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Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness

7/30/2020

38 Comments

 
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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)
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​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:
  1. Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.
  2. Organisation: being structurally composed of one or more cells—the basic units of life.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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).
  7. 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)
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​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):
  1. Global operant conditioning (involving whole body and learning brand-new behaviours)
  2. Behavioural trade-offs, value-based cost-benefit decisions
  3. Frustration behaviour
  4. Self-delivery of pain relievers or rewards
  5. 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.
 
  1. Matter: a system that is part of the environment, is affected by it, and affects it. Panpsychism.
  2. 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.
  3. Perception: models of the environment built from distance senses, increasing the scope of what the reflexes are reacting to.
  4. Volition: selection of which reflexes to allow or inhibit based on learned predictions.
  5. Deliberative imagination: sensory-action scenarios, episodic memory, to enhance 4.
  6. 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)
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​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.
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​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
38 Comments
SelfAwarePatterns link
7/30/2020 10:07:54 pm

Well done Ed! I think you're on the right track with the hierarchy. Of course, as a purveyor of a hierarchy, I would say that. (Thanks for mentioning it again!)

I do have an issue with yours, and it's rooted in my differences with Solms and Panksepp,

The problem is the common definition of "affect" is the *conscious* experience or feeling of an emotion. So using it in a particular level of hierarchy ends up being a statement that consciousness is present. (I've used "affect" before in my own hierarchy, but I'm becoming leery of it for that reason.) For Solms and Panksepp, that's fine. They see actual consciousness existing at this low level.

Damasio, who is often grouped with Solms and Panksepp, doesn't stipulate this for the protoself. He uses the word "emotion", but what he means by it is an action-program. He uses the word "feeling" for the actual conscious component, which if I recall correctly, requires the core self. (Although I have to admit I'm rusty on my Damasio.)

Damasio's friend, Joseph LeDoux, is even more reserved, using the term "survival circuit" for what's happening at the lower level. He reserves the word "emotion" for the conscious feeling itself.

As you can see, the field is awash in terminological confusion!

My own attitude is that "survival circuit", "action program", "reflex", or "fixed action patterns", are better descriptions of what's happening at the lower level. I think we need your level 4-Prediction or 5-Awareness before we can use "affect" in the conventional manner.

But, in the end, we're Level 6-Abstraction systems discussing what features of the lower levels are necessary and sufficient for our experience. Of course, our *full* experience requires all six. But which ones are sufficient for consciousness isn't a fact of the matter.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
7/31/2020 09:36:35 am

Thanks Mike. As I've said, your own hierarchy is well worth including because you genuinely have worked hard to keep up on this field and integrate it into your thinking. This may just be a one-time deep dive for me so I will continue to watch what you are doing with this topic.

One of the things I've been thinking that didn't quite come clear in this write-up is that I think it would be helpful to distinguish between two types of affect — biological and cognitive. I'm not happy with those labels though, since cognition is so broad that it could include biological affect too. (The 13 cognitive capacities that Lyon listed do include it.) But the affect that I've got in level 2 of the hierarchy is a non-conscious type of emotion that is objectively observable. I'm with Solms on this hook line and sinker as far as seeing that as primary. However, it wouldn't be the type of "cognitive affect" or "subjective feeling" or "qualia" (or "consciousness" to some folks) until self-awareness arises in level 5. Those philosophical terms are so muddled though that I just couldn't include them in the hierarchy.

I don't think the common definition for affect that you cite is correct (or settled). You say using it in a level asserts "consciousness is present" but I certainly don't assert that. To do so would be an essentialist "on/off" use of the term (which I thought you were starting to throw away too). I say that EVERYTHING in my hierarchy are just aspects of consciousness that can be understood in pieces and collectively. But it'd be arbitrary for someone to say "this" or "that" just IS consciousness. There isn't anything necessary or sufficient for an arbitrary line.

Thanks for pushing and questioning though! That's exactly what I need to hear for my final write-up after the four Tinbergen aspects are covered. I'm possibly buying a new house this month, but hopefully I can get through all this much faster now that I've got my own hierarchy basically sorted out. That makes my thinking much clearer on this.

Reply
SelfAwarePatterns link
7/31/2020 02:57:08 pm

Thanks Ed! As a fellow student in all this, I periodically decide the whole thing is a misguided pursuit of the soul, but I always seem to drift back to it, a fascination that's stuck for a while now.

With the way you're using "affect", that really resolves the major issue I have with your hierarchy. (I have other differences, but they're really just differences in emphasis and choice of descriptive language.) I'm definitely not in the essentialist on/off camp.

In terms off whether the common definition of "affect" is the correct one, I'm also not a believer in objective definitions. All definitions are convention, and the only real issue is, given current convention, whether use of a particular word effectively communicates what we mean.

It is true that "affect" has some variability in meaning. In psychology it often is the conventional one I noted above. But sometimes it means the *display* of a reaction we might take to be a conscious feeling, but might not be. I prefer "affect display" for that concept, but the word "affect" by itself is used for it just often enough to blur the meaning. Sometimes it is equivalent to "emotion", but other times it's meant to refer to something more simple and primal. Panksepp seemed to regard them as equivalent. Lisa Feldmann Barrett sees animals having affects but not emotions.

Just more of the terminological morass in this area. We can actually have a hierarchy of just emotions. (In fact, I have a post on that: https://selfawarepatterns.com/2019/11/25/the-layers-of-emotional-feelings/ )

All of which is to say that this stuff is complex and defies simple definitions, which is why we resort to all these hierarchies!

Reply
Ed Gibney link
8/1/2020 09:09:56 am

That's an interesting post about emotions. A hierarchy like that might emerge from my post on the mechanisms of consciousness. Right now, I've just noted "basic emotions" in the 2. Affect level, and "feelings" in the 5. Awareness level. That adopts the major distinction I think we are discussing, although not at the level of detail in your emotional hierarchy.

I note in your post that you say, "My own view is that the conscious feeling of the emotion happens in 5 [Utilization of the representation], whether or not it’s being introspectively accessed. This substantially widens the number of species who can be regarded as having emotional feelings."

I would put it that if bacteria were placed into an environment where they are constantly moving to get away from harmful stimuli, we could objectively observe that the bacteria is suffering. Is that bacteria aware of it's own suffering? Of course not. It doesn't have the cognitive capacities to achieve awareness in my consciousness hierarchy. The morality of all of this is another question I might touch on later, but basically I'd say my main position still stands that the survival of life in general is still the ultimate consequence that needs to be aimed at and the virtue ethics along the way towards that would point towards minimising suffering.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
8/1/2020 03:01:06 pm

On the post, thanks!

On a single bacterium struggling to survive, I think it depends on what we mean by "suffering."

Bacteria can sense harmful stimuli and react to them, but their reactions are typically along the lines of tumbling and then propelling themselves in a random direction. That random direction might be straight into more of the harmful stimuli. As I understand it, their next reaction will be...to tumble and head into a random direction again, with no memory of the previous sequence. They might do this several times in a row, which looks to us like frantic attempts to escape.

Evolutionarily, this works because it enables more rather than fewer bacteria to survive, which maximizes the persistence and propagation of its genes. But the bacterium itself seems to lack even a first order awareness of itself or its environment. Its actions seem pretty robotic. (There are unicellular species that show sensitization and habituation, but I think they're eukaryotic ones.)

I do agree that the sensing of danger and survival reactions are at the core of what we call "affect" or "emotion" in systems with more developed spatio-temporal information processing.

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James of Seattle
8/1/2020 06:01:58 pm

I think the criteria for determining suffering will need some work. My take would look like:
A response to a measurement which is taken to show the entity is far from a goal state (more food, away from predator, not damaged, etc.), which response is:
a. prevented from achieving its goal of moving toward the goal state, and
b. has a negative impact on other systems in that those other systems have reduced functional capacity.

For example, fleeing from a predator will inhibit seeking food and/or seeking reproductive opportunities while depleting internal reserves. Prolonged recognition of internal damage which monopolizes attention in favor of finding ways to correct said damage (or at least end the signal of said damage), taking attention away from other priorities, could be considered pain/suffering.

Bottom line, I think suffering requires 1. frustration of a goal, and 2. a detrimental systemic effect.

*

Astronomer Eric
8/2/2020 01:41:22 am

James, I like this criteria. For social species, do you think your criteria B extends to other members of the species? Or in other words, could your criteria B be worded: "has a negative impact on other members of the species in that those other members have reduced functional capacity." So, for example, one may feel very isolated (far from their social goal state) and in a desperate attempt to reach that goal they force others to satisfy that goal which causes others to take their attention away from their own goals.

James of Seattle
8/2/2020 06:28:33 am

Eric, my answer is kinda sorta probably, but I’m not sure if you’re considering the suffering as belonging to/applying to the group as a whole, or if you’re referring to members of the group suffering individually. I think both are reasonable considerations.

*

Astronomer Eric
8/2/2020 01:43:24 pm

Yeah, I thought about whether I was referring to the group or the individual after I wrote the comment. Speaking individually, it's really the same thing you said in the sense that one who is forced to satisfy another's social goals is also prevented from achieving their own goal (maybe that of safety for example) which has a negative impact on their own system.

Thinking more about it, I think I was more considering the feedback effects at the group level where the suffering of one can cause a "suffering cascade effect" on others around them. But that's still actually "individual suffering" albeit one in an interconnected system and probably different than actual "group suffering" (maybe like that which a telepathic species might feel???).

James of Seattle
8/1/2020 05:43:12 pm

Hey Ed, just in case you’re interested in different takes on morality with respect to non-humans, I would suggest taking a look at Daniel Estrada’s work (@eripsa on Twitter). It suggests your take on the suffering of bacteria might extend to robots, etc.

*

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Ed Gibney
8/1/2020 05:54:37 pm

Thanks James. I just bookmarked the article in his pinned tweet and will give it a look. Before I do, I’ll just say that it think it’s pretty easy to imagine a robot generating the kind of unique existence that is morally valuable. Whether or not that robot feels pain and pleasure in the way a biological organism surely does is another question. But I’m open to other modes of living being valuable. For sure.

Ed Gibney link
8/1/2020 05:45:19 pm

Oh definitely. I’m 100% with you that it takes a lot of stretching and anthropomorphising to call that suffering in a bacteria. It’s just easy enough for me to see it on the evolutionary continuum. I like Dan Dennett’s article on “The Overdue Demise of Essentialism” on this where he calls these kinds of steps “sorta” functions. It’s sorta suffering. (And then sorta, sorta, sorta gradually more and more.)

I’m reading “Transcend” by Scott Barry Kauffman at the moment (highly recommended) and he has a stock phrase I like about how in real life, as one ascends up the Maslow hierarchy of needs, it’s not like a video game. No voice comes booming out of the sky saying, “Congrats. You have completed level existence. You have unlocked level durability.”

There’s no booming voice about unlocking consciousness either.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
8/1/2020 06:26:27 pm

I'm definitely on board with opposing essentialism. There are productive categories that are useful at certain levels of abstraction and for certain purposes, but the mistake is thinking of those categories as absolute platonic things. There always seem to be particular cases on the margins, where there's no clearly correct categorization.

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James of Seattle link
8/1/2020 06:16:58 pm

Great post, Ed. I even read (almost) all of the extra stuff, which is why it’s taken me so long to comment. I especially appreciate your extra-broad-scale (evolution) take on the topic, which contrasts with my micro view.

Instead of making general comments, I will reproduce the entire post with my comments inserted. [kidding, obv, but that was my inclination ]

I have to admit I got excited when you said we need to have a single unifying concept to understand consciousness, because I thought that was what I was doing by looking at the micro, but then I saw this:

“ 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 implies your unifying concept necessarily includes the goal of survival and life, which seems to me, um, problematic. At the end you suggest the possibility of consciousness in non-biological life. Must this non-biological life have the goal of survival, as opposed to some other goal?

*

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Ed Gibney
8/1/2020 07:52:19 pm

Thanks James. Take your time and write as much or as little as is helpful for you. I’ll be here to try and do the same in kind.

You ask a great question. Before I answer, I have to stress that “consciousness” is just a label to me. And I’ve mostly tried to gather a broad understanding of what it *is* rather than theories about what it could be.

So, if I imagine a very sophisticated artificial life that, let’s say senses the world beautifully well and acts as the perfect assistant to me. If this assistant has no regard for its own survival though and does nothing when I take it apart bolt by bolt, I’d kinda say, yeah, that’s not conscious. If it has no regard for itself (or a kin or a meme or anything that might survive), then it’s hard for me to imagine having regard for “what it’s like to be” it. Does this assistant with another goal have some interesting cognitive capacities? Sure. And maybe we can discuss them and invent a new term for them. But I think I’d reserve consciousness for my definition. I could be wrong. My imagination isn’t perfect. What do you think?

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James of Seattle
8/1/2020 08:59:03 pm

What if it really really wants to assist you. Or really really wants you to enjoy your elevator ride (although in that reference, it does have a survival instinct, as it really really wants to take you to the basement), or my favorite, really really wants to make you toast.

It just seems to me that your assistant might be able to talk about the redness of seeing red, and talk about what seems to be it’s own consciousness. I think you’re saying it would be a zombie assistant.

*

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SelfAwarePatterns link
8/1/2020 08:58:01 pm

This is why consciousness is in the eye of the beholder. A machine that is able to be aware of its environment and itself, but with no self concern (aside presumably for what is necessary to carry out its function), doesn't trigger many people's intuition of a conscious being.

It's worth noting that once we know how to build such a machine, putting in impulses related to self concern probably wouldn't be that hard. (Although we should probably think very carefully before we do put in those impulses.) (There are some who think we won't achieve general intelligence until its grounded on those kinds of impulses.)

Anyway, maybe an alternate label for what that kind of system has is "agency."

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James of Seattle
8/1/2020 09:07:53 pm

I was gonna try to be clever, but I’ll just say what I said above. You’re suggesting p-zombies.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
8/1/2020 09:21:41 pm

It's only p-zombies if they have *all* the capabilities of a conscious being without being conscious. If someone's definition of consciousness requires self concern, and the system doesn't have that, then it isn't a zombie to them.

Overall, I think zombies are incoherent, except under some form of strict epiphenomenalism.

James of Seattle link
8/1/2020 09:26:48 pm

I should point out that I absolutely agree that purpose/function enters into the explanation of consciousness, but it comes in as the final cause, the teleonomic cause, the reason the (conscious) mechanism was created. But that cause does not change how the mechanism functions. That reason could be defunct, but the conscious mechanism, the conscious “agent”, would continue on, and still be conscious.

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Ed Gibney
8/2/2020 09:55:22 am

Mike is right that such assistants wouldn’t be p-zombies. They wouldn’t act *exactly* like us at all. They would be h-zombies, where h = Hollywood. Just substitute “braaiiinnnss” with “ttooaasstt” and you get the same thing. (Fun story idea!) Both h-zombies get destroyed without much compunction. (Although why would I when I like toast!)

I also agree this is in the eye of the beholder, but I wouldn’t use “agency” for such servants because agency requires an agent and these things wouldn’t have any sense of that (according to the way we’re discussing making them). They’d have “program freedom” or something like that. I’m not sure we have a word for this yet, which makes sense because it’s a form of existence that hasn’t yet existed.

I also agree it wouldn’t be that hard to give such programs a survival goal, and it would be dangerous to do so. One of the reasons the survival goal for all of life works is because we’re all so connected through ecosystem dependence. The systems self regulate (eventually) to keep in balance. A non-biological life would have no such implicit governance and might easily wipe out biological life. I’ve suggested in other writing that we therefore ought to consider giving artificial intelligence a biological link before turning it loose, but there is lots of danger there too. (And I don’t know how either.)

James — a quick aside on “suffering”. Sure, your definition is fine at first glance. Feelings are more labels that just need consensus to be used, and I provisionally grant mine to yours if you want to continue any points about suffering.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
8/2/2020 02:25:01 pm

There is the danger if we give them survival goals that they may turn on us. But long before we have superhuman intelligent machines capable of destroying us, I think we're going to have machines with the intelligence of an animal, say, a dog. Giving such a machine self concern, unless we're prepared to adopt it as a permanent pet, strikes me as pretty cruel.

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James of Seattle
8/2/2020 04:19:44 pm

I think the danger is not giving survival goals per se so much as prioritizing. Self-driving cars have survival goals. The roomba which goes back to its charger when the battery is low has a survival goal.

The problem comes when we give it the priority of “survive at all costs”. The question is will we give the self-driving truck (say, having no passengers) the priority of hitting a pedestrian instead of veering off the cliff. [What about a horse? A deer? A dog? Another self-driving empty truck?]

*

James of Seattle
8/2/2020 04:11:26 pm

Man, writing is so hard when discussing concepts that different people have, and you have to dig and poke just to find those differences.

On zombies, I’m trying to find the difference that makes a difference. A p-zombie is considered to have exactly zero consciousness. Not a little, not a tiny bit, but zero. So if you want to say that the only reason a particular zombie is not conscious is because it does not have a self-preservation goal, I want you to explain what the smallest addition you can make, physically, to move the zombie from zero consciousness to non-zero consciousness, and explain why that difference is necessary for consciousness, including the consciousness of seeing red. Again note: you don’t need to explain the usefulness of seeing red, but you need to explain why there is no consciousness of seeing red unless there is, right now, in the present seeing mechanism, a usefulness. [A thought experiment just came to me: imagine Elon Musk creates a device to electrically stimulate cells in your visual cortex in response to certain microwave radiation at a specific wavelength, so that you “see” it. You would then become conscious of activity of some but not all cell phones. Would that consciousness require an explanation of self-preservation?]

On “agent”, I’m not sure how you guys are defining it. My working definition is:
1. A thing which *does stuff* for
2. a reason/purpose/goal.
The assistant without a self-preservation goal has other goals and does things to achieve them, so to me it is an agent.

*

Reply
Ed Gibney
8/2/2020 05:17:35 pm

Difficult indeed James.

—> , I want you to explain what the smallest addition you can make, physically, to move the zombie from zero consciousness to non-zero consciousness, and explain why that difference is necessary for consciousness, including the consciousness of seeing red.“

First, I’m going to reject the question as looking for an on/off switch to consciousness that isn’t there.

Second, I have to reiterate that I’m personally really concerned with straightening out the concept of consciousness within biological organisms, as that’s where the concept arose. I can choose to restrict the concept to biology just on those grounds alone. Look at the criterial for life. Got it? Okay go from there. Zoombas and self-driving cars don’t meet the minimum criteria of organisation, growth, and reproduction, so I don’t consider them to have survival goals because they are not alive. Consciousness isn’t about “seeing red” to me. That doesn’t get you anywhere on its own.

Maybe we can try another line of attack to find some agreement. Is there “something it is like” for a Tesla to see a parking space? Yes. Forces are exerted and changes are made to matter. This is well within the “pandynamism” I set out where forces are everywhere and matter is not inert. Would I call that consciousness? No. By definition I’ve reserved that for things that meet the criteria for life. Can we give that Tesla’s experience a name? Sure. I guess. But haven’t got one yet. And I think it’s radically different than biological consciousness.

[I fear this is going to be a rift between us as big as the divide between life and non-life.]

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James of Seattle
8/2/2020 06:02:23 pm

First, I reject your rejection. [cheshire grin]

Second, we are far more in agreement than I think you think. I accept that you are restricting your consideration of consciousness to “consciousness of life”, which right there excludes roombas.

But [here it comes], there are certain patterns that are observable in things that are biologically alive which are also observable in certain things that are not biologically alive. These patterns were first actually observed in things that were actually alive because at the time they were first observed, nothing existed that wasn’t alive and exhibited those patterns. So we gave names to those patterns, and it was easy to assume that those patterns required life, because those patterns were only seen in living things.

Until they weren’t only seen in living things. So we have names for patterns which only existed in living things, until now. We have two options: 1. reserve the name that we have for the pattern when seen in living things and come up with a new name for the pattern when we see it in non-living things, or 2. use the same name for both. You’re choosing 1. I choose 2.

:P

*

Reply
Ed Gibney
8/2/2020 06:16:45 pm

That’s an excellent summary of the two options. I would add, however, that with consciousness in particular, we aren’t talking about externally observable behaviour. We’re talking about the inner subjective feel (that requires a subject). Behavioural patterns alone just gets you back to zombies.

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James of Seattle
8/2/2020 06:34:23 pm

There’s the rub. I’m gonna say an inner subjective feel is objectively explainable, and so there will be objective explanations of why what you are calling a zombie (non-living agent exhibiting “conscious-like” behavior) actually does have an inner subjective feel, and so is a subject. The objective explanation is not the “feeling”, but it’s all you can get. Just like there is an objective explanation of John’s broken foot, there is also a subject which “has” the broken foot, and nobody else can “have” that broken foot.

*

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James of Seattle
8/2/2020 06:37:19 pm

I should be explicit: I will argue that your inner subjective “feel” can be explained by physically observable events. With sufficient knowledge, you could predict everything involved with the “feel”. But only the subject can “have” the feel.

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James of Seattle
8/2/2020 06:45:04 pm

To be yet more explicit, I will argue that if I see physically observable events in you that lead to a “feel” in you, and I see essentially similar events in something else, I will anticipate that something else has a similar, but not the same, “feel”.

Reply
Ed Gibney
8/2/2020 07:23:45 pm

Well, if you can be sure of some physical activity that *is* conscious subjective experience, then all power to you. I’m worried that’s an impossible task because of exactly what you say that only the subject can feel it. If we’re the only subjects that can feel it AND discuss it, then I find it hard to see what physical occurrence will give us subjective feel AND be the same in other things. I mean, it’s possible, but hasn’t been found yet.

I’d like to further reiterate that this is just the first of Tinbergen’s 4 questions. According to evolutionary theory, if you want to understand a product of evolution, you have to grasp all 4 of Tinbergen’s questions. Once you add mechanisms, ontology, and phylogeny to these functions I’ve laid out in a hierarchy, then the differences between my “consciousness” and yours sounds further and further apart.

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James of Seattle
8/2/2020 09:09:02 pm

To say it correctly you have to be very careful with your words. For example, calling an activity a conscious subjective experience has all kinds of problems. All “experiences” have a subject, just like all “rollings down a hill” have a subject, i.e., the thing rolling down the hill. I’m not sure what referring to it as the “subjective rolling down the hill” buys you. Does that mean you are not referring to the objective rolling, but just the subjective rolling? Not sure what that would mean. And likewise, if I can describe (via the “easy” problems of neuroscience) the activity which is “experience”, I’m not sure what “subjective experience” is. I can identify the activity and the subject. That’s all there is. When you say of “subjective experience” only the subject can “feel” it, I would say that neuroscience will describe objectively everything about the “feeling”, but only the subject can *do* the “feeling”.

Re: Tinbergen’s questions, I look forward to your analysis, and I absolutely appreciate and encourage your examination at the evolutionary scale. But I will warn you that I have a perspective on this that derives from my Aristotelian understanding of causation. Specifically, for the consideration of consciousness per se, whether something is conscious is determined by the mechanism, so Tinbergen’s second question. This mechanism describes Aristotle’s material, efficient, and formal causes. Tinbergen’s other questions all address Aristotle’s final cause in terms of both “how come?”, answered by ontology and phylogeny, and “what for”, answered by the function(s) you describe here. So again, function, ontology, and phylogeny explain how you get a conscious mechanism. Mechanism explains how Consciousness works, irrespective of function, ontology, and phylogeny.

*

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Ed Gibney
8/3/2020 06:27:26 am

That’s cool. I can agree with everything you say there. I will just warn that I’m calling ALL of these mechanisms and functions and histories the aspects of consciousness. I don’t think one can pluck one thing out of here (let’s say sense perception) and say “thats consciousness and my machine has it!” I really see the building up process, especially including affect, as (literally) vital to the experience. Theoretically, sure, I think that can be built up artificially. And it doesn’t require a personal (ontogenetic) or species (phylogenetic) history to get there. But I want to see the artificial mimicking done and understood comprehensively before calling it something as complex and multifaceted as consciousness.

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James of Seattle
8/3/2020 09:32:14 pm

Fair enough. Waiting for the next installment.

*
[tap, tap, tap, tap, ...]

Reply
Gene link
9/14/2020 03:37:01 am

Thank you for this amazing series! I am trying to work my way through it, but came across this post first. I'm sorry to ask a question before reading everything closely, but this statement really surprised me:

"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."

This story always seemed credible to me:

1. Consciousness - however defined - has a distinctive form in humans. That is, the human experience of consciousness is not like the experience that other animals have of their mental processes.

2. IF consciousness has an evolutionary function, it's likely that the function is related to scaling, i.e. to group success rather than individual success. In other words, the zombie human does - by definition - seem just as individually capable as a conscious human. Extending that definition to a group seems like a stretch that would need more explanation than just being part of the premise of the thought experiment.

3. What does it mean to say that consciousness enables scale? Another way to ask this question is: *What is the obstacle to scaling that consciousness might solve?*

- Consider that each and every human is composed of roughly the same base genetic material. In other words, each and every human has the innate ability to lead other humans.

- Leadership is required to scale. The very definition of scaling is that one decision broadens quickly into massive impact.

- If human leadership is required to scale, how do we pick leaders given that each and every human has roughly the same ability to lead? This is a scaling problem that does not exist for anthills or schools of fish or flocks of birds. Humans have this scaling problem in a massive way, due to the fact that each human is so innately powerful.

4. Consciousness gives humans the ability to tell stories to each other so that some will follow and others will lead, despite the fact that none "deserves" leadership from a biological perspective. A very small number of humans controls the life outcomes for billions of humans - that requires very elaborate stories indeed.

This is an amateur story, but it seems at least somewhat credible, I think? Maybe it's a circular argument, I'm not sure. And of course, it's not detailed or disciplined enough, it's just a story. Anyway, I'll try to read the posts in more detail to learn more. Thanks!

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Ed Gibney link
9/14/2020 10:51:48 am

Thanks Gene. Glad to see you followed up on my tweet to give this a look. Please do consider checking out the rest of the series to maybe see if that answers or brings up further questions.

So I have a few issues with your story of consciousness, but they probably start with your definition of C, which I don't actually see, but I infer to be something very late in the evolutionary process and something like "conscious awareness". As you'll see in my post here, I consider that as the 5th level of my hierarchy, with the 6th being the kind of abstract thinking that may be uniquely human. (The extent of our abstract thinking is certainly unique.)

So, in your story of C, I'll agree with point 1 that human experience is unique, but I'll quibble with the assertion that "it is not like the experience that other animals have." We share an enormous part of our evolutionary history with other life, and so we share a lot of the characteristics of consciousness too. Evolutionary thinking lends itself to thinking in gradations of similarities rather than discrete qualitative differences.

I'll somewhat agree with your point 2 that human consciousness extends over vaster scales than other beings, but it's so much more than individual vs. group success. According to my definition of C, it is about "sensing, understanding, and responding to all biological forces." Our culture and tools have given us the ability to grasp so many more of these over so much longer timeframes leading to so many more complicated causal chains.

(By the way, google "The unimagined preposterousness of zombies" and read that paper by Dan Dennett to see why your zombie assertions don't fit with mine.)

I really don't follow the leap to leadership as it relates to scale. Lots and lots of social species have hierarchies and leadership. We're not unique in that at all.

Stories do seem to be an important part of our abstract thinking abilities though, which extends our consciousness far beyond the mere working memories of 7+/-2 things that George Miller noted in the 1950's. That is vital, although the development of the abstract ability to write seems to me to be the leap that *really* made us special since that leads to sharing knowledge much more widely, much more precisely, and with a kind of compounding interest over the years that verbal communication alone cannot keep up with.

I'd be very wary of ascribing too much power to "a very small number of humans". That's just not the way knowledge and stories grow and develop. It takes a village to make ideas. And it takes consensus to move groups. Keep working on your story though! That's how yours and all of ours continue to adapt and change towards (hopefully) more survival.

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Gene Yoon link
9/14/2020 03:25:17 pm

Thanks Ed! I really appreciate it when a scholar responds to the uneducated ramblings of a layperson like me. There was a joke recently on Twitter about how physics professors routinely field inquiries from nutters who claim to have figured out the problems with quantum physics. I imagine it just be like that for academics who study consciousness. This stuff is fascinating, thanks again!

Ed Gibney link
9/14/2020 03:40:30 pm

The pleasure is mine Gene. I'm an independent scholar on this stuff so it's always good to get some feedback and a chance to sharpen my points through an exchange. Cheers.

Reply



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