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Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective

3/25/2020

6 Comments

 
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In the last post, I introduced illusionism using an interview with Keith Frankish. (Which he himself retweeted!) I mentioned that illusionists don't think our conscious experience is an illusion, just that our experience of it is papering over what's really going on behind the scenes. It's a little like pointing out that old projection movies give us the illusion of fluid motion on the screen when in reality there is just a series of still images flying by too fast for us to perceive. But what, then, is the reality behind our illusion of consciousness?

That's the question we'll be diving into for pretty much the rest of the series. Most of the research into that question has been done by neuroscientists, but before we get to them, there's one more pure philosopher we ought to consider to help set the stage, and that is Dan Dennett. Dennett has been prominently working on consciousness for decades. I'll be honest that I've never gone back and read his 1991 doorstopper Consciousness Explained, but I figure his 2017 book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds would supplant that now. Plus, the neuroscience has exploded since 1991, so why go back? The wikipedia entries that I've linked to for those books offer very quick summaries, but I'm going to focus in this post on a Google Talk that Dennett gave about FBtBaB. Here are the most important points from his hour-plus talk:
  • The history of life is an R&D project, a design process that exploits information in the environment to create, maintain, and improve the design of things.
  • R&D takes time and energy. There are two main types: evolution by natural selection, and human intelligent design. There have been intelligent designers for only about 100,000 years. You should not read back our intelligent design efforts into nature.
  • Evolutionary design is purposeless, foresightless, extremely costly (99% of everything that ever lived died childless), and very slow. Intelligent design is purposeful, goal directed, somewhat foresighted, governed by cost considerations, and relatively fast.
  • A termite mound might be 70 million clueless termites. A brain might be 86 billion clueless neurons. There are no captains, lieutenants, or generals in the brain. How [then] do you get a mind capable of intelligent design out of such a brain?
  • Short answer: You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain. A termite colony is a bare brain. Intelligent designers have well-equipped brains. They have thinking tools.
  • Long answer: Cultural evolution designed thinking tools that impose novel structures on our brains: virtual machines that could travel and be installed on different brains to give them powers they otherwise didn’t have (“apps we download into our necktops”).
  • Darwin’s strange inversion of reason: in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not necessary to know how to make it.
  • Turing’s strange inversion of reason: in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not necessary to know what arithmetic is.
  • These yield Dennett’s bumper sticker: Competence Without Comprehension
  • The upshot of this is that the mind (consciousness, understanding, etc.) is the effect, not the cause. It’s not a mind-first universe; it’s a matter-first universe. Minds came recently.
  • ​There’s a difference between how come ("Why are planets spheres?") and what for ("Why are ball bearings spheres?"). The teleology of "what for" enters the world gradually. Darwin showed that it didn’t always have to be there.
  • Panpsychism is the view that everything is conscious. And I almost agree with it, but I just have to change the view a little bit. I call my view “pan-niftyism” — every atom is nifty, every electron is nifty. The question then is, is there any difference between panpsychism and pan-niftyism? They both explain the same thing—nothing. To say conscious things are made out of conscious things doesn’t necessarily follow. Coloured things aren’t made of coloured things.
  • The (Paul) MacCready Explosion: 10,000 years ago, human population plus livestock and pets were approximately 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today, it is 98%. This is probably the biggest, fastest, biological change on the planet ever. Genes don’t explain it. Technology does.
  • [The creation of] eukaryotic cells was one of the first great transfers of technology. A recent one is the invasion of human brains by symbiotic thinking tools called memes.
  • These memes are “free floating reasons” as opposed to the reasons that saturate the biotic world. Trees, fungi, bacteria, non-human animals, etc. all do things for reasons. But they aren’t aware of them. We can be.
  • Bach was a top example of experimenting with purpose. He deeply understood his instruments and the history and theory of music in order to prolifically produce genius compositions. How [then] to get from blind genetic evolution to Bach?
  • First step is synanthropic words. Synanthropic means things that thrive along with humans (e.g. seagulls, cockroaches, etc.). Nobody owned the first words; they were just habits that developed. [E.g. screeching for certain predators or specific dangers.]
  • Next are domesticated words. Domesticated means the reproduction is controlled. For words, this means conscious choosing of one over the other. This leads to differential replication. Meanings or pronunciations can change over time, but the best ones survive, usually without even noticing why.
  • The next step are coined words, deliberately designed, although their survival is still down to selection. Then there are technical terms, which are very carefully designed, and curated under strong group pressure. E.g. phenotype vs. genotype. These are hyper-domesticated words.
  • This describes the age of intelligent design—ever-controlled more and more in a top-down method. Now, however, we are entering the age of post-intelligent design, where we have learned that the power of evolution is smarter than we are so we can create without comprehension. [Thus going from Bach back to bacteria.]

Brief Comments
I really don't have much to add to this other than that it's a good introduction to the ideas that complexity can arise very gradually without foresight, and the cultural evolution of language is a good hypothesis for providing an instrumental difference maker in the kind of minds that we humans have. If you are reading this post on a website called evolutionary philosophy, you probably already agree with this. But I wanted to stop and make this point specifically before l go on a deeper dive into Dennett's thoughts in the next post.

Oh and I had to share this talk because I loved Dennett's quip about pan-niftyism. That surrender to explaining nothing is essentially my view of the panpsychists' project (if you can even call it a project). So, this post puts a nice bow on the end of that discussion too.

What do you think? Do you have any hesitations or questions about the role evolution can play in the history of that thing we currently call consciousness?

--------------------------------------------
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?
6 Comments
SelfAwarePatterns link
3/25/2020 06:01:47 pm

The pan-nifty quip is awesome. The thing is, we can also use it for a lot of consciousness talk. I'm currently reading a book that looks at when in evolution consciousness began, with various people arguing that this or that is necessary for consciousness. After a while, the whole thing starts to feel like a debate on when niftyism began.

And that's the thing that looking at this from an evolutionary perspective has done for me. "Consciousness" essentially refers to systems like us. How much like us does another system have to be before we say it's conscious? Whether talking about non-human animals, babies, brain injured patients, or some future version of AI, I don't think there's a fact of the matter. Consciousness lies in the eye of the beholder.

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James of Seattle
3/25/2020 07:01:39 pm

Ditto on pan-niftyism. For the record, my go to in this regard is pan-angelism.

However, I do want to poke at the phrase “Evolutionary design is purposeless”. I think it’s important to make the distinction between teleonomy and teleology. Teleonomic purpose is real, and in the end, teleologic purpose is just meta-teleonomic purpose. Is this controversial?

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Sylvia Jane Wojcik
3/25/2020 07:06:51 pm

Shouldn't Thomas Nagel be one of the thinkers you examine in this wonderful series. Beyond his classic-- "What is it like to be a bat?"--more important is his Mind and Cosmos which puts the problem in a larger or more fundamental context.

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Ed Gibney link
3/26/2020 12:51:36 pm

Mike — yep. This is my life with evolutionary thinking. One of my favourite articles to cite to people is Dan Dennett's "Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism." It was in an excellent edited collection published in 2016 called "How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism."

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/Demise_of_Essentialism.pdf

James — I'm wasn't familiar with telenomy or meta-telenomic, so I can't say I fully get what you mean. When you say "telenomic purpose is real", I think that has the same effect as when I say that "things that survive are what will always emerge from evolutionary systems." I don't see how calling that "purpose" helps in any way though. Purpose has too many other connotations. So, I don't think you are being controversial here, just maybe not entirely clear to me.

Sylvia — Hi again! Thanks for the comment. I will remind people later what I've already said about Nagel's "What's it like to be a bat?" I'm not a fan though, and feel his anti-materialism is a side track that I've already debated. This quote on the wikipedia entry for Mind and Cosmos sums up my feelings nicely:

"Physicist Sean M. Carroll negatively reviewed the book concluding "Nagel advocates overthrowing things that are precisely defined, extremely robust, and impressively well-tested (the known laws of physics, natural selection) on the basis of ideas that are rather vague and much less well-supported (a conviction that consciousness can’t be explained physically, a demand for intelligibility, moral realism).""

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James of Seattle
3/26/2020 05:15:14 pm

[teleonomic, with an “o”, ;) ]

Ed, I can see the reluctance to apply “purpose” to natural mechanisms, and I note that the online/Wikipedia definition of teleonomy refers to “apparent purpose”. In speaking on the subject, Richard Dawkins refers to archeo-purpose. But having thought about this a lot, I no longer see the point of the distinction. The distinction would be in the same class as saying a fully intelligent robot doesn’t “think” because it’s not using a biological brain. For “purpose”, in each case (Nature and Human), there is a system which creates mechanisms which move the environment toward a particular “goal” state. I do admit to a distinction between design (Human) and selection (Nature), although, on further thought (which means I just thought of this now), the two systems may be more similar than most people think. Both systems (probably? may?) involve two steps: 1 production of multiple possible mechanisms, and 2. selection of one which moves the environment towards the goal. It’s just that the human mechanisms start inside the brain.

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Ed Gibney link
3/27/2020 10:31:08 am

Eeek! What's the number of consistent misspellings one can make and still claim a typo? Probably not 3. I told you I was unfamiliar with *teleonomy*! : )

Once you add free will scepticism into the mix, I think purpose loses some meaning anyway so I'm technically with you on this. I'm just wondering about the best way to communicate to the general public without jargon. A quick google of "define: purpose" shows:

(1) the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists
(2) a person's sense of resolve or determination

So, it's clearly 2 that is contaminating 1 in any concern I have. And that makes me prefer more neutral, passive constructions. It's just a nitpick or a preference though. It's not like we have a philosophically perfect language to fall back on.

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