefore, a barrier to knowing “what it is like” to be another subject. However, affect will eventually lead to distinctive behaviour in complex animals that can be objectively observed.

Behavioural criteria showing an animal has affective consciousness (likes and dislikes):

Global operant conditioning (involving whole body and learning brand-new behaviours)
Behavioural trade-offs, value-based cost-benefit decisions
Frustration behaviour
Self-delivery of pain relievers or rewards
Approach to reinforcing drugs or conditioned place preference (Feinberg and Mallatt)

13. These affects become separable into three categories and seven basic emotions.

Subcortical affective processes come in at least three major categorical forms: (a) the homeostatic internal bodily drives (such as hunger and thermoregulation); (b) the sensory affects, which help regulate those drives (such as the affective aspects of taste and feelings of coldness and warmth); and (c) the instinctual-emotional networks of the brain, which embody the action tools that ambulant organisms need to satisfy their affective drives in the outside world (such as searching for food and warmth). These instinctual “survival tools” include foraging for resources (SEEKING), reproductive eroticism (LUST), protection of the body (FEAR and RAGE), maternal devotion (CARE), separation distress (PANIC/GRIEF), and vigorous positive engagement with conspecifics (PLAY). (Solms and Panksepp)

14. Cognition is built alongside and on top of this affective valence to sense, remember, and know more and more about what is bad and good. This happens in an ever-evolving way, growing in time, space, and circles of concern.

“Cognition is comprised of sensory and other information-processing mechanisms an organism has for becoming familiar with, valuing, and interacting productively with features of its environment in order to meet existential needs, the most basic of which are survival/persistence, growth/thriving, and reproduction.” This specifies the adaptive value of cognition for an organism and has the additional virtue of differentiating cognition from metabolic functions such as respiration and photosynthesis, which arguably also employ mechanisms for acquiring, processing, and acting on information. … This proposed definition is consistent with Peter Sterling and Simon Laughlin’s (2015) description in Principles of Neural Design of what brains do, including the human brain: “The brain’s purposes reduce to regulating the internal milieu and helping the organism to survive and reproduce. All complex behaviour and mental experience—work and play, music and art, politics and prayer—are but strategies to accomplish these functions.” (p. 11) (Lyon)
What, then, does cortex contribute to consciousness? Although neocortex surely adds much to refined perceptual awareness, initial perceptual processing appears to be unconscious in itself (cf. blindsight) or it may have qualities that we do not readily recognize at the level of cognitive consciousness. … It is possible that perceptual and higher cognitive forms of consciousness emerged in the neocortex upon an evolutionary foundation of affective consciousness. (Solms and Panksepp)

15. Cognitive processing enables the interruption of affective reflexes in order to consider several things at once. Cognition thus gives stability to the fleeting nature of affective emotion. This stability allows for driven, intentional acts.

It is argued here that cortex stabilises consciousness rather than generates it; i.e., that cortical functioning binds affective arousal, and thereby transforms it into conscious cognition. … The essential task of cognitive (cortical) consciousness is to delay motor responses to affective “demands made upon the mind for work.” This delay enables thinking. The essential function of cortex is thus revealed to be stabilisation of non-declarative executive processes, which is the essence of what we call working memory. (Solms)
The fundamental contribution of cortex to consciousness in this respect is stabilisation (and refinement) of the objects of perception and generating thinking and ideas. This contribution derives from the unrivalled capacity of cortex for representational forms of memory (in all of its varieties, both short- and long-term). To put it metaphorically, cortex transforms the fleeting, fugitive, wave-like states of consciousness into mental solids. It generates objects. (Freud called them “object presentations”.) Such stable representations, once established, can be innervated both externally and internally, thereby generating objects not only for perception but also for cognition. To be clear: the computations and memories underlying these representational processes are unconscious in themselves; but when consciousness is extended to them, it (consciousness) is transformed by them into something stable, something that can be thought, something in the nature of crystal clear perceptions that are transformed into ideas in working memory. (Solms and Panksepp)

16. Further cognition allows brains to become better reality simulators or prediction machines, which aid tremendously in prospects for survival.

The evolutionary and developmental pressure to constrain incentive salience in perception through prediction-error coding (the “reality principle”) places inhibitory constraints on action. The resultant inhibition requires tolerance of frustrated affects, but it secures more efficient drive satisfaction in the long run. (Solms and Panksepp)
In this process, the organism must stay “ahead of the wave” of the biological consequences of its choices (to use the analogy that gave Andy Clark's (2016) book its wonderful title: Surfing Uncertainty): “To deal rapidly and fluently with an uncertain and noisy world, brains like ours have become masters of prediction—surfing the waves of noisy and ambiguous sensory stimulation by, in effect, trying to stay just ahead of the place where the wave is breaking (p. xiv).” (Solms)
What I am claiming is something else: feeling enables complex organisms to register—and thereby to regulate and prioritize through thinking and voluntary action—deviations from homeostatic settling points in unpredicted contexts. This adaptation, in turn, underwrites learning from experience. In predictable situations, organisms may rely on automatized reflexive responses (in which case, the biologically viable predictions are made through natural selection and embodied in the phenotype; see Clark, 2016). But if the organism is going to make plausible choices in novel contexts (cf. “free will”) it must do so via some type of here-and-now assessment of the relative value attaching to the alternatives (see Solms, 2014). (Solms)

17. The development and feelings of “precision” are an important part of how these predictions work.

“Precision” is an extremely important aspect of active and perceptual inference; it is the representation of uncertainty. The precision attaching to a quantity estimates its reliability, or inverse variance (e.g., visual—relative to auditory—signals are afforded greater precision during daylight vs. night-time). Heuristically, precision can be regarded as the confidence afforded probabilistic beliefs about states of the not-system—or, more importantly, what actions “I should select.” (Solms)
The feeling of knowing (“I do know that”) is a basic emotion like fear that is not under conscious control. (Campbell)

18. As cognitive predictions are tested, they take on valence where surprises and uncertainty are bad and therefore honed by evolution to improve. This cognitive valence is what philosophers seemingly refer to as qualia.

Friston’s model of the Bayesian brain (in terms of which prediction-error or “surprise”, equated with “free energy”) is minimized through the encoding of better models of the world leading to better predictions is therefore, in principle, entirely consistent with the model outlined here. It is important to note that in this model, prediction error (mediated by the sensory affect of surprise), which increases incentive salience (and therefore conscious “presence” of the self) in perception, is a “bad” thing, biologically speaking. The more veridical the brain’s generative model of the world, the less surprise (the less salience, the less consciousness, the more automaticity), the better. Freud called this the “Nirvana principle”. [In simpler terms,] the goal of all learning is automatised mental processes, increased predictability, and reduced uncertainty or “surprise”. (Solms and Panksepp)
The inherently subjective and qualitative nature of this auto-assessment process explains “how and why” it feels like something to the organism, for the organism (cf. Nagel, 1974). Specifically, increasing uncertainty in relation to any biological imperative just is “bad” from the (first-person) perspective of such an organism—indeed it is an existential crisis—while decreasing uncertainty just is “good.” (Solms)
The proposal on offer here is that this imperative predictive function—which bestows the adaptive advantage of enabling organisms to survive in novel environments—is performed by feeling. On the present proposal, this is the causal contribution of qualia. (Solms)

19. Predictions about the intentions of others are particularly vital.

I claim that our power to interpret the actions of others depends on our power—seldom explicitly exercised—to predict them. Where utter patternlessness or randomness prevails, nothing is predictable. The success of folk-psychological prediction, like the success of any prediction, depends on there being some order or pattern in the world to exploit. … Folk psychology provides a description system that permits highly reliable prediction of human (and much nonhuman) behaviour. (Dennett)

Understanding of others' intentions is a critical precursor to understanding other minds because intentionality, or “aboutness”, is a fundamental feature of mental states and events. 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. (Theory of Mind Wikipedia)
Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behaviour is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do. (p.17) (Dennett)

20. By making cognitive connections between intentions, predictions, and internal affective feelings, the development of self-awareness slowly arises.

[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. The self of everyday cognition is therefore largely an abstraction. That is why the self is so effortlessly able to think about itself in relation to objects, in such everyday situations as “I am currently experiencing myself looking at an object”. (Solms and Panksepp)

21. Models of others and the self are made using the same mechanisms.

In The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, Feinberg and Mallatt contend that consciousness is about creating image maps of the environment and oneself. But systems that do it with orders of magnitude less sophistication than humans can still trigger our intuition of a fellow conscious being. (Post 11)
External body representation is made of the same “stuff” as the representation of other objects. The external bodily “self” is represented as a thing—“my body”—and is inscribed on the page of consciousness in much the same way as other objects. It is, in short, an external, stabilized, detailed representation of the subject of consciousness. It is not the subject itself. The subject of consciousness identifies itself with this external bodily representation in much the same way as a child might project itself into the animated figures that she controls in a computer game. The representations rapidly come to be treated as if they were the self, but in reality they are not. Here is some experimental evidence for the counterintuitive relation between the self and its external body. Petkova and Ehrsson reported a series of “body swap” experiments in which cameras mounted over the eyes of other people or mannequins, transmitting images from their viewpoint to goggles mounted over the eyes of experimental subjects, rapidly created the illusion in the experimental subjects that the other body or mannequin was their own body. This illusion was so compelling that it persisted even when the subjects (projected into the other bodies) shook hands with their own bodies. The existence of this illusion was demonstrated objectively by the fact that when the other (illusory own) body and one’s own body were both threatened with a knife, the emotional reaction (measured by heart rate and galvanic skin response) was greater for the illusory body. The well-known “rubber hand illusion” demonstrates the same relation between the self and the external body, albeit less dramatically. So does the inverse “phantom limb” phenomenon. (Solms and Panksepp)

22. Studies have shown that conscious awareness is necessary for some types of learning that give organisms additional plasticity to respond to new and novel stimuli in their environment.

Our pain and sex lives might be regulated by unconscious information, but organisms need to learn. It is this that consciousness is for. It confers, like nothing else could, plasticity. Innate responses to basic evolutionarily advantageous or disadvantageous things might get us to mate or avoid standard bad things, but they wouldn’t get us to learn about the contingent features of our environment on which rests our ultimate success. (Flanagan and Polger) (Note: F&P don’t actually support this argument. They say “This argument won’t work. Plasticity, learning, and the like need not be, indeed in our own case they often are not, conscious.” However, the following studies show they are wrong for some types of learning.)
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. … Clark and Squire (1998, p.79) suggested that “awareness is a prerequisite for successful trace conditioning”: (i) when explicitly briefed before trace conditioning about the temporal relationship between tone and air puff, all subjects learned the task, and faster than those without briefing; (ii) when performing an attention-demanding task, subjects did not acquire trace conditioning. (van den Bos)

23. An awareness of internal “emotions” allow us to learn from “feelings”.

Feelings are mental experiences that are the conscious experience of emotions. (Post 10)
Learning arises from associations between interoceptive drives and exteroceptive representations, guided by the feelings generated by the affective experiences aroused by those representations. This is why they become conscious; the embodied subject must evaluate them. (Solms and Panksepp)
As the cognitive science of the late twentieth century is complemented by the affective neuroscience of the present, we are breaking through to a truly mental neuroscience, and finally understanding that the brain is not merely an information-processing device but also a sentient, intentional being. Our animal behaviours are not “just” behaviours; in their primal affective forms they embody ancient mental processes that we share, at the very least, with all other mammals. (Solms and Panksepp)

24. This learning can be repeated over and over in order to rebuild memories and learn new things from them in light of further information.

The reversal of the memory consolidation process (reconsolidation; Nader et al., 2000) renders Long Term Memory-traces labile, through literal dissolution of the proteins that initially “wired” them (Hebb, 1949). This iterative feeling and re-feeling one's way through declarable problems is the function of the cognitive qualia which have so dominated contemporary consciousness studies. (Solms)

25. Conscious awareness of what is going on in our own minds goes hand in hand with developing awareness that others have minds.

The study of which animals are capable of attributing knowledge and mental states to others, as well as the development of this ability in human ontogeny and phylogeny, has identified several behavioural precursors to theory of mind. Understanding attention, understanding of others' intentions, and imitative experience with other people are hallmarks of a theory of mind that may be observed early in the development of what later becomes a full-fledged theory. (Theory of Mind Wikipedia)
Selfhood is impossible unless a self-organizing system monitors its internal state in relation to not-self dissipative forces. The self can only exist in contradistinction to the not-self. This ultimately gives rise to the philosophical problem of other minds. In fact, the properties of a Markov blanket explain the problem of other minds: the internal states of a self-organizing system can only ever register hidden external (not-system) states vicariously, via the sensory states of their own blanket. (Solms)

26. Once living organisms become aware of selves and others, simple forms of communication such as pointing develop.

Joint attention refers to when two people look at and attend to the same thing; parents often use the act of pointing to prompt infants to engage in joint attention. The inclination to spontaneously reference an object in the world as of interest, via pointing, and to likewise appreciate the directed attention of another, may be the underlying motive behind all human communication. (Theory of Mind Wikipedia)

27. While sensory memory and pointing are enough for the self and for rudimentary communication, the development of language through abstract symbols allows for much greater scale and scope in cognition.

On the “self-awareness being tied to language” note, I found this quote from Helen Keller interesting: “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.” Hellen Keller, 1908: quoted by Daniel Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained. London, The Penguin Press. pg 227 (Hiskey)
Interestingly, deafness is significantly more serious than blindness in terms of the effect it can have on the brain. This isn’t because deaf people’s brains are different than hearing people, in terms of mental capacity or the like; rather, it is because of how integral language is to how our brain functions. To be clear, “language” here not only refers to spoken languages, but also to sign language. It is simply important that the brain have some form of language it can fully comprehend and can turn into an inner voice to drive thought. (Hiskey)
Recent research has shown that language is integral in such brain functions as memory, abstract thinking, and, fascinatingly, self-awareness. Language has been shown to literally be the “device driver”, so to speak, that drives much of the brain’s core “hardware”. Thus, deaf people who aren’t identified as such very young or that live in places where they aren’t able to be taught sign language, will be significantly handicapped mentally until they learn a structured language, even though there is nothing actually wrong with their brains. The problem is even more severe than it may appear at first because of how important language is to the early stages of development of the brain. Those completely deaf people who are taught no sign language until later life will often have learning problems that stick with them throughout their lives, even after they have eventually learned a particular sign language. (Hiskey)
Today I found out how deaf people think in terms of their “inner voice”. It turns out, this varies somewhat from deaf person to deaf person, depending on their level of deafness and vocal training. Those who were born completely deaf and only learned sign language will, not surprisingly, think in sign language. What is surprising is those who were born completely deaf but learn to speak through vocal training will occasionally think not only in the particular sign language that they know, but also will sometimes think in the vocal language they learned, with their brains coming up with how the vocal language sounds. Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign language. Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one’s own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads. (Hiskey)

Interestingly, if you take a deaf person and make them grip something hard with their hands while asking them to memorize a list of words, this has the same disruptive effect as making a hearing person repeat some nonsense phrase such as “Bob and Bill” during memorization tasks. (Hiskey)

28. Language increases our ability to make sense of the world compared to working memory alone.

Feeling only persists (is only required) for as long as the cognitive task at hand remains unresolved. Conscious cognitive capacity is an extremely limited resource (cf. Miller's law) which must be used sparingly. [Miller's law states that human beings are capable of holding seven-plus-or-minus-two units of information in working memory at any one point in time.] (Solms)
Only consciousness allows us to entertain lasting thoughts. It also allows us to create algorithms, a step-by-step way of solving a problem. It allows for flexible routing of information and appears to be necessary for making a final decision. Consciousness is an important element of social information sharing. It condenses information, [making it easier to transfer]. (Post 9)
If I ask you to picture a rope and climbing up it, you can do it. I specifically chose those objects and actions because it is exactly what a chimp in a zoo is familiar with. If I asked a chimp to do the same thing, could it? We don’t know, but I suspect not, because you can’t do it wordlessly. You need to be able to interact using language. Without language, I don’t think you have the cognitive systems for self-simulation and self-probing that we have. … Language allows us to be conscious of things we otherwise wouldn’t be able to be conscious of. (Post 7)

29. Language also vastly enlarges the recognition of patterns in the world, which is a vital part of our prediction abilities.

Differences in knowledge yield striking differences in the capacity to pick up patterns. Expert chess players can instantly perceive (and subsequently recall with high accuracy) the total board position in a real game but are much worse at recall if the same chess pieces are randomly placed on the board, even though to a novice both boards are equally hard to recall. This should not surprise anyone who considers that an expert speaker of English would have much less difficulty perceiving and recalling: “The frightened cat struggled to get loose” than “Te serioghehnde t srugfcalde go tgtt ohle” which contains the same pieces, now somewhat disordered. Expert chess players, unlike novices, not only know how to Play chess; they know how to read chess—how to see the patterns at a glance. (Dennett)

30. Language enables deep and precise probing of the self.

A particular human experience is where you know the experience is happening to you. We can’t rule that out in other animals, but neurological evidence suggests that it’s not happening. This “autonoetic consciousness” represents the view of the self as the subject. It enables mental time-travel (i.e. you can review past experiences and possible future states). Other animals can learn from the past, but in a simple way. (Post 12)

31. Language enables many more degrees of freedom. We may not have ultimately free will, but Libet’s attempt to deny it is a misunderstanding of the difference between the core affective self and the represented self of cognition.

Degrees of freedom is something I’m using more lately. It is an opportunity for control. Degrees of freedom can be clamped or locked down to be removed. How many degrees of freedom do humans have? Millions and millions of things we can think of. We have orders of magnitude more that we can think of than a bear does, even with roughly the same number of cells. So, our complexity is higher. The options a bear has are a vanishing subset of the options that we have. Learning to control these options is not now a science. It is an art. (Dennett)
Whereas homeostasis requires nothing more than ongoing adjustment of the system's active states (M) and/or inferences about its sensory states (ϕ), in accordance with its predictive model (ψ) of the external world (Q) or vegetative body (Qη), which can be adjusted automatically on the basis of ongoing registrations of prediction error (e), quantified as free energy (F)—contextual considerations require an additional capacity to adjust the precision weighting (ω) of all relevant quantities. This capacity provides a formal (mechanistic) account of voluntary behaviour—of choice. (Solms)
The unrecognized gap between the primary subjective self and the re-representational abstracted self causes much confusion. Witness the famous example of Benjamin Libet recording a delay of up to 400 ms between the physiological appearance of premotor activation and the voluntary decision to move. This is typically interpreted to mean that free will is an illusion, when in fact it shows only that reflexive re-representation of the self initiating a movement occurs somewhat later than the core self actually initiating it. (Solms and Panksepp)

32. Finally, language and the autobiographical self leads to all of the items of human culture.

Autobiographical self has prompted: extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity, and language. Out of these came the instruments of culture: religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, and technology. (Post 10)

33. Bringing all of these aspects of consciousness together requires a multi-faceted framework. But it would help if this framework was organised around a single unifying concept.

As long as one avoids confusion by being clear about one's meanings, there is great value in having a variety of concepts by which we can access and grasp consciousness in all its rich complexity. However, one should not assume that conceptual plurality implies referential divergence. Our multiple concepts of consciousness may in fact pick out varying aspects of a single unified underlying mental phenomenon. Whether and to what extent they do so remains an open question. (Consciousness Entry in Stanford Encyclopedia)
The problem of consciousness will only be solved if we reduce its psychological and physiological manifestations to a single underlying abstraction. (Solms)

34. Before describing my own framework and unifying concepts, a quick review of some other contenders is helpful. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists six separate functions of consciousness.

How do mental processes that involve the relevant sort of consciousness differ from those that lack it? What function(s) might consciousness play? The following six notions are some of the more commonly given answers: 1) Flexible control. Though unconscious automatic processes can be extremely efficient and rapid, they typically operate in ways that are more fixed and predetermined than those which involve conscious self-awareness. 2) Social coordination. Consciousness of the meta-mental sort may well involve not only an increase in self-awareness but also an enhanced understanding of the mental states of other minded creatures, especially those of other members of one's social group. 3) Integrated representation. Conscious experience presents us not with isolated properties or features but with objects and events situated in an ongoing independent world, and it does so by embodying in its experiential organisation and dynamics the dense network of relations and interconnections that collectively constitute the meaningful structure of a world of objects. 4) Informational access. The information carried in conscious mental states is typically available for use by a diversity of mental subsystems and for application to a wide range of potential situations and actions. 5) Freedom of will. Consciousness has been thought to open a realm of possibilities, a sphere of options within which the conscious self might choose or act freely. 6) Intrinsic motivation. The attractive positive motivational aspect of a pleasure seems a part of its directly experienced phenomenal feel, as does the negative affective character of a pain. (Consciousness Entry in Stanford Encyclopedia)

35. A simple distinction is sometimes made between primary and higher order consciousness.

Another theory about the function of consciousness has been proposed by Gerald Edelman called dynamic core hypothesis which puts emphasis on re-entrant connections (bi-directional connections) that reciprocally link areas of the brain in a massively parallel manner. Edelman also stresses the importance of the evolutionary emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans from the historically older trait of primary consciousness which humans share with non-human animals. (Consciousness Wikipedia)
Primary consciousness is broken down into three elements: 1) Exteroceptive—Damasio’s mapping of the outer world. 2) Interoceptive—signals from inside the body. 3) Affective—the experience of feeling, emotion, or mood. (Post 11)
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness does not address higher levels of consciousness: full-blown self-awareness, meta-awareness, recognition of the self in mirrors, theory of mind, access to verbal self-reporting. (Post 11)

36. Another widely discussed definition divides consciousness into three forms: anoetic, noetic, and autonoetic.

In short, the complexity of our capacity to consciously and unconsciously process fluctuating brain states and environmentally linked behavioural processes requires some kind of multi-tiered analysis, such as Endel Tulving’s well-known parsing of consciousness into three forms: anoetic (unthinking forms of experience, which may be affectively intense without being “known”, and could be the birthright of all mammals), noetic (thinking forms of consciousness, linked to exteroceptive perception and cognition), and autonoetic (abstracted forms of perceptions and cognitions, which allow conscious “awareness” and reflection upon experience in the “mind’s eye” through episodic memories and fantasies). (Solms and Panksepp)

37. This is similar to Antonio Damasio’s three selves.

A mind emerges from the brain when an animal is able to create images and to map the world and its body. [According to Antonio Damasio’s definition,] consciousness requires the addition of self-awareness. This begins at the level of the brain stem, with “primordial feelings.” The self is built up in stages starting with the proto self made up of primordial feelings, affect alone, and feeling alive. Then the core self is developed when the proto self is interacting with objects and images such that they are modified and there is a narrative sequence. Finally comes the autobiographical self, which is built from the lived past and the anticipated future. (Post 10)

38. Feinberg and Mallat list six adaptive advantages of consciousness organised over three different levels.

Adaptive advantages of consciousness: 1) It efficiently organizes much sensory input into a set of diverse qualia for action choice. As it organizes them, it resolves conflicts among the diverse inputs. 2) Its unified simulation of the complex environment directs behaviour in three-dimensional space. 3) Its importance-ranking of sensed stimuli, by assigned affects, makes decisions easier. 4) It allows flexible behaviour. It allows much and flexible learning. 5) It predicts the near future, allowing error correction. 6) It deals well with new situations. (Feinberg and Mallatt)
The Defining Features of Consciousness are: Level 1) General Biological Features: life, embodiment, processes, self-organising systems, emergence, teleonomy, and adaption. Level 2) Reflexes of animals with nervous systems. Level 3) Special Neurobiological Features: complex hierarchy (of networks); nested and non-nested processes, aka recursive; isomorphic representations and mental images; affective states; attention; and memory. (Post 11)

39. The latest hierarchy from Mike Smith on his excellent Self Aware Patterns website (which devotes a lot of time to consciousness studies) has six layers.

Matter: a system that is part of the environment, is affected by it, and affects it. Panpsychism.
Reflexes and fixed action patterns: automatic reactions to stimuli. If we stipulate that these must be biologically adaptive, then this layer is equivalent to universal biopsychism.
Perception: models of the environment built from distance senses, increasing the scope of what the reflexes are reacting to.
Volition: selection of which reflexes to allow or inhibit based on learned predictions.
Deliberative imagination: sensory-action scenarios, episodic memory, to enhance 4.
Introspection: deep recursive metacognition enabling symbolic thought.

40. Lyon lists 13 functional abilities of cognition that help organisms adapt to their environment.

The broadly biological conceptions of the capacities encompassed by the general concept of cognition 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) memory — retention of information about a state of affairs for a non-zero period; (5) learning — experience-modulated behaviour change; (6) problem solving / decision making — behaviour selection in circumstances with multiple, potentially conflicting parameters and varying degrees of uncertainty; (7) communication — mechanism for initiating purposive interaction with conspecifics (or non-conspecific others) to fulfil an existentially salient goal; (8) motivation — teleonomic striving; implicit goals arising from existential conditions; (9) 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; (10) awareness — orienting response; ability to selectively attend to aspects of the external and/or internal milieu; (11) self-reference — mechanisms for distinguishing “self” or “like self” from “non-self” or “not like self”; (12) normativity — error detection, behavioural correction, value assignment based on motivational state; (13) intentionality — directedness towards an object. (Lyon)

41. These adaptations help meet the evolutionary hierarchy of needs of all life.

The evolutionary perspective of our diverse and ever-changing web of life transforms Maslow’s hierarchy. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid—or tree now—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 characterizes the struggle for survival. And finally, the “self-actualization” that Maslow struggled to define (and which Kenrick and Andrews discarded or subsumed elsewhere), 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.” Putting this all together, we may then change Maslow’s hierarchical pyramid of human needs into the following multi-layered tree for any individual life. (Gibney)

42. Summarising all of this research, here is my proposal for a hierarchy of the functions of consciousness. They are unified under a single concept, governed by the evolutionary laws of selection, and guided by biological forces in order to meet the needs of life.

In my proposal, understanding consciousness begins with the unifying concept of “subjects sensing and responding to the world for the ultimate goal of the survival of life.” This is in line with how I define consciousness (derived from the Latin for “knowing together”). The functions that evolve are governed by the laws of natural selection and (later) sexual selection. They are guided in this evolution by the biological forces that exerted on living beings: consumption, predation, niche competition, conspecific rivalry, and potential invasion. And they help organisms meet their evolutionary hierarchy of needs.

Stepping through the hierarchy, we therefore start with the origin of life. Once the first three criteria from the general definition for life are happening—organisation, growth, and reproduction—subjects come into existence.

As soon as life emerges, the function of affect begins to take hold. Any changes to these living organisms cause chemical forces to be exerted on individual subjects. Changes that lead towards persistence are objectively defined as good. The opposite changes are bad. Stability is homeostasis. As these changes are selected for, the earliest forms of life become more complex, eventually meeting the rest of the criteria for the definition of life—response to stimuli, adaptation, homeostasis, and metabolism. These forms of life respond reflexively, using chemical emotional responses alone that develop (according to Panksepp) into seven basic emotions: foraging for resources (SEEKING), reproductive drive (LUST), protection of the body (FEAR and RAGE), maternal devotion (CARE), separation distress (PANIC), and vigorous positive engagement with conspecifics (PLAY). The first four of these have premammalian origins. In humans, the final three only date back to early primates. Among the 13 cognitive capacities that Lyon notes, 4 are required during this stage of affect: sense perception, valence, discrimination, and motivation. These can be said to produce the anoetic, proto self.

Over time, adaptations from affective reflexes alone lead to capacities for cognition that are able to interrupt these reflexes. From Lyon’s list, the five capacities of attention, memory, pattern recognition, learning, and communication lead to this noetic, core self where organisms can be said to be acting with intention. Choices are made and to an outside observer there is a narrative sequence to life.

Once intentions exist (either one’s own or the intentions of others), they can be taken into account. To do so is to use prediction to think through what the result will be from any intentions. This requires three more cognitive capacities from Lyon’s list: anticipation, problem solving, and error detection. With these abilities, organisms can simulate reality and be led by emotions of precision to hone these simulations towards greater accuracy.

As predictions and perceptions improve, organisms eventually make the connection that there is a self which has its own mind. Awareness is achieved. This development is covered by the final cognitive capacity from Lyon’s list: self-reference. Such conscious cognition allows memories and thoughts built from the lived past and the anticipated future to create the autonoetic, autobiographical self.

Finally, through the development of ideas about the self and other minds, brains began to imagine something that had no immediate impact on their senses. This opens up the doors for much further abstraction. Slowly, the evolution of symbols, art, and language took place, enabling certain abilities that perhaps only humans possess at this time. Memes, writing, mathematics, philosophy, and science make up and enable all of eventual the products of human culture.

So, there you have it. As I noted in my brief history of the definitions of consciousness, many, many attempts have been made at this. Maybe this is just another one. But I believe it is the kind of comprehensive definition that would allow others to draw circles around the items from their definitions and say, “that’s what I think consciousness is.” If I’m lucky, maybe they’ll even switch to say, “that’s what I thought consciousness was.”

The hard problem of consciousness is often phrased as wondering how inert matter can ever evolve into the subjective experience that we humans undoubtedly feel. I think this short-changes matter. Far from being inert, matter responds to the forces exerted on it all the time. Panpsychism says mind (psyche) is everywhere. But to me there can be no mind without a stable subject. In my current conception, the forces that minds feel and are shaped by are merely the chemical and physical forces that shape all matter. Until something else is found, what else could there be? So, mind is not everywhere, but forces are. The Greek for force is dynami, so rather than panpsychism, I would say the universe has pandynamism. The psyche only originates and evolves along with life.

What about other forms of non-biological life? As I said in post 17, “Could artificial life also respond to these forces and be declared conscious? I think yes, although the “feeling of what it is like” to be such life would be very different from current biological life forms that are built from organic chemistry. We already believe the feeling of what is like to be a bat is likely very different from that of a cuttlefish, so the difference would be even greater for artificial life given the much larger change in underlying mechanisms. Yet both could be considered conscious in my definition.”

And with that, I have my answer to the 1st of Tinbergen’s 4 questions about the biological aspects of consciousness. Now that we have a clear list of the functions that consciousness enables, I’ll try to match them up against the mechanisms that cause all of this. Stay tuned for that as the end of this series comes into view.

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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

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Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions

7/3/2020

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Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

In my last (long) post, I noted that “I think a more natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm where life responds to biological forces in order to survive. … I acknowledge that this view of consciousness raises a lot of questions. To try and answer them—at least as well as the current state of science allows—we’ll need a comprehensive understanding of this position.” And I said that “In my next post, I’ll introduce a framework that can help lead us through that kind of comprehensive explanation.”

Where should we look for such a framework? We could turn to Aristotle since his empirical studies of plants and animals led him to be considered the founder of the science of biology. During his observations and classifications, Aristotle developed a framework known as the four causes. And he said, “we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause.” The four kinds of causes are described briefly as:

The efficient cause. This is something outside of the thing that is under consideration, which is responsible for the origination of that thing. For a table, this is a carpenter.
The material cause. This is the material “out of which” a thing is composed. For a table, this might be wood.
The formal cause. This is the form or shape of a thing which makes up the general definition of that thing. For a table, this could be its blueprint.
The final cause. This is the goal or the purpose (telos in Greek) for which a thing originated and at which it aims. For a table, this could be dining.

These causes—arguably better translated as “explanations”—weren’t considered to be separable and mutually exclusive things that all operated on their own. Rather, they are just different aspects that work together to explain something in its full context. This line of thinking about biological organisms remained successful for about 2000 years. It was developed and used by Neoplatonists in antiquity, Averroes and Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and right on through to the 19th century. An elderly Charles Darwin even famously said, “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.”

Looking at these four causes now, however, we see that Darwin undermined them completely. The four causes are static, they lack any sense of evolutionary history, and the final telos cause has been flipped upside down by Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning.” As the world got to grips with that, Julian Huxley (who was the grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley) gave us an updated evolutionary framework in his 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. That looked at three major aspects of biological facts: 1) mechanistic-physiological, 2) adaptive-functional, and 3) evolutionary or historical aspects.

This is much better, but the final framework that evolutionary biologists still use today came a few decades later from Nicholaas Tinbergen. Tinbergen won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for his contributions as one of the founders of ethology (the study of animal behaviour), and his 1963 paper “On aims and methods of Ethology” has “become a classic that gives evolutionary students of behaviour a basic framework for their agenda. Tinbergen proposes, in what has subsequently become known as Tinbergen’s Four Questions, that to achieve a complex understanding of a particular phenomenon, we may ask different questions which are mutually non-transferable.”

What that phrase ‘mutually non-transferable’ really means in this case is your classic 2x2 matrix with 2 options for each of 2 different variables. In this case, Tinbergen considered static vs. dynamic views as well as proximate vs. ultimate views. The static view looks at the current form of an organism. The dynamic view looks at the historical sequence that led to it. The proximate view considers how an individual organism's structures function, whereas the ultimate view asks why a species evolved the structures that it has. Setting up this 2x2 matrix yields the following four areas for consideration:

Mechanism (causation). This gives mechanistic explanations for how an organism's structures currently work. (Static + Proximate)
Ontogeny (development). This considers developmental explanations for changes in individuals, from their original DNA to their current form. (Dynamic + Proximate)
Function (adaptation). This looks at a species trait and how it solves a reproductive or survival problem in the current environment. (Static + Ultimate)
Phylogeny (evolution). This examines the entire history of the evolution of sequential changes in a species over many generations. (Dynamic + Ultimate)

This framework adds the important consideration of ontogeny to Huxley’s three major aspects of biology. (How did he tell the story of a frog without the story of a tadpole?) The fact that Tinbergen arrived at four considerations is perhaps why “it has been repeatedly pointed out that this concept is derived from Aristotle’s Four Causes.” A paper called “Was Tinbergen an Aristotelian? Comparison of Tinbergen’s Four Whys and Aristotle’s Four Causes” thinks that “in general, they parallel very well” but honestly that feels a bit forced to me. (Try to match them up to see for yourself.) Tinbergen apparently never mentioned Huxley or Aristotle, but regardless of his inspiration, he now has the “standard framework in the behavioural sciences.”

If that’s the case, then why hasn’t consciousness already been considered using this framework? I was sure someone would have done this already, but I couldn’t find it. In fact, one of the top search results for “Tinbergen and Consciousness” was a paper called “The Mind-Evolution Problem: The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework” written by Yoram Gutfreund in 2018 in Frontiers in Psychology. I’ll say more about that later but let me quickly trace the history of this difficulty.

Firstly, Tinbergen wrote in the 1950’s and 1960’s at the height of the behaviourist movement in psychology which tried to get rid of cognitive studies. Perhaps because of this, Tinbergen himself thought his framework did not apply to consciousness. As he wrote, “Psychology does not come into contact with objective study of the lowest levels such as the reflex level, because introspection does not reach them. At the higher level, introspection brings us into contact with an aspect of behaviour that is out of reach of objective study. … As scientists, we have to recognise the duality of our thinking and to accept it.” Duality?! Well I think I see a fatal flaw in his thinking about this.

Even Dan Dennett, however, apparently subscribed to this separation of consciousness from ethology. In his doctoral thesis “Content and Consciousness”, published in 1969, Dennett is described as saying that “in the intentional case the antecedent (intention) cannot be described or defined independently from the consequent (action), it [therefore] cannot be properly regarded in terms of cause and effect in the natural sciences’ sense; antecedent-consequent relationships in the behaviouristic or ethological tradition (stimulus-response relationships) however can. These approaches are incompatible.” To untangle that jargon, Dennett meant that we couldn’t grasp our intentions as they arise and separate them into a standard model of cause and effect. I believe this is a problem we can solve now, but even the man who later called evolution a “universal acid” didn’t originally see how it could eat into this particular method of studying consciousness.

In fact, The Oxford Companion to Consciousness notes, “Conspicuously absent from [Tinbergen’s] ‘classical’ ethology were issues involving consciousness. Thus, in ethology as well as in behaviouristic experimental and comparative psychology, questions of animal consciousness and related ones involving emotion and subjective experiences in general largely became taboo. To recognise a broadened view of ethology that encompassed cognitive, emotional, and conscious processes, Burghardt (1997) added a fifth aim, the study of private experience.”

When neuroscientists finally broke through these taboos in the 1980's and developed the field of Consciousness Studies, they kept some of this separation intact. As the founder of animal cognition studies Donald Griffin noted: “Crick and Koch (1998), leaders in the renewal of scientific studies of consciousness, take it for granted that monkeys are conscious. But they prefer to defer investigating nonhuman consciousness because they claim that ‘when one clearly understands, both in detail and in principle, what consciousness involves in humans, then will be the time to consider the problem of consciousness in much simpler animals.’” This might seem like prudent behaviour, but I agree with Griffin who further said, “Restricting scientific investigation to the most complex of all known brains may be unwise, however, for insofar as consciousness can be identified and analysed in a variety of animals, certain species might turn out to be especially suitable for investigating its basic attributes.”

Many neuroscientists have indeed studied the evolutionary origins of consciousness (see especially Feinberg and Mallat, and LeDoux), but not using Tinbergen as far as I can tell. In the paper I mentioned earlier about “The Difficulty of Fitting Consciousness in an Evolutionary Framework”, we can partly see why. The author Yoram Gutfreund noted that “the question of how the mind emerged in evolution (the mind-evolution problem) is tightly linked with the question of how the mind emerges from the brain (the mind-body problem). It seems that the evolution of consciousness cannot be resolved without first solving the ‘hard problem’. Until then, I argue that strong claims about the evolution of consciousness based on the evolution of cognition are premature and unfalsifiable.” But I already dismissed the worst of the hard problem in my post about it.

So, scientists remain unable, unwilling, or uninterested in tackling the philosophical problems of consciousness. They have also, in my view, drawn too small or too large a circle around the term to accurately describe it. What about philosophers? Can they attack these problems from their side?

In a lecture series from The Great Courses about Mind-Body Philosophy, the professor Patrick Grim of SUNY Stony Brook made a sketch of this in his final lecture titled “A Philosophical Science of Consciousness?” He proposed that we need an integration of philosophy, brain science, and AI in order to stand a better chance of grasping consciousness. He didn't have this new science worked out yet, but he offered: “a sketch of a speculative plan. First, figure out what consciousness is by figuring out what consciousness is for. What does it do that other cognitive processing could not? Second, analyse the process in abstract terms. What function is needed to produce the process we’ve identified as what consciousness is for? Then move to concrete specifics. How does the brain perform that function?” He finished by imagining that AI researchers could then build simulated brains using these discoveries and see where that got us in a kind of looped project with all sides informing one another for further progress. That iterative scientific process sounds great, but Grim entirely missed out on 2 of Tinbergen’s 4 questions. He only proposed we look at the 1st (mechanism) and 3rd (function) from my list above. He entirely ignored the 2nd (ontogeny) and 4th (phylogeny), which provides a striking example of the lack of evolutionary thinking among philosophers.

Well, let’s rectify that as best as I can. In my last post, I said consciousness involves living organisms, governed by the laws of natural and sexual selection, sensing and responding to biological forces. With that in mind, I think we can gain a lot of detail about this general definition by stepping through Tinbergen’s four questions one at a time. So, that’s what I’ll do with my next four posts. Please bear with me as I work on that for a while.

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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

11 Comments

Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology

6/23/2020

12 Comments

In my last post--a (sorta) brief history of consciousness—we saw the enormous range of definitions for consciousness that have existed throughout history among philosophers, scientists, and dictionaries. This led to my conclusion that I ought to go back and look for consciousness “in everything that has ever existed.” As David Chalmers said about this,

“My background is in mathematics, computer science, and physics, so my first instincts are materialist. To try to explain everything in terms of the processes of physics: e.g. biology in terms of chemistry and chemistry in terms of physics. This is a wonderful great chain of explanation, but when it comes to consciousness, this is the one place where that great chain of explanation seems to break down.”

Does it really? For a philosopher like myself who sees the hypothesis of physicalism still holding up, I thought I ought to go through the “great chain of explanation” to see precisely where it does break down. Now, the details of the physicalist picture of the universe is not complete. And it never really can be either since we can’t get outside of the universe to know for sure what might be “out there” that we just don’t know yet. But we sure know a lot more about the universe now than we did when Descartes kicked this discussion off with the first philosophical usage of the word conscious in 1640. Major mysteries still exist, but I’d like to sketch in what we currently have a good picture of and see how consciousness best fits in there. As I do this, please be generous about what I’m calling a “sketch” for this simple blog post, but hopefully even these faintest outlines will prove helpful.

Physics
Everything we know about what has existed stretches back to the Big Bang origins of our universe. That’s not the whole story, but it’s a pretty big one. Among my basic tenets, the third one describes a bit about this size:

The universe is composed of trillions and trillions of stars and is currently expanding after a Big Bang and 13-14 billion years of evolutionary processes.* We are just another species of animal life on a single planet orbiting one of the stars in the universe. (* The best current estimate of the age of the universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years. The best current estimate of the number of stars in the universe is from 3 to 100 × 10^22 or between 30 sextillion and 30 septillion.

The most successful theory describing the basic makeup of this universe is known as the Standard Model of particle physics. There are some fundamental physical phenomena that are currently beyond the Standard Model such as dark matter, dark energy, matter-antimatter asymmetry, and gravity (which is best described by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity). Plus, Richard Feynman is also famously quoted as saying, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” However, no experimental results have definitively contradicted the Standard Model at the five-sigma level, and we are only working on a series about consciousness. Other than in the most extreme panpsychist views, consciousness doesn’t appear to operate at the quantum scales of quantum theory. Throughout Ginger Campbell’s podcast series on consciousness (Brain Science episodes 160—163), she noted that physicists and neuroscientists believe the human body is too warm for quantum computing and the speed and scale is all wrong. At the other extreme, conventional ideas about consciousness don’t think of it as operating over cosmic scales either, where dark matter and dark energy show themselves. So, let’s not worry too much about the frontiers still being explored in physics. Here, then, in my usual bullet-point format, are a few highlights about the Standard Model of physics. (Sources throughout this article are generally from well-cited Wikipedia entries unless otherwise noted.)

The Standard Model of particle physics was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century through the work of many scientists around the world. The current formulation was finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks.
The Standard Model is the theory that classifies all known elementary particles and describes three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe—the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions, but not the gravitational force.
The fundamental interactions, also known as fundamental forces, are the interactions that do not appear to be reducible to more basic interactions. The gravitational and electromagnetic interactions produce significant long-range forces whose effects can be seen directly in everyday life. The strong and weak interactions produce forces at minuscule, subatomic distances and govern nuclear interactions. Although the electromagnetic force is far stronger than gravity (gravity is 10x-36 of electromagnetism at the scale of protons/neutrons), it tends to cancel itself out within large objects, so over large distances (on the scale of planets and galaxies), gravity tends to be the dominant force.
The Standard Model includes 12 elementary particles of spin 1⁄2, known as fermions. The model also includes gauge bosons, which are force carriers that mediate the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fundamental interactions. The Higgs boson explains why the photon and gluons are massless, and why the other elementary particles have mass.

In physics, interactions are the ways that particles influence other particles. Gauge bosons are the force carriers that mediate the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fundamental interactions. The Standard Model explains such forces as resulting from matter particles exchanging other particles, generally referred to as force-mediating particles. (Gravitons have been hypothesised as force-mediating particles for gravity but have so far been undetected and mathematically problematic. Einstein’s description of the curvature of spacetime remains the best explanation of gravity.) When a force-mediating particle is exchanged, the effect at a macroscopic level is equivalent to a force influencing both of them, and the particle is therefore said to have mediated (i.e., been the agent of) that force.
Quarks form composite particles called hadrons that contain either mesons (a quark and an antiquark) or baryons (three quarks). The most familiar baryons are protons and neutrons, which make up most of the mass of the visible matter in the universe, as well as forming the components of the nucleus of every atom. The first-generation charged particles do not decay, hence all ordinary (baryonic) matter is made of such particles. Specifically, all atoms consist of electrons orbiting around atomic nuclei, which are constituted of up and down quarks.

These sub-atomic particles and fundamental forces interact in many various ways but are governed by the three laws of thermodynamics. Let’s describe those briefly too.

The laws of thermodynamics define physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, which characterise systems at equilibrium. The laws describe the relationships between these quantities, and they form a basis for precluding the possibility of certain phenomena, such as perpetual motion. The three fundamental laws are:

Conservation of Energy — The total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another but can be neither created nor destroyed. When energy passes, as work, as heat, or with matter, into or out of a system, the system's internal energy changes by the corresponding amount.
Entropy — The total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time. (Entropy can be described as “the number of possible configurations of a system's components that is consistent with the state of the system as a whole.”)
Zero —The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero.

Chemistry
Once these physics particles combine into atoms, we arrive at the field of chemistry. Here are some highlights from that field which contribute to this journey.

Chemistry is the scientific discipline involved with elements and compounds composed of atoms, molecules, and ions, as well as their composition, structure, properties, behaviour, and the changes they undergo during a reaction with other substances.
Traditional chemistry starts with the study of elementary particles, atoms, molecules, substances, metals, crystals, and other aggregates of matter. Matter can be studied in solid, liquid, gas, and plasma states, in isolation or in combination. The interactions, reactions, and transformations that are studied in chemistry are usually the result of interactions between atoms, leading to rearrangements of the chemical bonds which hold atoms together.
The atom is the basic unit of chemistry. It consists of a dense core called the atomic nucleus surrounded by a space occupied by an electron cloud. The nucleus is made up of positively charged protons and uncharged neutrons, while the electron cloud consists of negatively charged electrons which orbit the nucleus.
A chemical element is a pure substance which is composed of a single type of atom, characterized by its particular number of protons in the nuclei of its atoms, known as the atomic number. The standard presentation of the chemical elements is in the periodic table, which orders elements by this atomic number.

A molecule is the smallest indivisible portion of a pure chemical substance that has its unique set of chemical properties allowing it to undergo a certain set of chemical reactions with other substances.
A compound is a pure chemical substance composed of more than one element. The properties of a compound bear little similarity to those of its elements.
Molecules are held together by covalent bonds, which involve the sharing of electron pairs between atoms. Covalent bonding occurs when these electron pairs form a stable balance between attractive and repulsive forces between atoms. Covalent bonding does not necessarily require that the two atoms be of the same elements, only that they be of comparable electronegativity.
Intermolecular forces are the forces which mediate interactions between molecules and other types of neighbouring particles such as atoms or ions. They are weak relative to the intramolecular forces of covalent bonding which hold a molecule together.
Intermolecular forces are electrostatic in nature; that is, they arise from the interaction between positively and negatively charged molecules. The four key intermolecular forces are: 1) Ionic bonds; 2) Hydrogen bonding; 3) Van der Waals dipole-dipole interactions; and 4) Van der Waals dispersion forces.
The investigation of intermolecular forces starts from macroscopic observations which indicate the existence and action of forces at a molecular level. Information on intermolecular forces is obtained by macroscopic measurements of properties like viscosity, pressure, volume, and temperature data.
A chemical reaction is a transformation of some substances into one or more different substances. Chemical reactions usually involve the making or breaking of chemical bonds. Chemical reactions happen at a characteristic reaction rate at a given temperature and chemical concentration. Typically, reaction rates increase with increasing temperature because there is more thermal energy available to reach the activation energy necessary for breaking bonds between atoms.
There are hundreds or even thousands of specific types of chemical reactions. Oxidation, reduction, dissociation, acid-base neutralization, and molecular rearrangement are some of the commonly used kinds of chemical reactions.
If you are asked to name the main 4, 5, or 6 types of chemical reactions, here is how they are categorized. The main four types of reactions are synthesis (A + B --> AB), decomposition (AB --> A + B), single replacement (AB + C --> AC + B), and double replacement (AB + CD --> AC + BD). If you’re asked for the five main types of reactions, it is these four and then either acid-base or redox (combustion) depending who you ask.
Chemical reactions are governed by many laws, which have become fundamental concepts in chemistry. Some of them are: Avogadro's law, Beer–Lambert law, Boyle's law, Charles's law, Fick's laws of diffusion, Gay-Lussac's law, Henry's law, Hess's law, Law of definite composition, Law of multiple proportions, Raoult's law.

So, in physics, I noted that exchanges of particles (from the Standard Model), governed by discovered laws (of Thermodynamics), led to a description of fundamental forces being exerted on matter. In chemistry, we see something analogous: exchanges of elements (from the Periodic Table), governed by discovered laws (Avogadro’s, Boyle’s, Hess’s, etc.), leading to descriptions of intra- and inter-molecular forces exerted on matter. Might the same pattern hold for biology?

The Origins and Definitions of Life
In order to get there, we’ll have to traverse one of the other great mysteries of science. Besides the mysteries of quantum physics, dark matter, dark energy, and (of course) consciousness, the mystery of how life arose is still a major gap in our knowledge. How exactly did biology arise out of mere chemistry? Wherever gaps in our knowledge occur, supernatural explanations abound. But they offer no actual explanatory power. However, let’s take a look at one of the leading natural hypotheses of the origin of life (known technically as abiogenesis), and see how explanatory that might be. Here are some highlights from the transcript of a short video called The Origin of Life, which is about Dr. Jack Szostak (who happens to have won a Nobel Prize for his work on telomeres) and his work on abiogenesis at the Harvard Medical School.

(Note: Unless your biochemistry is very strong, I recommend watching the 10-minute video instead of reading these transcript highlights. The simple diagrams really help understand what is going on.)

We know from experiments and observations in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, geology, and meteorology that the early pre-biotic Earth was filled with organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Organic molecules are actually quite common in space. We also know that early life must have been extremely simple, meaning no complex protein machinery. Modern cells separate themselves from the environment with a lipid bilayer (internally hydrophobic, externally hydrophilic). The problem with modern phospholipids is that they are too good at what they do. They form a nearly impenetrable barrier. Modern cells must use proteins to move molecules through their surface. But life didn’t have to start with modern chemicals!
The pre-biotic environment contained many simple fatty acids. Under a range of pH, they spontaneously form stable vesicles (fluid-filled bladders). And they are permeable to small organic molecules, meaning no complex proteins are required to get stuff in. When a vesicle encounters free fatty acids in solution, it will incorporate them. Eating and growth are driven purely by thermodynamics. When a vesicle grows, it adopts a tubular branched shape (because surface area grows faster than volume), which is easily divided by mechanical forces (e.g. waves, currents, rocks, etc.). During mechanical division, none of the contents of the vesicle are lost.
So far, with naturally occurring simple fatty acids, we have a vesicle that can spontaneously grow and divide. So, what about the genetic material? Again, modern nucleotides are too stable and require complex protein machinery to replicate. The pre-biotic environment contained hundreds of types of different nucleotides (not just DNA and RNA). All it took was for one to self-polymerize. Recent experiments have shown that some of these are capable of spontaneous polymerization where monomers will base pair with a single stranded template and self ligate. In other words, strings X (e.g. AGGTACA) bond with specific strings Z (e.g. CTTGCAC) using hydrogen bonds for each base pair and covalent bonds for further ligation. They can also polymerize in solution and spontaneously form new templates or extend existing templates. No special sequences are required. It’s just chemistry.
So far, we have lipid vesicles that can grow and divide, and nucleotide polymers that can self-replicate, all on their own. But how does it become life? Here’s how. Our fatty acid vesicles are permeable to nucleotide monomers, but not polymers. (Single chains can get in; bonded ones can’t get out.) Once spontaneous polymerization occurs within the vesicle, the polymer is trapped. Floating though the ocean, the polymer-containing vesicles will encounter convection currents such as those set up by hydrothermal vents. (Fatty acid vesicles are stable under near boiling conditions.) The high temperatures will separate the polymer strands and increase the membrane’s permeability to monomers. Once the temperature cools, spontaneous polymerization can occur. And the cycle repeats. Here’s where it gets cool.
The polymer, due to surrounding ions, will increase the osmotic pressure within the vesicle, stretching its membrane. A vesicle with more polymer, through simple thermodynamics, will “steal” lipids from a vesicle with less polymer. This is the origin of competition. They eat each other. A vesicle that contains a polymer that can replicate faster will grow and divide faster, eventually dominating the population.
Let’s review: Monomers diffuse into a fatty acid vesicle. Monomers spontaneously polymerize and copy any template. Heat separates strands and increases membrane permeability to monomers. Polymer backbones attract ions, increasing osmotic pressure. Pressure on the membrane drives its growth at the expense of nearby vesicles containing less polymer. Vesicles grow into tubular structures. Mechanical forces cause vesicles to divide. Daughter vesicles inherit polymers from the parent vesicle. Polymer sequences that replicate faster will dominate the population. Thus beginning evolution!
Early genomes were completely random and therefore contained no information. It was their ability to spontaneously replicate, irrespective of sequence, that drove growth and division of the fatty acid vesicles. Any mutation that increases the rate of polymer replication would be selected for. And, as we know, mutation + natural selection = increased information. Early beneficial mutations would include: “change in sequence to contain only the most common nucleotides”; “don’t form secondary structures that block replication”; “form sequences that are stable yet separate easily”; and “form secondary structures that show some enzymatic activity”.
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, modify lipids so they don’t leave a membrane, and that’s it. 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.
For much more on this RNA world hypothesis, see the video series with Dr. Jack Szostak.

We can’t go back and empirically observe this formation of life. Nor can we run an experiment over millions of years to see if it could happen again. But this sure sounds like a plausible theory for the leap from chemistry to biology that kicks off evolution and the development of life from there. When can we say life first arose? That’s impossible to say. Through an evolutionary lens life is a gradually emerging phenomenon with no currently clear dividing line or definition, although there are some characteristics that slowly took root and are now generally well established and accepted as defining life. Let’s see those.

The definition of life has long been a challenge for scientists and philosophers, with many varied definitions put forward. This is partially because life is a process, not a substance. Most current definitions in biology are descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of something that preserves, furthers, or reinforces its existence in the given environment. According to this view, life exhibits all or most of the following traits:

Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.
Organization: being structurally composed of one or more cells—the basic units of life.
Metabolism: transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation: the ability to change over time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity, diet, and external factors.
Response to stimuli: a response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion; for example, phototropism (the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun), and chemotaxis (movement of a motile cell or organism, or part of one, in a direction corresponding to a gradient of increasing or decreasing concentration of a particular substance).
Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two parent organisms.

These complex processes, called physiological functions, have underlying physical and chemical bases, as well as signalling and control mechanisms that are essential to maintaining life.
From a physics perspective, living beings are thermodynamic systems with an organized molecular structure that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival dictates.
Thermodynamically, life has been described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself. Hence, life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution. A major strength of this definition is that it distinguishes life by the evolutionary process rather than its chemical composition.
Whether or not viruses should be considered as alive is controversial. They are most often considered as just replicators rather than forms of life. They have been described as “organisms at the edge of life” because they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and replicate by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolize, and they require a host cell to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.
The study of artificial life imitates traditional biology by recreating some aspects of biological phenomena. Scientists study the logic of living systems by creating artificial environments—seeking to understand the complex information-processing that defines such systems. While life is, by definition, alive, artificial life is generally referred to as data confined to a digital environment and existence.

Biology
So, once physical and chemical processes have self-assembled and evolved into having these characteristics, we get life, the study of which is called biology. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E.O. Wilson proposed seven categories to integrate all of the biological sciences. His seven categories describe the study of life in totality, from the smallest atomic building blocks, to the billions of years of life-history that they have all constructed. Therefore, the simple diagram below of these mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive categories is actually an astonishingly broad vision of all of the life that has ever existed or will ever exist.

So, to recap where we are, we had sub-atomic particles in physics and the four fundamental forces that affect them, which are governed by the laws of thermodynamics. In chemistry, we had elements from the periodic table and the fundamental bonding forces that hold them together or cause exchange reactions that can be described by many laws. And now we have the material elements of all of life in biology. The obvious holes left would be an account of the fundamental forces that act on life and the laws that describe the various interactions that thereby arise. Note that when we talked about forces in physics, they were described this way:

“When a force-mediating particle is exchanged, the effect at a macroscopic level is equivalent to a force influencing both of them, and the particle is therefore said to have mediated (i.e., been the agent of) that force.”

And when we talked about forces in chemistry, they were described this way:

“The investigation of intermolecular forces starts from macroscopic observations which indicate the existence and action of forces at a molecular level.”

In other words, it is the effect at a macroscopic level that we describe as equivalent to a force. This reminds me of Porter’s Five Forces in the field of strategic management. Harvard business school professor Michael Porter noted that you could map the competitive environment of any industry in order to understand the industry’s attractiveness in terms of profitability. Porter’s five forces are exerted by: 1) suppliers (supplier power), 2) buyers (buyer power), 3) entrants (threat of new entrants), 4) substitutes (threat of substitution), and 5) competitors (competitive rivalry). These forces are the influences that change the behaviour of businesses. Strategic analysts can rate their relative strengths in order to predict profitability for a firm and then guide actions to improve a firm’s chances for success. Calculations are far too complicated to put stable coefficients in front of formulas to calculate these forces and their combined interactions, but we generally grasp them and can see how they work.

Similarly, there are forces at work in the competitive environment of biological life. However, instead of driving towards the profits that allow a business to survive, biological forces drive life towards lots of actions that aid survival. One significant difference between these forces is that in the business world, cooperation between separate legal entities can often be ruled as illegal collusion, so B-school graduates tend to focus only on competition. In biology, of course, cooperation plays a major role in the collective struggle for life to survive. Within any ecological niche, however, the same dynamics play out as in the business world. (This makes sense, of course, because the business world is just another ecological niche.) In biology, there is 1) consumption of upstream inputs of energy, material, or prey (suppliers); 2) consumption of downstream outputs by mutualists, micro- or macroscopic predators (buyers); 3) potentially invasive species (threat of entrants); 4) current niche competitors from heterospecifics in other species (substitutes); and 5) the balance between competition and cooperation among conspecifics from the same species (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 I like to say.) And just as the complexity in the system makes Porter’s Five Forces impossible to calculate with precision, the same is also true for these biological forces. Yet, we can illustrate them and discuss their relative strengths to aid in analysis.

Are there any laws that describe the results of these forces? Yes. A review of evolutionary processes shows there are two fundamental ones that govern the ultimate goal of survival. As a reminder, here is how evolution works:

Many different rules or laws can be used to describe how proximate goals are reached. (Think, for example, of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning principles for common pool resources.) But the two orange bottlenecks in the picture above give us the two most fundamental laws that govern biology—natural selection and sexual selection. (Asexual reproducers are, of course, only confined by the first law.) Here are some summary highlights of these two evolutionary laws.

Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution (which is defined as the change in the heritable traits that are characteristic of a population over generations). Charles Darwin popularised the term ‘natural selection’, contrasting it with artificial selection, which in his view is intentional, whereas natural selection is not.
Natural selection acts on the phenotype, the characteristics of the organism which actually interact with the environment, but the genetic (heritable) basis of any phenotype that gives that phenotype a reproductive advantage may become more common in a population. Over time, this process can result in populations that specialise for particular ecological niches (microevolution) and may eventually result in speciation (the emergence of new species, macroevolution).
Darwin defined natural selection as the “principle by which each slight variation [of a trait], if useful, is preserved.”
In a letter to Charles Lyell in September 1860, Darwin regretted the use of the term Natural Selection, preferring the term Natural Preservation [which sounds less directed and more emergent].
With the early 20th century integration of evolution via Mendel's laws of inheritance (the so-called Modern Synthesis), scientists generally came to accept natural selection.
Ernst Mayr recognised the key importance of reproductive isolation for speciation in 1942. W. D. Hamilton conceived of kin selection in 1964. This synthesis cemented natural selection as the foundation of evolutionary theory, where it remains today.
A second synthesis was brought about at the end of the 20th century by advances in molecular genetics, creating the field of evolutionary developmental biology (‘evo-devo’), which seeks to explain the evolution of form in terms of the genetic regulatory programs which control the development of the embryo at the molecular level. Natural selection is here understood to act on embryonic development to change the morphology of the adult body.
Selection can be classified in several different ways, such as by its effect on a trait, on genetic diversity, by the life cycle stage where it acts, by the unit of selection, or by the resource being competed for.
Selection has different effects on traits. ‘Stabilizing selection’ acts to hold a trait at a stable optimum, and in the simplest case all deviations from this optimum are selectively disadvantageous. ‘Directional selection’ favours extreme values of a trait. The uncommon ‘disruptive selection’ also acts during transition periods when the current mode is sub-optimal but alters the trait in more than one direction.
Alternatively, selection can be divided according to its effect on genetic diversity. ‘Purifying’ or ‘negative selection’ acts to remove genetic variation from the population (and is opposed by ‘de novo mutation’, which introduces new variation). In contrast, ‘balancing selection’ acts to maintain genetic variation in a population by negative frequency-dependent selection. One mechanism for this is heterozygote advantage, where individuals with two different alleles have a selective advantage over individuals with just one allele. The polymorphism at the human ABO blood group locus has been explained in this way.
Another option is to classify selection by the life cycle stage at which it acts. Some biologists recognise just two types: ‘viability selection’, which acts to increase an organism's probability of survival, and ‘fecundity selection’, which acts to increase the rate of reproduction, given survival.
Selection can also be classified by the level or unit of selection. ‘Individual selection’ acts on the individual, in the sense that adaptations are for the benefit of the individual and result from selection among individuals. ‘Gene selection’ acts directly at the level of the gene. In ‘kin selection’, gene-level selection provides a more apt explanation of the underlying process. ‘Group selection’, if it occurs, acts on groups of organisms, on the assumption that groups replicate and mutate in an analogous way to genes and individuals.
Finally, selection can be classified according to the resource being competed for. ‘Sexual selection’ results from competition for mates. Sexual selection typically proceeds via fecundity selection, sometimes at the expense of viability. ‘Ecological selection’ is natural selection via any means other than sexual selection, such as kin selection, competition, and infanticide. Following Darwin, natural selection is sometimes defined as ecological selection, in which case sexual selection is considered a separate mechanism.
How life originated from inorganic matter remains an unresolved problem in biology. One prominent hypothesis is that life first appeared in the form of short self-replicating RNA polymers. On this view, life may have come into existence when RNA chains first experienced the basic conditions, as conceived by Charles Darwin, for natural selection to operate. These conditions are: 1) heritability, 2) variation of type, and 3) competition for limited resources. The three primary adaptive capacities could therefore logically have been: 1) the capacity to replicate with moderate fidelity (giving rise to both heritability and variation of type), 2) the capacity to avoid decay, and 3) the capacity to acquire and process resources.
By analogy to the action of natural selection on genes, the concept of memes has arisen as units of cultural transmission, or culture's equivalents of genes undergoing selection and recombination. Memes were first described in this form by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and were later expanded upon by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett as explanations for complex cultural activities, including human consciousness.

Sexual reproduction is the most common life cycle in multicellular eukaryotes, such as animals, fungi, and plants. Sexual reproduction does not occur in prokaryotes (organisms without cell nuclei), but they have processes with similar effects such as bacterial conjugation, transformation, and transduction, which may have been precursors to sexual reproduction in early eukaryotes.
Sexual selection is a mode of natural selection in which some individuals out-reproduce others of a population because they are better at securing mates for sexual reproduction.
Sexual selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859) and developed in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), as he felt that natural selection alone was unable to account for certain types of non-survival adaptations.
Darwin's ideas on sexual selection were met with scepticism by his contemporaries and not considered of great importance until the 1930s when biologists decided to include sexual selection as a mode of natural selection. Only in the 21st century have they become more important in biology; the theory is now seen as generally applicable and analogous to natural selection.
One factor that can influence the type of competition observed is the population density of males. Another factor that can influence male-male competition is the value of the resource to competitors. Male-male competition can pose many risks to a male's fitness, such as high energy expenditure, physical injury, lower sperm quality, and lost paternity. The risk of competition must therefore be worth the value of the resource. A third factor that can impact the success of a male in competition is winner-loser effects. The winner effect is the increased probability that an animal will win future aggressive interactions after experiencing previous wins, while the loser effect is the increased probability that an animal will lose future aggressive interactions after experiencing previous losses. The outcomes of winner and loser effects help develop and structure hierarchies in nature and is used to support the game theory model of aggression.

So, we’ve identified the most fundamental forces and laws affecting life on Earth. There are, of course, 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. In a 2017 article, I generalised these and adapted them to apply to all of life, thereby producing something I call an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs. Here are some details from that work:

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Physiological Needs — breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion
Safety and Security — resources, property, employment, health, social stability
Love and Belonging — friendship, family, intimacy
Self-Esteem — confidence, achievement, mutual respect, uniqueness
Self-Actualisation — meaning, purpose, morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving

The evolutionary perspective of our diverse and ever-changing web of life transforms Maslow’s hierarchy. Starting at the bottom of the 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 characterizes the struggle for survival. And finally, the ‘self-actualization’ 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’.

Maslow and other psychologists say that individual humans have a need to care for their kin, but what does that really mean once science teaches us that all of life is our kin? Rather than just trying to understand and meet the hierarchy of needs for our fellow human individuals, we could collectively spend much more time considering such details for each realm of E.O. Wilson’s consilient view of life.

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs for Human Individuals

Existence — breathing, food, water, senses, sleep, touch, homeostasis, excretion
Durability — resources, bountiful environment, shelter, employed, health, social stability
Interactions — cooperation, competition, defences, friendship, family, community, intimacy / sex
Identity — personality, creativity, emotions, decisions, memory, uniqueness, transcendence
Telos / End / Goal / Purpose — ultimate meaning, morality, problem solving, culture, social roles

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs for Evolutionary Biology to Occur

Existence — biochemistry, variation, reproduction
Durability — geologic time, adaptation, habitable worlds
Interactions — natural selection, sexual selection, group selection, genetic drift, cosmic processes
Identity — each and all of the consilient categories of the tree of life
Telos / End / Goal / Purpose — continued life, long term survival

The most important takeaway from a quick pass through the collection of hierarchies is the fact that they are all related. Each level of biology requires a healthy and stable lower level to provide the ingredients for its existence. Each level also needs a healthy and stable level above it to provide a durable habitat for its existence. And the top-most level of evolutionary biology can only kick off (as far as we know from the history of Earth) after the formation of biochemistry in the lowest level. In other words, no matter how much you focus on one seemingly individual tree, it is actually part of an interwoven forest of life.
This broad perspective is not a luxury for the philosophically minded alone. It is a necessity. If we are to consider needs at all, we must enlarge our circle of concern as far as it will go. If I held that the flourishing of Ed Gibney was the absolute highest priority, others would find me selfish and stop working with me. They might even imprison me depending on my acts of callous selfishness. Only a lack of power and opportunity would stop me from acting for myself by exploiting others. If, instead, the flourishing of my family were the highest priority, I would provoke feuds with clans or mafias around me. If the flourishing of my community were the highest priority, ideological crusades and genocides would be eventual outcomes after intractable disagreements. If the flourishing of my nation were the highest priority, wars would be the result. If the flourishing of my species were the highest priority, we would commit ecocide without a second thought. If my ecosystem were the highest priority, our invasive species would produce monocultures with little resilience in the face of change. It’s only when our absolute highest priorities are concerned with the evolution of life in general that we can find ways for all of life to flourish together and ensure its long-term survival.
And so, it is incumbent upon us, for individual and collective reasons, to not only understand Maslow and other psychologists’ hierarchies of human needs, but we must also expand these hierarchies and adapt them to portray a wider and fully evolutionary view as well. As Darwin himself said, there is grandeur in this view of life.

Brief Comments
Phew! That concludes my (very) brief history of everything that has ever empirically existed. I’ve gone from the appearance of sub-atomic particles and fundamental forces after the Big Bang up to the longest-term view of all of the needs required for the evolution of life. This gives us an outline of the “great chain of explanation” that Chalmers described at the top of this article as “biology in terms of chemistry and chemistry in terms of physics.” All along the way, we see exchanges of particles defining changes in forces that affect matter according to natural laws that are regular and can be studied empirically.

Where might consciousness fit into all of this??

In my last post about the history of philosophical and scientific studies of consciousness, I noted an etymological root of the word that I think offers some help. Wikipedia noted that 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 know (from an outsiders’ perspective) what they are AND what they need. A radical panpsychist might claim that a quark can feel the strong nuclear force, or a hydrogen atom can feel the covalent bond in H2O, but I think a more natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm where life responds to biological forces to survive. Could artificial life also respond to these forces and be declared conscious? I think yes, although the “feeling of what it is like” to be such life would be very different from current biological life forms that are built from organic chemistry. We already believe the feeling of what is like to be a bat is likely very different from that of a cuttlefish, so the difference would be even greater for artificial life given the much larger change in underlying mechanisms. Yet both could be considered conscious in my definition.

As Mark Solms wrote in The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Free Energy Principle, “There cannot be any objects of consciousness without a subject of consciousness. You cannot experience objects unless you are there to experience them.” The earliest forms of life were the first such subjects who experienced a need. As these lifeforms evolved to sense more and more needs, their consciousness grew in quantity and quality of varieties. I acknowledge that this view of consciousness—as an evolved trait of living things sensing and responding to biological forces—raises a lot of questions. To try and answer them—at least as well as the current state of science allows—we’ll need a comprehensive understanding of this position. In my next post, I’ll introduce a framework that can help lead us through that kind of comprehensive explanation. After that, I’ll step through the framework item-by-item until I can finally arrive at my full evolutionary theory of consciousness (for now).

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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

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Consciousness 16 — A (Sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions

5/25/2020

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(Quick Note: Sorry for the long delay on this. I am fine; no coronavirus infections yet. I posted the first 15 parts of this series roughly every other day, but it’s taken a little over a month now for this one. Basically, I’ve been doing loads of research. I had a sketch in mind for my personal thoughts about consciousness but fleshing out the details took a lot longer than I expected. I put together 37 pages of research for the first 15 posts in this series, but I had to gather another 80 pages (!) for these final posts, of which I expect there to be 8. Don’t let that put you off, though. The first 15 posts were basically transcriptions of that research, but these final ones will be highly summarised. Anyway, back to the series!)

In the last post, I went over what a scientific theory is and is not. I asked if we were ready for just such a scientific theory of consciousness, one that uses analogies from things we understand to explain everything we know, makes some predictions, and offers a consilient view of a wide variety of observations. Before fleshing out my own take on this, I knew I ought to take a little more care in reviewing the history of how other people have grappled with this big, tangled concept. Whole books have already been written about this, and I don’t intend to duplicate the details there, but a useful sketch can be drawn from the following sources that I found particularly helpful:

the wikipedia entry on Consciousness
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Consciousness
a 2012 paper by the British philosopher Peter Hacker titled “The Sad and Sorry History of Consciousness: Being, Among Other Things, A Challenge to the ‘Consciousness-Studies Community'”
three papers from Dan Dennett: “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” (1995); “Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained” (2003); and “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism” (2016)

I’ll use these sources and some details from the previous posts in this series to slot ideas about consciousness into three categories: philosophical, scientific, and dictionary.

Philosophical Considerations of Consciousness

Descartes introduced the term ‘conscious’ into philosophy in 1640, although it was only in passing as part of his writing about thoughts. Descartes defined the term ‘thought’ (pensée) as “all that we are conscious as operating in us.” This included everything passing in our minds—thinking, sensing, understanding, wanting, and imagining. He held these things to be private, infallible, and beyond doubt, leading to his famous “I think therefore I am” argument (which is deeply flawed). Descartes was also a ‘substance dualist’ who asserted the existence of both physical and non-physical substances as components of nature. Such Cartesian dualism has largely been dropped from philosophy now.
Fifty years later in 1690, John Locke is credited with the first modern concept of ‘consciousness’ which he defined as “the perception of what passes in a Man’s own Mind.”
In 1714, Leibniz made the first distinction between ‘perception’ (“the representation of that which is outside”) and ‘apperception’ (“consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state”). Leibniz also famously argued that a mechanical explanation of consciousness would be impossible for it would be like going into a windmill and claiming the moving parts explained the phenomenon.
In the 1780’s, Kant took these ideas to their “baroque culmination” by developing a rich structure of mental organisation. Kant called the components of this structure fundamental ‘intuitions’, which include 'object', ‘shape', 'quality', 'space', and 'time'. Kant’s category of ‘quality’ (aka qualia, e.g. redness, pain, etc.) has proven particularly difficult for philosophers to explain in physical terms. Some claim these ‘raw feels’ are ineffable and incapable of being reduced to component processes. There are psychologists and neuroscientists who reject this, however.
“It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that ‘consciousness’ came to be used to signify wakefulness as opposed to being unconscious. Thenceforth one could speak of losing and regaining consciousness.” (Hacker 2012)
Phenomenology arose in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. These phenomenologists studied the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The experiences they considered ranged from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition, to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. This typically involved what Husserl called ‘intentionality’—the directedness of experience toward things in the world.
In 1933 (The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness), the psychologist E. G. Boring originated the idea of ‘type-identity’ physicalism, aka the ‘identity theory of mind’. Boring wrote, “To the author, a perfect correlation is identity. Two events that always occur together at the same time in the same place, without any temporal or spatial differentiation at all, are not two events but the same event.” Several versions of this developed over the following decades but all share the central idea that the mind is identical to something physical.
In 1949 (The Concept of Mind), Gilbert Ryle argued that traditional beliefs about consciousness were based on Cartesian dualism, which improperly separated minds from bodies. Ryle proposed we instead ought to talk about individuals acting in the world, and thus, ‘consciousness’ was not something separate from behaviour. (This paralleled B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism in psychology in the 1930’s.) As part of these arguments, Ryle coined the terms ‘ghost in the machine’ as well as ‘category mistake’. He provided robust distinctions between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-that’, as well as between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ descriptions (i.e., observations only and providing context for them). Ryle also identified ‘topic-neutral terms’ such as ‘if’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘because’, and ‘and’. Ryle said his philosophical arguments “are intended not to increase what we know about minds but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess.” Former Ryle student Daniel Dennett has said that recent trends in psychology such as embodied cognition and discursive psychology have provoked a renewed interest in Ryle's work.
Two major schools in the philosophy of mind developed in the post-war years —representationalism and functionalism.
Direct representationalism (aka naïve realism) argues that we perceive the world directly. Indirect realism/representationalism states that we do not and cannot perceive the external world as it really is; we can only know our ideas and our interpretations of the way the world is. This is roughly the accepted view of perception in the natural sciences.
Functionalism was first put forth by Hilary Putnam in the 1960s. This theory of mind states that mental states (beliefs, desires, being in pain, etc.) are constituted solely by their functional role. It developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviourism. An important part of some arguments for functionalism is the idea of ‘multiple realisability’, which asserts that mental states can be realised in multiple kinds of systems, not just brains.
The term ‘folk psychology’ is used to characterise the human capacity to explain and predict the behaviour and mental state of other people. This has primarily focused on intentional states described in terms of everyday language rather than technical jargon, and includes concepts such as ‘beliefs’, ‘desires’, ‘fear’, and ‘hope’.
Eliminative materialism is the claim that folk psychology is false and should be discarded (or eliminated). It is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The main roots of eliminative materialism can be found in the writings of mid-20th century philosophers Wilfred Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty.
In 1962 (“Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”), Wilfrid Sellars coined a distinction between the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’ of the world. The manifest image includes intentions, thoughts, and appearances. The scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences such as causality, particles, and forces. Sellars is also known for describing the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, ‘hang together’.
In 1974 (“What is it like to be a bat?”), Thomas Nagel published the paper that Dan Dennett called “the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.” In it, Nagel defended three theses: 1) An experience is a conscious experience if and only if there is something it is like for the subject of the experience to have that very experience. 2) A creature is conscious or has conscious experience if and only if there is something it is like for the creature to be the creature it is. 3) The subjective character of the mental can be apprehended only from the point of view of the subject. Nagel used these theses to argue that “materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness.” (In my response to this thought experiment, I argued that it is actually entirely consistent with a materialist/physicalist worldview.)
In 1980 (“Minds, Brains and Programs”), John Searle first published his Chinese Room thought experiment in which a man who does not understand Chinese, stays inside a room, takes in requests written in Chinese characters, consults a complete book for responses, and simply returns whatever characters the book tells him to. This experiment challenged the functionalist view that it is possible for a computer running a program to have a ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ in the same sense that people do, since this man would have no understanding of the Chinese function being performed. This was part of Searle’s ‘biological naturalism’ which states that consciousness requires the specific biological machinery that is found in brains. Searle argues that this machinery (known to neuroscience as the 'neural correlates of consciousness') must have some as yet unspecified 'causal powers' that give us our experience of consciousness. (In my response to this thought experiment, I noted that Searle’s dismissal of the notion that the Chinese Room ‘system’ gains consciousness chimes with what theoretical evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Eros Szathmary said in The Origins of Life in their analysis of ecosystems (emphasis added): “There is a massive amount of information in the system, but it is information specific to individuals. There is no additional information concerned with regulating the system as a whole. It is therefore misleading to think of an ecosystem as a super-organism.” However, I also went through a list of behaviours that might give an AI system enough of the appearance of consciousness to get us to pragmatically treat it as if it did. Once computers become unique individuals that have changed their goals and understanding due to irreplaceable, learned experiences, then they will similarly attain the infinite value that any life has.)
In 1982 (“Epiphenomenal Qualia”) and 1986 (“What Mary Didn’t Know”), Frank Jackson published and then clarified his ‘knowledge argument’ about a neuroscientist named Mary who learns “all there is to know” about the colour red while being confined to a black and white existence. Her discovery of ‘something new’ when she sees red for the first time is intended to show that consciousness must contain non-physical elements since she already supposedly knew every physical fact about red. (In my response to this thought experiment, I noted that a physical universe would preclude Mary from having every fact about red because mental imaginings are not enough to move the physical atoms in the nerves of our eyes and brain synapses.)
In 1991 (Consciousness Explained), Dan Dennett put forward his ‘multiple drafts model’ of consciousness, claiming there is no single central place (a ‘Cartesian theatre’) where conscious experience occurs. Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account of the brain's underlying parallelism. Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all. He says, “To explain is to explain away.”
Robert Kirk first introduced the idea of philosophical zombies—unconscious beings who are physically and behaviourally identical to human beings—in 1974 (“Zombies v. Materialists”). However, this idea gained much more traction in the mid-1990’s with the publications of essays by Todd Moody (“Conversations with Zombies” 1994), Owen Flanagan and Thomas Polger (“Zombies and the Function of Consciousness” 1995), Dan Dennett (“The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies” 1995), and David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind 1996). If philosophical zombies existed, this would show that consciousness has non-physical properties. Robert Kirk eventually reversed his earlier position about zombies, but in 2019 wrote a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on zombies that ended by saying, “In spite of the fact that the arguments on both sides have become increasingly sophisticated—or perhaps because of it—they have not become more persuasive. The pull in each direction remains strong.” (In my response to this thought experiment, I noted that the argument takes our uncertainty about the existence of zombies and uses that to claim certainty that physicalism is false. That’s a logical error. We just don’t know yet and speculations about the possibility of zombies or zoombies (beings who are non-physically the same as zombies but are conscious) can actually be used to argue for or against physicalism in either direction.)
In 1995 (“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”), David Chalmers introduced the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness to ask why some internal states are subjective, felt states, rather than non-subjective, unfelt states, as in a thermostat or a toaster. Chalmers contrasted this with the ‘easy problems’ of explaining the neural basis for abilities to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, and so forth. Easy problems are (relatively) easy because “all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function.” The existence of the hard problem is controversial, with many philosophers and neuroscientists on both sides of the argument. (In an earlier post in this series, I said it is only hard because it can keep retreating to an impossible problem.)
In 1996 (Consciousness and Experience), William Lycan argued that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified: 1) organism consciousness; 2) control consciousness; 3) consciousness of; 4) state/event consciousness; 5) reportability; 6) introspective consciousness; 7) subjective consciousness; and 8) self-consciousness.
In 1998 (“On a Confusion About a Function of Consciousness”), Ned Block wrote that consciousness “is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different ‘consciousnesses’.” In particular, Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness). P-consciousness is simply raw experience: it is moving, coloured forms, sounds, sensations, emotions, and feelings with our bodies. These experiences can be called qualia. A-consciousness, on the other hand, is when information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behaviour. Information about what we perceive is access conscious; information about our thoughts is access conscious; information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction. David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms but understanding P-consciousness is the hard problem.
In 2003 (“Who’s on First? Heterophenomenology Explained”), Dan Dennett further elucidated the methodology used for studying consciousness, which he calls ‘heterophenomenology’ (the phenomenology of another, not oneself). Dennett says this is a straightforward extension of objective science that covers all the realms of human consciousness without having to abandon the experimental methods that have worked so well in the rest of science. Heterophenomenology is a way to take the first-person point of view as seriously as it can be taken. Social sciences are almost entirely conducted in this way already, so the methods are well understood. Consider two possible sources of data: (a) ‘conscious experiences themselves’ and (b) beliefs about these experiences. If you have conscious experiences you don’t believe you have, then those extra conscious experiences are just as inaccessible to you as to external observers. On the other hand, if you believe you have conscious experiences that you don’t in fact have, then it is your beliefs that we need to explain, not the non-existent experiences! Either way, this demonstrates the need to collect the data of (b), and those beliefs can be shared and studied objectively. In contrast, ‘lone-wolf autophenomenology’, in which the subject and experimenter are one and the same person, is a foul because it isn’t science until you turn your self-administered pilot studies into heterophenomenological experiments. Whatever insights one may garner from first-person investigations fall happily into place in third-person heterophenomenology. Heterophenomenology is, therefore, the beginning of a science of consciousness, not the end. And nobody has yet pointed to any variety of data that are inaccessible to heterophenomenology.
Other philosophical explorations of consciousness talk of components such as:
- Four main pieces: 1) knowledge in general; 2) intentionality; 3) introspection; and 4) phenomenal experience.
- Streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking ‘in words’ or ‘in images’.
- Creature consciousness—an animal, person, or other cognitive system may be conscious in a number of ways: sentience, wakefulness, self-consciousness, what it is like, subject of conscious states, or transitive consciousness (being conscious of).
- State consciousness—there are six major options for distinct, though perhaps interrelated, types of this: 1) states one is aware of (meta-mentality); 2) qualitative states (raw sensory feels, qualia); 3) phenomenal states (not only sensory ideas and qualities but complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, world, and the organized structure of lived reality); 4) what-it-is-like states (similar to 2 and 3, but coming from Nagel); 5) access consciousness (info generally available for use); and 6) narrative consciousness (serial episodes of a self).
Current schools of philosophy about consciousness largely fall into two main camps: property dualism and physicalism.
Property dualists assert the existence of conscious properties that are neither identical with nor reducible to physical properties, but which may nonetheless be made up of the same stuff as physical things. There are: 1) fundamental property dualists (consciousness is a basic part of the universe, much like fundamental physical properties such as electromagnetism); 2) emergent property dualists (consciousness arises in a radically new way from physical stuff, but only once it reaches a certain complexity); 3) neutral monist property dualists (physical and mental properties are both derived from something even more basic in reality); and 4) panpsychists (all parts of reality have both physical and mental properties).
Physicalists assert that reality is only composed of physical objects and the fundamental forces acting upon them. There are: 1) eliminativists (the existence or distinction for some or all features of consciousness are denied in either modest or radical ways); 2) identity theorists (conscious properties just are physical processes, usually neurophysiological processes, and so no further causes or explanations are necessary). Most physicalists acknowledge the reality of consciousness but say that it supervenes on the physical, is composed of the physical, or is realised by the physical.
In January 2020, when asked if he had a simple definition of consciousness, Dan Dennett said, “No. But that’s okay. That’s the way science works too. There’s no perfect definition of time or energy, but scientists get on with it.”

That’s obviously not everything written by philosophers about consciousness, but it’s a pretty good summary of the modern timeline. In my previous posts in this series, I already covered how some prominent scientists do “get on with” consciousness research, but let’s look at some of the main definitions used there.

Scientific Considerations of Consciousness

In 1890 (The Principles of Psychology), William James wrote that introspection “means, of course, the looking into one’s own mind and reporting there what we discover” and the use of this inner sense is the way we become conscious. He said this inner sense is just like an outer sense, only: 1) without a sense organ; 2) its successful exercise is independent of observation conditions; 3) it never fails us, but always yields knowledge; and so therefore 4) we know the mind better than the material world. While some philosophers still seem beholden to such a Cartesian view of infallibility and indubitability, all four of these characteristics of consciousness have been shown to be faulty. James also considered the ways the unity of consciousness might be explained by known physics and found no satisfactory answer. He coined the term ‘combination problem’, in the context of a ‘mind-dust theory’ in which a full human conscious experience is proposed to be built up from proto- or micro-experiences in the same way that matter is built up from atoms. James claimed that such a theory was incoherent, since no causal physical account could be given of how distributed proto-experiences would ‘combine’. Today, some prominent philosophers and neuroscientists (e.g., Dan Dennett and Bernard Baars) disagree that this combination problem even exists, claiming consciousness is not unified in the way James described it. Evidence from recall experiments and change blindness support this.
It was not known that neurons are the basic units of the brain until approximately 1900 (Santiago Ramón y Cajal). The concept of chemical transmission in the brain was not known until around 1930 (Henry Hallett Dale and Otto Loewi). In the 1950s, we began to understand the basic electrical phenomenon that neurons use to communicate—the action potential (Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, Andrew Huxley and John Eccles). We became aware of how neuronal networks code stimuli in the 1960s, which showed how the formation of concepts is possible (David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel). The molecular revolution swept through US universities in the 1980s. And it was only in the 1990s that molecular mechanisms of behavioural phenomena became widely known (Eric Richard Kandel).
Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called ‘Consciousness Studies’. This created a stream of experimental work, which was published in books and journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Frontiers in Consciousness Research, Psyche, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Regular conferences were also organised by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and the Society for Consciousness Studies.
Seven types of specific detailed theories have emerged from Consciousness Studies about the nature of consciousness. This is not comprehensive, but it helps to indicate the main range of options. They are: 1) higher-order theories, 2) representational theories, 3) interpretative narrative theories, 4) cognitive theories, 5) neural theories, 6) quantum theories, and 7) nonphysical theories. These are described below.
1. Higher-order (HO) theories analyse the notion of a conscious mental state in terms of reflexive meta-mental self-awareness. Unconscious mental states are unconscious precisely because we lack higher-order states about them.
2. Representational theories attempt to explain the various phenomena of consciousness in terms of representation. A mental representation is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol or process that represents external reality. Mental representation is the mental imagery of things that are not actually present to the senses. A mental representation is one of the prevailing ways of explaining and describing the nature of ideas and concepts. Mental representations enable representing things that have never been experienced as well as things that do not exist. Although visual imagery is more likely to be recalled, mental imagery may involve representations in any of the senses.
3. According to narrative interpretive theories, consciousness is dependent on interpretative judgments. Dan Dennett’s ‘Multiple Drafts Model’ is a prominent example of this. MDM says that at any given moment many types of content are being generated throughout the brain. What makes some of these contents conscious is not that they occur in a privileged spatial or functional location—the so called ‘Cartesian Theatre’—but, rather, it is a matter of what Dennett calls ‘cerebral celebrity’. MDM says the self emerges from the roughly serial narrative that is constructed out of the various contents in the system.
4. Cognitive theories associate consciousness with a distinct cognitive architecture or a special pattern of activity within that structure. For example, Global Workspace Theory describes consciousness in terms of a competition among processors and outputs to ‘broadcast’ information for widespread access and use.
5. Neural theories of consciousness come in many forms, though most in some way concern the so called ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ or NCCs. A sampling of recent neural theories includes models that appeal to:
- global integrated fields (Kinsbourne)
- binding through synchronous oscillation (Singer 1999, Crick and Koch 1990)
- NMDA channels in neurons (Flohr 1995)
- patterns of cortical activation modulated by the thalamus (Llinas 2001)
- re-entrant cortical loops (Edelman 1989)
- comparator mechanisms that engage in continuous action-prediction-assessment loops between frontal and midbrain areas (Gray 1995)
- left hemisphere based interpretative processes (Gazzaniga 1988)
- emotive somatosensory hemostatic processes based in the frontal-limbic nexus (Damasio 1999) or in the periaqueductal gray (Panksepp 1998)

It is possible for several of these to be true, with each contributing some partial understanding to the links between all the diverse forms of consciousness and the brain activity that occurs in many different levels of complex organization and structure.

6. According to quantum theories, the nature and basis of consciousness cannot be adequately understood within the framework of classical physics but must be sought within the alternative picture of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics.
7. Those who reject physicalist descriptions of consciousness look for ways of modelling it as a non-physical aspect of reality. For example, David Chalmers (1996) has offered an admittedly speculative version of panpsychism which appeals to the notion of information not only to explain synchrony between psycho and physical events, but also to possibly explain the existence of the physical itself as derived from information (i.e., an “it from bit” theory).
Dr Ginger Campbell, host of the Brain Science podcast, notes that while theories of consciousness do have their differences, there are still three concepts that the most prominent scientific ones all share: 1) consciousness requires a brain; 2) consciousness is a product of evolution; and 3) consciousness is embodied.
The ‘Global Neuronal Workspace Theory’ states that consciousness is global information broadcasting within the cortex.
Antonio Damasio defines consciousness as: mind + self. To him, a ‘mind’ emerges from the brain when an animal is able to create images and to map the world and its body. Consciousness requires the addition of self-awareness. This begins at the level of the brain stem, with ‘primordial feelings’. The ‘self’ is built up in stages starting with the proto-self made up of primordial feelings, affect alone, and feeling alive. Then the core self is developed when the proto-self can interact with objects and images such that they are modified and there is a narrative sequence. Finally comes the autobiographical self, which is built from the lived past and the anticipated future.
Feinberg and Mallatt say their theory of ‘Neurobiological Naturalism’ rests on three principles: 1) life—consciousness is grounded in the unique features of life; 2) neural features—consciousness correlates with neural activity; and 3) naturalism—nothing supernatural is needed. To F&M, the defining features of consciousness are organised in three levels. Level 1) General Biological Features—life, embodiment, processes, self-organising systems, emergence, teleonomy, and adaption. Level 2) Reflexes of animals with nervous systems. Level 3) Special Neurobiological Features—complex hierarchy of networks, nested and non-nested processes (aka recursive), isomorphic representations, mental images, affective states, attention, and memory.
Joseph LeDoux prefers higher-order representations from among the different theories of consciousness. LeDoux seems to draw a pretty narrow definition around consciousness, but then shows the clear evolutionary history of aspects of consciousness along the way, and really advocates for a more subtle use of the term.
Michael Graziano sees a growing standard model of consciousness whose core set of scientists realise that we are machines and the brain is an information processing machine that thinks it has magic inside it because it builds somewhat imperfect models of the world inside it. This brings together Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and even some Illusionists who talk of consciousness as an illusion. His ‘Attention Schema Theory’ attempts to provide an integrative picture of these.
Integrated Information Theory says fundamentally what consciousness is, is the ability of any physical system to exert causal power over itself. This is an Aristotelian notion of causality. For example, the present state of my brain can determine one of the trillion future states of my brain. One of the trillion past states of my brain can have determined my current state, so it has causal power. The more power the past can exert over the present and future, the more conscious the thing that we are talking about is.
These neuroscientific theories can be summed up into two main camps: global and local.
Global theories describe modules for: balance and coordination; memory; emotion; language; writing; attention, planning, organisation, and reasoning; emotional affect and adaptability; motor / sensory; listening and decoding; reading and interpretation; visual-spatial and visual recognition. There may be specific pathways through each of these modules, e.g. dorsal visual stream, but for general connection between multiple modules there may also be a global workspace. This global workspace coordinates inputs from evaluative systems (value), attentional systems (focusing), long-term memory (past), and perceptual systems (present), into motor control outputs (future). Information in the global workspace is available from all modules and can be seen by each module.
Local theories say vision, for example, just needs to trigger the right kind of activity patterns in the visual module to be consciously perceived. (E.g. Victor Lamme’s local recurrence theory.) Activity that is forward-focused only (from stimulus to response) is unconscious. Feedback activity is required for consciousness. One thing common to all local theories is they say that “activity in frontal and parietal cortices is not absolutely needed for conscious perception to occur.”

Phew! That is a heck of a lot of history and detail about this subject.

So, what is consciousness?

We still can’t say! And from all of this, you can probably see why there are still so many different dictionary definitions of consciousness. Let’s add them to the list of this research too.

Dictionary Definitions of Consciousness

(Wikipedia)—the English word ‘conscious’ originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- ‘together’ and scio ‘to know’), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our word, it meant ‘knowing with’ or ‘having joint or common knowledge with another’
(Diderot and d'Alembert's 1753 Encyclopédie)—the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do
(The Oxford Living Dictionary)—the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings; a person's awareness or perception of something; the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world
(Cambridge Dictionary)—the state of understanding and realizing something
(Merriam-Webster)—awareness or sentience of internal or external existence
(Webster's Third New International Dictionary)—1) awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact; intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one's inner self; inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact; concerned awareness: interest, concern—often used with an attributive noun; 2) the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought; mind in the broadest possible sense; something in nature that is distinguished from the physical; 3) the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span

Finally, I want to note the hierarchy of consciousness that Mike Smith (aka Self Aware Patterns) has developed from his very extensive reading about all of this. To him, consciousness involves:

reflexes and fixed action patterns
perceptions, representations of the environment, expanding the scope of what the reflexes are reacting to
volition, goal directed behaviour, allowing or inhibiting reflexes based on simple valenced cause and effect predictions
deliberative imagination, sensory-action scenario simulations assessed on valenced reactions
introspection, recursive metacognition, and symbolic thought.

Brief Thoughts
So, attributions of consciousness stretch all the way from it 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. Wow. What a mess. As 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.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on consciousness comes to a similar conclusion:

“A comprehensive understanding of consciousness will likely require theories of many types. One might usefully and without contradiction accept a diversity of models that each in their own way aim respectively to explain the physical, neural, cognitive, functional, representational, and higher-order aspects of consciousness. There is unlikely to be any single theoretical perspective that suffices for explaining all the features of consciousness that we wish to understand. Thus, a synthetic and pluralistic approach may provide the best road to future progress.”

Once again, however, I am drawn to use the ‘universal acid’ of evolutionary thinking that Dan Dennett described in his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. If anything stands a chance to usefully provide “a single theoretical perspective” on consciousness, I think it’s likely to be that. For a helpful start, consider these passages from Dennett’s 2016 paper “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism.”

“Ever since Socrates pioneered the demand to know what all Fs have in common, in virtue of which they are Fs, the ideal of clear, sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy.”

“When Darwin came along with the revolutionary discovery that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes but historical populations with fuzzy boundaries, the main reactions of philosophers were to either ignore this hard-to-deny fact or treat it as a challenge: Now how should we impose our cookie-cutter set theory on this vague and meandering portion of reality?”

“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. So, we’re looking for a gradualist theory of the complex phenomena of consciousness. We’ve got a pretty good idea of what we’re looking for, based on all the definitions from philosophers, scientists, and dictionaries shown above, but it could be anywhere, and it could have got started at any time. To really spot an emergence and development of consciousness, in order to try to then characterise it, we’ll have to look at the history of everything that has ever existed. So, I’ll give that a go in the next post. That shouldn’t take too long.

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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?

18 Comments

Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?

4/16/2020

8 Comments

In the last post, I finished my series of reviews about what I consider to be the best theories and data about consciousness that are currently available from philosophers and scientists. I was planning to start laying out my own thoughts about this subject in today's post, but as luck would have it, I happened to come across an amazing lecture last night that I thought would be helpful as a transition and setup before I continue.

A few days into this coronavirus lockdown, I stumbled across an app called Kanopy that lets you log into it using your local library account, and then watch stuff online that you could normally check out of your library. All for free! It's such a great idea. As it happens, my wife's university library account also gave us free access to The Great Courses, which is a real treasure trove of university-level lectures. For reasons I don't need to go into now, I started watching a class called An Introduction to Formal Logic by Professor Steven Gimbel of Gettysburg College. Last night, I made it through lesson 7 on inductive reasoning. (Quick recap: deductive reasoning narrows down from a big rule to small facts, while inductive reasoning grows out from small observances to general rules. Of course, the problem of induction is well known as "the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy.")

Towards the end of this lecture, Gimbel went over the difference between using inductive reasoning for a theory versus using it for a hypothesis. This ended up being one of the best passages I've seen for explaining why Darwin's great idea is called the theory of evolution rather than the fact of evolution. This will also come in handy for anyone who wants to put together a theory of consciousness. Enjoy.

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Take Newton’s theory of gravity, which is comprised of three laws: 1) the law of inertia; 2) the force law; and 3) the action-reaction law. Put them together, and you have a full theory of motion. But what we have here are three general propositions, not specific observable claims. These general laws are then combined to form a system from which we can derive specific cases by plugging in the conditions of the world.

These proposed laws of nature, which function as the axioms of the theory, should not be confused with hypotheses. Hypotheses are proposed individual statements of possible truth. They are more specific than the axioms, and we get evidence for them individually. The axioms work together as a group. We may be able to derive hypotheses when working within the theory, but the parts of the theory themselves are not hypotheses.

For example, a hypothesis would be, “If I drop a 10-pound bowling ball and a 16-pound bowling ball off the roof of my house, they will land at the same time." I could test this with a ladder and two bowling balls. Hypotheses are open to such direct testing. The purported laws of nature in Newton's theory, however, are different. Consider Newton’s First Law. If I have an object, and there’s no external force applied to it, then it will move in a straight line at a constant speed. At first glance, this seems like it should be just as testable as the hypothesis about the bowling ball. But the problem is that there can be no such object without an external force applied to it! As soon as there’s any other object in the universe, the object we're examining would feel the pull of gravity, which is an external force. So, Newton’s law of inertia, a vital part of his theory of motion, holds for no actual object. If we treat it like we do hypotheses, it would be kind of like having a biological law about unicorns. So, we have to have different inductive processes for hypotheses and for theories.

[ Karl Popper gave us the idea that hypotheses must be falsifiable. Hypotheses are tested using independent and dependent variables, i.e. the things we adjust and the things we measure.]

What about theories? Here, the philosopher Hans Reichenbach drew a distinction between discovery and justification. What this distinction has come to mean is that there is a difference between the context in which scientists come up with their theories, and the context in which they provide good reasons to believe those theories are true. The context of discovery is genuinely thought to be free. There’s no specific logic of discovery, no turn-the-crank method for coming up with scientific theories. The great revolutionaries are considered geniuses because they were able to not only think rigorously, but also creatively in envisioning a different way the world could work. There’s no logic that tells scientists what to consider when coming up with new theories.

While there’s no set method, surely there is induction in there somewhere. Scientists are working from their experiences and their data. They have a question about how a system works, they consider what they know, and they make inductive leaps. They look for models and analogies where the system could be thought to work like a different system that is better understood. So, while there’s no set means of using induction in the context of discovery, it usually is playing some kind of role.

The most important place in scientific reasoning that we find induction is in the context of justification. Once a theory has been proposed, why should we believe it? Theories are testable. They have effects, results, and predictions that come from them. These observable results of a theory are determined deductively. That is, if a theory is true, then, in some given situation, let's say that observable consequence O should result. We go to the lab, set up the situation, and see if we observe O as expected. If not, then the theory has failed, and, as it stands, it is not acceptable. It will either have to be rejected or fixed. But, if the theory says to expect O, and we actually do observe O, now we have evidence in favour of the theory. That evidence is inductive. It may be that theory T1 predicts O, but there will also be other theories, like T2, which is different from T1, which is also supported by O. As such, neither T1 nor T2 are certain. (To the degree that inductive inferences could be anyway.)

How then do we go from supporting evidence (which makes a theory more likely), to conclusive evidence (which makes a theory probably true)? We need lots of evidence. We also need evidence of different types. It’s good for a theory if it can account for everything we already know. We call this retrodiction. This is particularly true if everything we knew was previously unexplained. For example, before Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we knew that not only did Mercury orbit the Sun, but each time Mercury would make it around the Sun, the farthest point in its orbit would be in a different place. In other words, Mercury did not make the same exact trip around the Sun every time. But we had no idea why! Once Einstein gave us a new theory of gravitation, this effect was naturally explained. The fact that it solved the mystery was taken as strong inductive evidence.

Even better than explaining what we already know, prediction is also taken as strong evidence. Newton’s theory predicted that a comet would appear around Christmastime in 1758. When this unusual sight appeared in the sky on Christmas day, the comet (named for Newton’s close friend Edmund Halley) was taken as very strong evidence for his theory.

Beyond even prediction, the best evidence for a theory can bring forth what William Whewell termed consilience. Whewell was a philosopher of science, an historian of science, and also a scientist. In fact, he was the person who coined the term scientist. Consilience is when a theory that is designed to account for phenomena of type A, turns out to also account for phenomena of type B. If you set out to explain one thing, and are also able to explain something completely different, then that is extremely strong evidence that your theory is probably true.

The reigning champ in this realm is Darwin’s theory of evolution. It accounts for biodiversity. It accounts for fossil evidence. It accounts for geographical population distribution. There’s just a huge range of all sorts of observations that evolution makes sense of. This is stunning, and stands as extremely strong evidence for its likely truth.

This consilience is no accident. In his college days, Darwin was a student of Whewell’s. When he later began to develop his ideas, Darwin was extremely nervous about them. He knew how explosive his view was, so he spent many, many years accumulating a broad array of different sources of evidence in order to demonstrate his theory’s consilience. Some people today contend that evolution is not proven. Well of course it isn’t! The only things that are proven are the results of deductive logic. Darwin’s theory—like everything else in science—is confirmed by inductive logic, which never gives proof, but which offers high probability, and thereby firm grounds, for rational belief.
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What do you think? Does this understanding of a theory help you see how science can actually posit ideas that cannot be tested on their own, yet still help us make sense of the world? Are we ready for a theory of consciousness that uses analogies from things we understand to explain everything we know, make some predictions, and offer a consilient view of a wide variety of observations? And might it fit in with the theory of evolution too? Maybe not 100% ready, but I'm going to sketch out a new theory next time and give this all a go.

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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

8 Comments

Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory

4/11/2020

19 Comments

IIT. Simple summary. Devil in the details.

We're finally here! The end of my literature review on consciousness. In the last post, we heard Michael Graziano lump the work of all of the other neuroscientists I've profiled into one "growing standard model." This is by no means comprehensive for the entire field, so there are still people working outside of this model, but there was one particularly glaring omission that Graziano went out of his way to exclude — Integrated Information Theory (IIT). In the final interview in her four-part series on consciousness, Dr. Ginger Campbell spoke with one of the leading proponents of IIT, Christof Koch, about his latest book The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can't Be Computed. There's a lot to consider here so let's get to the highlights:

My background is in physics and philosophy. I worked with Francis Crick after his Nobel Prize. We looked for “the neural correlates of consciousness,” i.e. what are the minimal physical / biophysical neuronal mechanisms that are jointly necessary for any one conscious perception? What is necessary for me to “hear” that voice inside my head? Not necessarily to sense it, or process it, but to have that experience.
We now know it’s really the cortex—the outer-most shell of the brain, size and thickness of a pizza, highly convoluted, left and right hemispheres, the most complex and highly organised piece of matter in the known universe—which gives rise to consciousness.
This study of the neural correlates of consciousness is fantastic. For example, whenever you activate such and such neurons, you see your mom’s face or hear her voice. And if you artificially stimulate them, you will also have some vague feeling of these things. There is no doubt that scientists have established this close one-to-one relationship between a particular experience and a particular part of the brain.
Correlates don’t, however, answer why we have this experience. Or how. Or whether something like a bee can be conscious. For mammals it's easy to see the similarity to ourselves. But what about the further away you go? Or what about artificial intelligence? Or how low does it go? Panpsychism has said it is everywhere. Maybe it is a fundamental part of the universe.
To answer these questions, we need a fundamental theory of consciousness.
I’ve been working on this theory with Giulio Tononi, which is called the Integrated Information Theory.
IIT goes back to Aristotle and Plato. 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. I exist because I can push a book around. If there is no causal power over anything in the universe, why postulate they exist
IIT says fundamentally what consciousness is, is the ability of any physical system to exert causal power over itself. This is an Aristotelian notion of causality. The present state of my brain can determine one of the trillion future states of my brain. One of the trillion past states of my brain can have determined my current state so it has causal power. The more power the past can exert over the present and future, the more conscious the thing that we are talking about is.
In principle, you can measure this system. The exact causal power, a number we call phi, is a measure of how much things exist for themselves, and not for others. My consciousness exists for itself; it doesn’t depend on you, it doesn’t depend on my parents, it doesn’t depend on anybody else but me.
Phi characterises the degree to which a system exists for itself. If it is zero, the system doesn’t exist. The bigger the number, the more the system exists for itself and is conscious in this sense. Also the type and quality of this conscious experience (e.g. red feels different from blue) is determined by the extent and the quality of the causal power that the system has upon itself.
Look for the structure within the brain, or the CPU, that has the maximal causal power, and that is the structure that ultimately constitutes the physical basis of consciousness for that particular creature.
How does this relate to panpsychism? They share some intuitions, but also differ. One of the great philosophical problems with panpsychism is the superposition problem. I’m conscious. You are conscious. Panpsychism says there should be an uber-consciousness that is you and me. But neither of us have any experience of that. Also, every particle of my body has its own consciousness, and there is the consciousness of me and the microphone, or my wife and whatever, or even me and America. But there isn’t anything of what it feels like to be America. This is the big weakness of panpsychism.
IIT solves the superposition problem by saying only the maximum of this measure of IIT exists. Locally, there is a maximum within my brain or your brain. But the amount of causal interaction between me and you is minute compared to the massive causality within. Therefore, there is you and there is me.
If we ran wires between two mice or two humans, IIT predicts some things. For example, between my left and right hemispheres there are connections called the corpus callosum. If you cut them, you get split brain syndrome—two conscious entities. If you could do the opposite, you would build an artificial corpus callosum between my brain and your brain. If you added just a few, I would slowly start to see some things that you see, but there would be no confusion as to who is who. As more wires are added, though, IIT says there is a precise point in time when the phi across this system will exceed the information within either single brain, and at that point, the individuals will disappear and the new conscious entity will arise.
What is right about this as opposed to the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory or other approaches? GNWT only claims to talk about those aspects of consciousness that you can actually speak about. This is called "access consciousness." Once information reaches the level of consciousness, all areas of the brain can use it. If it remains non-conscious, only certain parts of the brain use it.
There is an "adversarial collaboration" just beginning where IIT and GNWT proponents have agreed on a large set of experiments to see which theory is supported by fMRI, EEG, subjective reporting, etc. In principle this will be great, but practically, we will see.
Where the theories really disagree is the fundamental nature of consciousness. GNWT embodies the dominant zeitgeist (Anglo-Saxon philosophy, scientists, Silicon Valley, sci-fi, etc), which says if you build enough intelligence into a machine, if you add feedback, self-monitoring, speaking, etc, sooner or later you will get to a system that is not only intelligent, but also conscious. Ultimately, consciousness is all about behaviour. It’s a descendent of behaviourism saying behaviour is all we can talk about.
The other view says no, consciousness is not magical, it’s a natural property of certain systems, but it’s about causal power. To the extent you can build something with causal power, that will be conscious, but you cannot simulate it. E.g. weather simulations don’t cause your computer to get wet. The same thing holds for perfect simulations of the human brain. The simulation will say it is conscious, but it will all be a deep behavioural fake. What you have to do is build a computer in the image of a brain with massive overlapping connectivity and inputs. In principle, this could give rise to consciousness.
Could a single cell or an atom be conscious? In the limit, it may well feel like something to be a bacterium. It doesn’t have a psychology, feel fragile, or hungry, etc. But there are already a few billion molecules and a few thousand proteins. We haven’t yet modelled this, but yes, most biological systems may feel like something.
Has any consciousness of my mitochondria been subsumed into my own? Yes. On its own, mitochondria has phi, but IIT says that once it is put together with something else, that consciousness dissolves. If your brain is disassembled, for example when you die, there may be a few fleeting moments where each part again feels like something. In each case you have to ask what is the system that maximises the integrated information. Only that system exists for itself, is a subject, and has some experience. The other pieces can be poked and studied, but they aren’t conscious.
The zap and zip technique is being used to look for consciousness in patients who may be locked in or anesthetised irregularly. You zap the brain, like striking a bell, and look at the amount of information that reverberates around the brain. A highly compressed response, one that is “zipped up” so there is almost no information response, is more unconscious (or even dead if there is no response) than one where much response around the brain is noted. This is progress in the mind-body problem. (Note, you don’t have to believe in IIT or GNWT to use this.)
Right now, we don’t have strong experimental evidence to think that quantum physics has anything to do with the function of brain systems. Classical physics is enough to model everything so far, but you still have to keep an open mind since we don’t understand all causations.

Brief Comments
Although I found this interview to be a good overview, it still left me with a lot of questions about IIT. So, before I make any comments, I want to share a bit more research that I found helpful.

From the Wikipedia Entry on Integrated Information Theory:

If we are ever going to make the link between the subjective experience of consciousness and the physical mechanisms that cause it, IIT assumes the properties of the physical system must be constrained by the properties of the experience.
Therefore, IIT starts by attempting to identify the essential properties of conscious experience (called "axioms"), and then moves on to the essential properties of the physical systems underneath that consciousness (called "postulates").
Every axiom should apply to every possible experience. The most recent version of these axioms states that consciousness has: 1) intrinsic existence, 2) composition, 3) information, 4) integration, and 5) exclusion. These are defined below.
1) Intrinsic existence — By this, IIT means that consciousness exists. Indeed, IIT claims it is the only fact I can be sure of immediately and absolutely, and this experience exists independently of external observers.
2) Composition — Consciousness is structured. Each experience has multiple distinctions, both elementary and higher-order. For example, within one experience I may distinguish a book, a blue color, a blue book, the left side, a blue book on the left, and so on.
3) Information — Consciousness is specific. Each experience is the particular way that it is because it is composed of a specific set of possible experiences. The experience differs from a large number of alternative experiences I could have had but am not actually having.
4) Integration — Consciousness is unified. Each experience is irreducible and cannot be subdivided. I experience a whole visual scene, not the left side of the visual field independent of the right side (and vice versa). Seeing a blue book is not reducible to seeing a book without the colour blue, or the colour blue without the book.
5) Exclusion — Consciousness is definite. Each experience is what it is, neither less nor more, and it flows at the speed it flows, neither faster nor slower. For example, the experience I am having is of seeing a body on a bed in a bedroom, a bookcase with books, one of which is a blue book. I am not having an experience with less content (say, one lacking colour), or with more content (say, with the addition of feeling blood pressure).
These axioms describe regularities in conscious experience, and IIT seeks to explain these regularities. What could account for the fact that every experience exists, is structured, is differentiated, is unified, and is definite? IIT argues that the existence of an underlying causal system with these same properties offers the most parsimonious explanation. The properties required of a conscious physical substrate are called the "postulates" because the existence of the physical substrate is itself only postulated. (Remember, IIT maintains that the only thing one can be sure of is the existence of one's own consciousness).

From two articles (1,2) about the "adversarial collaboration" between IIT and Global Workspace Theory (GWT):

Both sides agree to make the fight as fair as possible: they’ll collaborate on the task design, pre-register their predictions on public ledgers, and if the data supports only one idea, the other acknowledges defeat.
Rather than unearthing how the brain brings outside stimuli into attention, the fight focuses more on where and why consciousness emerges.
The GWT describes an almost algorithmic view. Conscious behavior arises when we can integrate and segregate information from multiple input sources and combine it into a piece of data in a global workspace within the brain. According to Dehaene, brain imaging studies in humans suggest that the main “node” exists at the front of the brain, or the prefrontal cortex, which acts like a central processing unit in a computer.
IIT, in contrast, takes a more globalist view where consciousness arises from the measurable, intrinsic interconnectedness of brain networks. Under the right architecture and connective features, consciousness emerges. IIT believes this emergent process happens at the back of the brain where neurons connect in a grid-like structure that hypothetically should be able to support this capacity.
Koch notes, "People who have had a large fraction of the frontal lobe removed (as it used to happen in neurosurgical treatments of epilepsy) can seem remarkably normal." Tononi added, “I’m willing to bet that, by and large, the back is wired in the right way to have high Φ, and much of the front is not. We can compare the locations of brain activity in people who are conscious or have been rendered unconscious by anesthesia. If such tests were able to show that the back of the brain indeed had high Φ but was not associated with consciousness, then IIT would be very much in trouble.”
Another prediction of GWT is that a characteristic electrical signal in the brain, arising about 300-400 milliseconds after a stimulus, should correspond to the “broadcasting” of the information that makes us consciously aware of it. Thereafter the signal quickly subsides. In IIT, the neural correlate of a conscious experience is instead predicted to persist continuously while the experience does. Tests of this distinction, Koch says, could involve volunteers looking at some stimulus like a scene on a screen for several seconds and seeing whether the neural correlate of the experience persists as long as it remains in the consciousness.
It may also turn out that no scientific experiment can be the sole and final arbiter of a question like this one. Even if only neuroscientists adjudicated the question, the debate would be philosophical. When interpretation gets this tricky, it makes sense to open the conversation to philosophers.

Great! So let's get on with some philosophising.

Right off the bat, the first axiom of IIT is problematic. It is trying to build upon the same bedrock that Descartes did. But that is an infamously circular argument that rested on first establishing that we are created by an all-perfect God rather than an evil demon. Descartes said this God wouldn't let him be deceived about seeing things "clearly and directly," which led to his claim that therefore, I am. Now, the first axiom of IIT claims consciousness is the only fact one can be sure of "immediately and absolutely." This is the same argument, and it still doesn't hold up. The study of illusions and drug-altered states of experience shows us that consciousness is not perceived immediately and absolutely. And as Keith Frankish pointed out in my post about illusionism, once that wedge of doubt is opened up, it cannot be closed.

Regardless, let's grant that the subjective experience each of us thinks we are perceiving does actually constitute a worthwhile data point. (Even if this isn't a certain truth, it's a pretty excellent hypothesis.) Talking to one another about all of our individual data points is how IIT comes up with its five axioms. But would it follow from that that ALL conscious experiences have the same five characteristics? No! That would be an enormous leap of induction from a specific set of human examples to a much wider universal rule.

However, despite the universal pretensions of IIT and its definition of phi that could theoretically (though not currently) be calculated for any physical system, when Koch is talking about consciousness, he occasionally is only referring to the very restricted human version of it that requires awareness and self-report. This makes him confusing at times, but that's certainly the consciousness he's talking about for the upcoming "adversarial collaboration" that will test predictions about consciousness by proponents of IIT and GWT. It's great to see such falsifiable predictions being made and tested, and of course the human report of consciousness is where we have to start our scientific studies of consciousness, but it's hard to see how these tests will actually end the debate any time soon. Why? Because as we have seen throughout this series, we just don't have a settled definition for the terms being used in this debate. One camp's proof of consciousness is another camp's proof of something else. They could all seemingly just respond to one another, "but that's not really consciousness."

So, What does IIT say consciousness really is? Koch reports:

>>> "IIT says fundamentally what consciousness is, is the ability of any physical system to exert causal power over itself."

I've heard Dan Dennett say that vigorous debates occur about whether tornadoes fit this kind of definition about consciousness. Their prior states influence their current and future states. That's a kind of causal power. They are also a physical system that acts as one thing even though none of the constituent parts act the way the system as a whole does. But does anyone really think a tornado is conscious? Koch continues:

>>> "My consciousness exists for itself; it doesn’t depend on you, it doesn’t depend on my parents, it doesn’t depend on anybody else but me."

This isn't strictly true, of course. Everything is interrelated. We have no evidence of any uncaused causes in this universe, so Koch's consciousness clearly depends on lots of outside factors. If I shouted that at him, would his consciousness be able to stop him from hearing it? I imagine that's not exactly what Koch meant, but between this and the similarity to Descartes' argument using God to see the world clearly and directly, IIT strikes me as practically a religious viewpoint. Tellingly enough, I found out that it is.

In an essay at Psychology Today titled, "Neuroscience's New Consciousness Theory Is Spiritual", there was this passage:

Most rational thinkers will agree that the idea of a personal god who gets angry when we masturbate and routinely disrupts the laws of physics upon prayer is utterly ridiculous. Integrated Information Theory doesn't give credence to anything of the sort. It simply reveals an underlying harmony in nature, and a sweeping mental presence that isn't confined to biological systems. IIT's inevitable logical conclusions and philosophical implications are both elegant and precise. What it yields is a new kind of scientific spirituality that paints a picture of a soulful existence that even the most diehard materialist or devout atheist can unashamedly get behind.

I'll let the "inevitability" of IIT's logical conclusions slide for now, but is this "sweeping mental presence" just another form of idealism, which George Berkeley used to argue that the mind of God was everywhere and caused all things? It's not from the same source or for exactly the same reason, but it's related. As an essay at the Buddhist magazine Lion's Roar points out, "Leading neuroscientists and Buddhists agree: 'Consciousness is everywhere'." Here we find that:

Buddhism associates mind with sentience. The late Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche stated that while mind, along with all objects, is empty, unlike most objects, it is also luminous. In a similar vein, IIT says consciousness is an intrinsic quality of everything yet only appears significantly in certain conditions — like how everything has mass, but only large objects have noticeable gravity."
In his major work, the Shobogenzo, Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, went so far as to say, “All is sentient being.” Grass, trees, land, sun, moon, and stars are all mind, wrote Dogen.
Koch, who became interested in Buddhism in college, says that his personal worldview has come to overlap with the Buddhist teachings on non-self, impermanence, atheism, and panpsychism. His interest in Buddhism, he says, represents a significant shift from his Roman Catholic upbringing. When he started studying consciousness — working with Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick — Koch believed that the only explanation for experience would have to invoke God. But, instead of affirming religion, Koch and Crick together established consciousness as a respected branch of neuroscience and invited Buddhist teachers into the discussion.
At Drepung Monastery, the Dalai Lama told Koch that the Buddha taught that sentience is everywhere at varying levels, and that humans should have compassion for all sentient beings. Until that point, Koch hadn’t appreciated the weight of his philosophy. "I was confronted with the Buddhist teaching that sentience is probably everywhere at varying levels, and that inspired me to take the consequences of this theory seriously," says Koch. "When I see insects in my home, I don't kill them."

These religious motivations don't necessarily mean that the motivated reasoning behind IIT is unsound. But it sure makes me skeptical. The cracks I see in IIT's logic—e.g. starting with seeing consciousness immediately and absolutely, making leaps from human experience to all experience, seeing islands of uncaused causes everywhere—are enough to give me pause. Despite all the fancy math plastered on top of these ideas, I'm still fundamentally unconvinced that consciousness is the integration of information, yet somehow "can't be computed and is the feeling of being alive." As for what I think consciousness really is, it's finally time for me to say. Hope I can get it down clearly!

What do you think? Is IIT flawed to you too? What useful concepts or calculations might it offer?

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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