Consciousness 11 —Neurobiological Naturalism

Two books that look pretty applicable to this series...
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In the last post, I mentioned that Dr. Ginger Campbell reviewed three books about consciousness in her magnificent Brain Science podcast that were written by neuroscientists. The first two were written by Stanislas Dehaene and Antonio Damasio, which I covered in the last two posts. Now, we get to a book written by Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt called Consciousness Demystified. This is their most recent book, published in 2018, so that's the one Campbell covered in depth. However, since this is a refined and perhaps popularised version of the book they published in 2016 called The Ancient Origins of Consciousness (which sure sounds appropriate for this series), I thought I should pull a couple of summary points from that book too. Here, then, are the most important items I found:

• Feinberg and Mallatt use a much broader view of consciousness than Dehaene or Damasio.
• They use the term "neurobiological naturalism" to address the hard problem, which is an elaboration of John Searle’s biological naturalism.
• F&M's goal is to bridge the gap between what the brain does and subjective experience.
• Neurobiological naturalism rests on three principles: 1) Life. F&M say consciousness is grounded in the unique features of life. 2) Neural features. This consciousness correlates with neural activity. 3) Naturalistic manner. Nothing supernatural is needed.
• 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.
• The intercommunicating axons of affective pathways branch a lot more than in the exteroceptive pathways, sending signals to many different parts of the system. Another difference is that affective circuits communicate less through short-distance neurotransmitter chemicals and more through far-diffusing neuromodulator chemicals than do exteroceptive circuits.
• Four problems arise then: 1) Referral—we don’t experience anything inside our brain. It’s all referred to from the outside world or from our bodies. 2) Mental unity—how is it all put together into a single experience. 3) Mental causation—how do thoughts cause action. 4) The perceived qualia of objects.
• Breaking the hard problem into four smaller problems makes things more manageable.
• E.g. mental unity is a process, not locatable to a single brain region. It requires synchronised oscillations to unify multiple networks.
• There is evidence that all vertebrates and some invertebrates enjoy consciousness. This is from a combination of anatomical and behavioural evidence, including operant learning.
• F&M see qualia (subjective experience) as having two unique features: 1) a unique neurobiology; and 2) the fact that it is exclusively first-person. So, therefore, we need two answers. They argue that the first person subjectivity comes from 1) the life process, combined with 2) the neurobiological pathways.
• Responding to Chalmers' famous question "Why is experience one way rather than another?" they write: "Our theory of neurobiological naturalism argues that animal experience is fundamentally and inextricably built on the foundation of life. Therefore, we must distinguish purely computational mechanisms, for example computers and any other known non-living computational device, as well as cognitive theories of consciousness that likewise centre on information processing, from the theories that invoke the biological and neural properties of a living brain. We hypothesise that experience and qualia are living processes that cannot be explained solely by non-biological computation. Our view of the hard problem begins and rests on the essential role that biology plays in making animal experience and qualia possible."
• There are several keys to the mystery of consciousness and subjective experience. One is that consciousness is incredibly diverse, coming from a multi-factorial combination of life and various unique neurobiological structures and processes. They also argue that qualia should not be treated as a single thing and that subjective experiences emerge when a sufficient level of neural complexity evolves. They argue repeatedly that the neurobiological problems should NOT be conflated with the philosophical problem.
  

• In The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, Feinberg and Mallatt conted 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.
• After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness. Simple reflexive behaviours evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago.
• To Feinberg and Mallatt, real consciousness is indicated by the optic tectum making a multi-sensory map of the world, attending to the most important object in this map, and then signalling behaviours based on the map.
• Isomorphic maps are the cornerstone of image-based sensory consciousness. These maps evolved in early vertebrates more than 520 million years ago, and this process was the natural result of the extraordinary innovations of the camera eye, neural crest, and placodes. These events led to the mental images that mark the creation of the mysterious explanatory gaps and the subjective features of consciousness.
• 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.
• 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.

​Brief Comments
These books are apparently rammed full of good details about the internal brain structures involved with lots of discretely-named aspects of consciousness, and the evolutionary history of these anatomical features. That's certainly helpful for my project. However, the philosopher in me can't also help agreeing with the top Amazon review for Consciousness Demystified, which called it a disappointing bait and switch. The reviewer said, "In other words, in spite of their stated 'main goal' to address the explanatory gap between a third-person, objective description of how the brain works and the mystery of why that gives rise to (or amounts to) subjective, conscious experience, in fact they finally conclude that this explanatory gap is only a 'philosophical problem' instead of a 'neurobiological problem' and thus not really what their book was ever intended to explain anyway."

I have already gone over how the "philosophical problem" raised by Chalmers is actually an impossible problem so it doesn't bother me that Feinberg and Mallatt didn't tackle it. But by naming their books as they have, and promising early on to clear up the so-called hard problem, Feinberg and Mallat have disappointed more than a few readers. Then, by merely asserting that consciousness only arises from natural living processes, they lose credibility by failing to acknowledge (as Searle did) the possibility that alternate arrangements of matter, other than biological brains, could bring forth consciousness. While I'd still put money on the uniqueness of biology leading to the uniqueness of the consciousness that we recognise (think about how that consciousness changes for tiny changes in the biology), I don't pretend that this is a sure bet.

Feinberg and Mallat's addition of "affect" to the mix of "exteroception" (what Damasio calls mind) and "interoception" (what Damasio calls self) is interesting, but probably due to their expanded conception of consciousness. I agree with them it is certainly something that is a part of this full range of experiences that can get lumped into "consciousness", but the note about how the affective circuits communicate "through far-diffusing neuromodulator chemicals" reminds me of the brain being awash in an emotion, which presumably Damasio would say can occur in a non-conscious fashion, which is why it is not a part of his more limited definition of consciousness.

What do you think? Did anything else in Feinberg and Mallatt's research or hypotheses add to your thinking about consciousness? As always, let me know in the comments below.

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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