Blog Posts

Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology

6/23/2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know from experiments and observations in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, geology, and meteorology that the early pre-biotic Earth was filled with organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Organic molecules are actually quite common in space. We also know that early life must have been extremely simple, meaning no complex protein machinery. Modern cells separate themselves from the environment with a lipid bilayer (internally hydrophobic, externally hydrophilic). The problem with modern phospholipids is that they are too good at what they do. They form a nearly impenetrable barrier. Modern cells must use proteins to move molecules through their surface. But life didn’t have to start with modern chemicals!
The pre-biotic environment contained many simple fatty acids. Under a range of pH, they spontaneously form stable vesicles (fluid-filled bladders). And they are permeable to small organic molecules, meaning no complex proteins are required to get stuff in. When a vesicle encounters free fatty acids in solution, it will incorporate them. Eating and growth are driven purely by thermodynamics. When a vesicle grows, it adopts a tubular branched shape (because surface area grows faster than volume), which is easily divided by mechanical forces (e.g. waves, currents, rocks, etc.). During mechanical division, none of the contents of the vesicle are lost.
So far, with naturally occurring simple fatty acids, we have a vesicle that can spontaneously grow and divide. So, what about the genetic material? Again, modern nucleotides are too stable and require complex protein machinery to replicate. The pre-biotic environment contained hundreds of types of different nucleotides (not just DNA and RNA). All it took was for one to self-polymerize. Recent experiments have shown that some of these are capable of spontaneous polymerization where monomers will base pair with a single stranded template and self ligate. In other words, strings X (e.g. AGGTACA) bond with specific strings Z (e.g. CTTGCAC) using hydrogen bonds for each base pair and covalent bonds for further ligation. They can also polymerize in solution and spontaneously form new templates or extend existing templates. No special sequences are required. It’s just chemistry.
So far, we have lipid vesicles that can grow and divide, and nucleotide polymers that can self-replicate, all on their own. But how does it become life? Here’s how. Our fatty acid vesicles are permeable to nucleotide monomers, but not polymers. (Single chains can get in; bonded ones can’t get out.) Once spontaneous polymerization occurs within the vesicle, the polymer is trapped. Floating though the ocean, the polymer-containing vesicles will encounter convection currents such as those set up by hydrothermal vents. (Fatty acid vesicles are stable under near boiling conditions.) The high temperatures will separate the polymer strands and increase the membrane’s permeability to monomers. Once the temperature cools, spontaneous polymerization can occur. And the cycle repeats. Here’s where it gets cool.
The polymer, due to surrounding ions, will increase the osmotic pressure within the vesicle, stretching its membrane. A vesicle with more polymer, through simple thermodynamics, will “steal” lipids from a vesicle with less polymer. This is the origin of competition. They eat each other. A vesicle that contains a polymer that can replicate faster will grow and divide faster, eventually dominating the population.
Let’s review: Monomers diffuse into a fatty acid vesicle. Monomers spontaneously polymerize and copy any template. Heat separates strands and increases membrane permeability to monomers. Polymer backbones attract ions, increasing osmotic pressure. Pressure on the membrane drives its growth at the expense of nearby vesicles containing less polymer. Vesicles grow into tubular structures. Mechanical forces cause vesicles to divide. Daughter vesicles inherit polymers from the parent vesicle. Polymer sequences that replicate faster will dominate the population. Thus beginning evolution!
Early genomes were completely random and therefore contained no information. It was their ability to spontaneously replicate, irrespective of sequence, that drove growth and division of the fatty acid vesicles. Any mutation that increases the rate of polymer replication would be selected for. And, as we know, mutation + natural selection = increased information. Early beneficial mutations would include: “change in sequence to contain only the most common nucleotides”; “don’t form secondary structures that block replication”; “form sequences that are stable yet separate easily”; and “form secondary structures that show some enzymatic activity”.
Just like RNA, early nucleotides could both store information and function as enzymes. Early polymer enzymes would enhance replication, use high energy molecules in the environment (near thermal vents) to recharge monomers, synthesize lipids from other molecules in the environment, modify lipids so they don’t leave a membrane, and that’s it. That’s it! A simple 2-component system that spontaneously forms in the pre-biotic environment can eat, grow, contain information, replicate, and evolve, simply through thermodynamic, mechanical, and electrical forces. No ridiculous improbability, no supernatural forces, no lightening striking a mud puddle. Just chemistry.
For much more on this RNA world hypothesis, see the video series with Dr. Jack Szostak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, we’ve identified the most fundamental forces and laws affecting life on Earth. There are, of course, many ways that the ultimate question of survival can be determined, and life has been slowly learning to sense and understand these over billions of years. For example, there are so many things that can kill you, your genes, your kin, or your species, and they can all do so in the immediate, medium, or very long term. Living organisms that can sense and respond to more and more of these threats are the ones that will last and emerge over time. Such organisms will sense many, many needs to meet all of the threats and exploit all of the opportunities in its environment. Each living organism’s unique genetic, environmental, and evolutionary histories are constantly leading to changes in the relative strengths of these needs, but at no point does something outside of the physical realm enter into the equation. All of these needs can be described through physical properties, even if the magnitude of their felt force cannot yet be calculated.

The ever-growing list of threats and opportunities is why the needs of life are ever-growing too. The psychologist Abraham Maslow studied these for individual humans and produced his famous Hierarchy of Needs. In a 2017 article, I generalised these and adapted them to apply to all of life, thereby producing something I call an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs. Here are some details from that work:

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

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

The evolutionary perspective of our diverse and ever-changing web of life transforms Maslow’s hierarchy. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid, we see that the ‘physiological’ needs of the human are merely the brute ingredients necessary for ‘existence’ that any form of life might have. In order for that existence to survive through time, the second-level needs for ‘safety and security’ can be understood as promoting ‘durability’ in living things. The third-tier requirements for ‘love and belonging’ are necessary outcomes from the unavoidable ‘interactions’ that take place in our deeply interconnected biome of Earth. The ‘self-esteem’ needs of individuals could be seen merely as ways for organisms to carve out a useful ‘identity’ within the chaos of competition and cooperation that characterizes the struggle for survival. And finally, the ‘self-actualization’ that Maslow struggled to define could be seen as the end, goal, or purpose that an individual takes on so that they may (consciously or unconsciously) have an ultimate arbiter for the choices that have to be made during their lifetime. This is something Aristotle called ‘telos’.

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

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs for Human Individuals

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

Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs for Evolutionary Biology to Occur

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

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

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

Where might consciousness fit into all of this??

In my last post about the history of philosophical and scientific studies of consciousness, I noted an etymological root of the word that I think offers some help. Wikipedia noted that the English word ‘conscious’ originally derived from the Latin conscius where con meant ‘together’ and scio meant ‘to know’. According to this literal interpretation, to be conscious would be ‘to know’, which requires a knower. And to ‘know together, this conscious thing would need to know at least two things.

Do sub-atomic particles feeling fundamental forces meet these criteria? No. Do elements from the periodic table feeling intermolecular forces meet these criteria? Also no. Do living things feeling biological forces meet these criteria? Yes. Once chemistry makes the jump to biology, the resulting proto-life forms have a defined self AND they begin to compete for resources with other potential entrants, substitutes, or conspecifics in order to self-replicate and survive. They know (from an outsiders’ perspective) what they are AND what they need. A radical panpsychist might claim that a quark can feel the strong nuclear force, or a hydrogen atom can feel the covalent bond in H2O, but I think a more natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm where life responds to biological forces to survive. Could artificial life also respond to these forces and be declared conscious? I think yes, although the “feeling of what it is like” to be such life would be very different from current biological life forms that are built from organic chemistry. We already believe the feeling of what is like to be a bat is likely very different from that of a cuttlefish, so the difference would be even greater for artificial life given the much larger change in underlying mechanisms. Yet both could be considered conscious in my definition.

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

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions

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

5/25/2020

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

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

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

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

Philosophical Considerations of Consciousness

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

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

Scientific Considerations of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

So, what is consciousness?

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

Dictionary Definitions of Consciousness

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

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

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

Brief Thoughts
So, attributions of consciousness stretch all the way from it being something as small as the private, ineffable, special feeling that only we rational humans have when we think about our thinking, right on down to it being a fundamental force of the universe that gives proto-feelings to an electron of what it’s like to be that electron. Wow. What a mess. As the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We should quell our desire to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many millions of years.”

“The demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”

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

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?

18 Comments

Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?

4/16/2020

8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory

8 Comments

Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory

4/11/2020

19 Comments

IIT. Simple summary. Devil in the details.

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

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

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

From the Wikipedia Entry on Integrated Information Theory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema

19 Comments

Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema

4/8/2020

8 Comments

Graziano with his ventriloquist puppet orangutan named Kevin. Consciousness studies sure do draw renegades.

In the last post, I noted that Dr. Ginger Campbell conducted one-on-one interviews with three prominent neuroscientists during the final episodes of her Brain Science podcast series on consciousness. We've already covered the first interview with Joseph LeDoux. Today, I'm going to go over the second interview with Michael Graziano about his book Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience. Graziano is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University where he has had a lab studying consciousness since 2010. Here are the highlights from his interview:

In 10 years of lab work, I have worked to put my ideas into an evolutionary context (i.e. how they developed), in order to give us an idea of the components that go into this thing we call consciousness.
More and more, people in the science of consciousness are beginning to coalesce around a coherent set of ideas. My work fits into this growing standard model of consciousness. This core set of scientists realise that we are machines and the brain is an information processing machine that thinks it has magic inside it because it builds somewhat imperfect models of the world inside it. This includes Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and even some Illusionists who talk of consciousness as an illusion. My theory is not a rival to these. We are moving past rivalry and towards an integrating picture of it all.
The realisation is coming that everything you think derives from information. No claims can be put out by the brain without information upon which to base it. This is just basic logic. The question then is how and why did the brain construct a particular piece of information? The brain can construct all sorts of seemingly crazy ideas (e.g. “I have a squirrel in my head instead of a brain.”)
I study movement control, which requires a whole model. If the brain wants to control the arm, it needs a model of the arm. It needs an internal model, a simulation of what an arm is and where it is at any one time. This is an engineering perspective, which is useful for the study of consciousness. Similar to the moving arm, the brain is continually shifting its focus of attention. So, how do you control that? The same way as the arm. The brain needs a model or simulation of attention, of what it means to focus resources on something.
This is called “attention schema theory”, which follows the “body schema” developed 100 years ago. Phantom limbs are good examples of “body schema”. By analogy, there must be a schema for attention—the brain's model for seeing information and processing it deeply.
Like all complex traits, you can go back very, very far and see this gradual transition where it becomes impossible to draw a line and say “the trait exists after this but not before this.” For example, you couldn't draw clear lines in evolution for hands, feet, and flippers. Consciousness is the same.
I start with attention—a basic ability of a nervous system to focus on a few things at a time and process them deeply. Some forms of this attention go back possibly all the way to the beginnings of nervous systems. Attention is at the root of intelligence. At the heart of intelligence is a very pragmatic problem: you only have so much energy and space for a brain, but you need to use it as efficiently as possible to process deeply and intelligently. How do you do that? Don’t occupy the brain with processing all of the million and a half things going on around you. Focus on one or two things at a time. Without that level of attention, any kind of intelligence is impossible.
Attention comes in very early in evolution, and over time it becomes more and more complex. There’s central attention, sensory attention, more cognitive kinds of attention, and they emerge gradually over this sweep of history from about half a billion years ago up to the present. Piggybacking off of this, what people call consciousness also emerged, and also as a gradual process.
Attention can be separable from consciousness. At what point might it be consciousness?
Bodies have been involved from the beginning. Schemas only came once nervous systems were capable of building models of these bodies. A body schema stands hierarchically above the body. It isn’t the same thing, and they can be dissociated (e.g. phantom limbs). Similarly, this is the relationship between attention and consciousness. Attention is literally what the brain is focusing its resources on. The Attention Schema is what the brain thinks it is focusing its resources on, what the brain thinks focusing is, and what the brain thinks the consequences of focusing are. And those are dissociable too. Typically, they don’t. Typically, they track quite well (like the body schema), but you can trick them and get them to peel off from one another.
Global Workspace Theory is basically a theory about attention. How do you become conscious of an apple you are looking at? GWT says you attend to the signals. They become stronger from your visual system at the expense of other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called “ignition” when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Now attention has been reached, you can talk about it, you can move toward it, you can remember it later. The apple information reaches the global workspace and becomes available all around the brain systems. GWT says that is consciousness. The weakness of GWT is that it doesn’t explain why we claim to have a subjective experience. It doesn’t say why I have an inner experience of the apple.
The attention schema says great for GWT, but you need one more component—a system in the brain that says “Ah, I am attending to the apple. I have a global workspace that has taken in that apple information.” You need something in the brain that can model itself and build some kind of self-description. GWT is the attention. Attention Schema is the consciousness riding on top of that.
To control something, you need a model of it. But an overly complicated one is wasteful. A “cartoonish” one is good enough.
Why does it feel non-physical? This is one of the most successful points about the Attention Schema. The brain models itself, but it doesn’t need to include little physical details. It doesn’t need to know anything about the little implementation details. Therefore, the brain’s self-models depict something that has no physical components. It depicts a vague non-physical thing that has a kind of location within us, but that’s the only physical property it has. Efficiency dictates the models be as stripped down as possible. This is why introspection, informed by internal models, tells us there is something inside us but it feels like a non-physical essence.
With this Attention Schema, we don’t need another explanation for the philosopher’s qualia because there it is. Chalmers, after the Hard Problem, now talks about the Meta Problem. The Hard Problem is how do we get qualia, or that inner subjective feeling. The Meta Problem is why do we think there is a Hard Problem? The Attention Schema solves the Meta Problem. It explains why people think there is this magical non-physical thing inside us. It does an end run around the Hard Problem.
The ability to attribute consciousness to others is important. In this evolutionary process, we start out evolving an ability to model and keep track of ourselves, which helps make predictions about ourselves and control our behaviour. At some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to use the same machinery to model others. This social use probably came in very early in evolution. There is a lot of sophistication in reptiles, birds, and mammals. We not only keep track of and model our own attention, but we keep track of and model others’ attention. That allows me to predict your behaviour.
Ventriloquist dummies are great examples of our souped-up drive to model conscious minds in the world around us.
We seem to model attention as if it were a fluid flowing out of their eyes, which explains all kinds of folk beliefs about feeling eyes on the back of the neck, telekinesis, the Force in Star Wars, the evil eye, etc., etc.
Integrated Information Theory is kind of the opposite of this. IIT belongs to theories where you start with an axiomatic assumption. IIT starts with “consciousness exists” stating there is this non-physical feely thing inside us. The magical thing is there, so how does it emerge and under what conditions? So right from the outset there is a divergence. On my end, the starting point is that the brain cannot put out a claim unless there is information for that claim on which it is based. There is no reason to assume this information is accurate. When people feel they have magic, the job of scientists isn’t to find out how the brain produces magic; it’s to find out why the brain builds that model to describe itself. IIT is a fundamentally magical theory.
According to IIT, consciousness arises from information and everything in the universe has some information in it. So, you end up with panpsychism that consciousness exists in everything and everywhere. That seems like you’ve used faulty logic to paint yourself into a corner. If everything is conscious, what does consciousness even mean anymore?

(Not So Brief) Brief Comments
When Graziano opened his interview talking about putting consciousness into an evolutionary context, he had me hooked. When he stated the field was coalescing around a growing standard model of consciousness that brought together Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and even some Illusionists, I got excited because those were the theories I most agreed with in the prior posts in this series. When Graziano said this core set of scientists think that we are machines and the brain is an information processing machine that thinks it has magic inside it because it builds somewhat imperfect models of the world inside it, this made a lot of sense. But when Graziano tried to offer his picture to integrate all of this, he finally lost me. To see why, let me go through some of his points one by one.

>>> "No claims can be put out by the brain without information upon which to base it."

This is an excellent place to start. I'll use this later in the series when making connections between the evolution of consciousness and evolutionary epistemology, which charts the way knowledge-gathering has grown incrementally over evolutionary history.

>>> "If the brain wants to control the arm, it needs a model of the arm. It needs an internal model, a simulation of what an arm is and where it is at any one time. This is an engineering perspective, which is useful for the study of consciousness. Similar to the moving arm, the brain is continually shifting its focus of attention. So, how do you control that? The same way as the arm. The brain needs a model or simulation of attention, of what it means to focus resources on something. ... By analogy, there must be a schema for attention—the brain's model for seeing information and processing it deeply."

I believe Graziano is making a poor analogy here. When an arm moves, it moves through space and time by contracting muscles that cannot see anything. When a focus of attention shifts, no such physical movement or navigation issues occur. I think it's a mistake to think of models being required to control both of these different things in the same kind of way.

>>> "Attention is at the root of intelligence. At the heart of intelligence is a very pragmatic problem: you only have so much energy and space for a brain, but you need to use it as efficiently as possible to process deeply and intelligently. How do you do that? Don’t occupy the brain with processing all of the million and a half things going on around you. Focus on one or two things at a time. Without that level of attention, any kind of intelligence is impossible."

This isn't the way evolution works. It doesn't start with information about "a million and a half things" and then pare back from that. Early nervous systems would have begun by sensing just one or a few things, with lots of trial and error going on about which few things. The most successful senses would have been naturally selected for, and then gone on to (blindly) experiment with adding a few new bits of information to sense and process. This evolution never stops, but it only gets as far as it needs to in order to remain alive and reproduce. As Michael Ruse wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology, "Consider the much-discussed example of the frog, which snaps at anything suitably small, dark, and moving, regardless of whether it is frog food. A frog cannot discriminate between moving flies and small plastic pellets tossed in front of it no matter how many pass its way."

So, contrary to Graziano's claims, attention is NOT at the root of intelligence. And intelligence IS possible without attention. Intelligence can be very slowly built up by very narrow increments of additional information. Attention — the way that Graziano is using it — is really another word for choice, i.e. choosing which stimuli to "pay attention" to. But such choices do not need control; they can be made non-consciously by simply responding to the loudest signals, where evolutionary trials and errors shape what "loud signals" actually are. Think of the bees flying back from explorations for nectar and doing their wiggle dance to "convince" others to "listen" to them. It's just the most excited dances that "get paid attention to" by the rest of the hive. That doesn't require conscious choice. So, it's not obvious to me that attention is what consciousness is or is required for.

>>> "A body schema stands hierarchically above the body. It isn’t the same thing, and they can be dissociated (e.g. phantom limbs). Similarly, this is the relationship between attention and consciousness. Attention is literally what the brain is focusing its resources on. The Attention Schema is what the brain thinks it is focusing its resources on, what the brain thinks focusing is, and what the brain thinks the consequences of focusing are."

I think there is an excellent point here about body schemas and brain schemas both being separate from the actual bodies and brains. I just don't think attention is at the heart of it.

>>> "Global Workspace Theory is basically a theory about attention. How do you become conscious of an apple you are looking at? GWT says you attend to the signals. They become stronger from your visual system at the expense of other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called “ignition” when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Now attention has been reached, you can talk about it, you can move toward it, you can remember it later. The apple information reaches the global workspace and becomes available all around the brain systems. GWT says that is consciousness. The weakness of GWT is that it doesn’t explain why we claim to have a subjective experience. It doesn’t say why I have an inner experience of the apple."

>>> "The attention schema says great for GWT, but you need one more component—a system in the brain that says “Ah, I am attending to the apple. I have a global workspace that has taken in that apple information.” You need something in the brain that can model itself and build some kind of self-description. GWT is the attention. Attention Schema is the consciousness riding on top of that."

See. Graziano unwittingly contradicts himself here by describing GWT as the attention without the consciousness. All of the choices of attention can be made (through evolutionarily-learned ignition) without a schema sitting on top of it and controlling it. Again, I think he's right that a schema is needed, but it isn't about attention alone.

>>> To control something, you need a model of it. But an overly complicated one is wasteful. A “cartoonish” one is good enough.

I think this may be a big source of Graziano's errors on this. He is thinking like an engineer who is concerned with top-down "control" rather than thinking like an evolutionary biologist who sees bottom-up emergence. There is no top-down control or design in nature.

>>> "Why does it feel non-physical? This is one of the most successful points about the Attention Schema. The brain models itself, but it doesn’t need to include little physical details. It doesn’t need to know anything about the little implementation details. Efficiency dictates the models be as stripped down as possible."

This is more thinking like an engineer. Nature doesn't strip down; it builds up. And if more building provides an advantage, then that building up gets selected for. Why wouldn't an Attention Schema ever build up these little physical details? Graziano raises an excellent point, but I think there's a better answer just ahead.

>>> "The ability to attribute consciousness to others is important. In this evolutionary process, we start out evolving an ability to model and keep track of ourselves, which helps make predictions about ourselves and control our behaviour. At some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to use the same machinery to model others. This social use probably came in very early in evolution. There is a lot of sophistication in reptiles, birds, and mammals. We not only keep track of and model our own attention, but we keep track of and model others’ attention. That allows me to predict your behaviour."

Making models is vital, but I think Graziano has it backwards here. Life wouldn't have started with models of itself; it would have started with models of the outside world, with models of others. As we saw in my post about Antonio Damasio, "Valence / value evolved much earlier. Even bacteria can go toward food and away from danger." What is a model other than a set of if / then rules? What rules would a bacteria have in place about itself before it developed rules for going towards food and away from danger? I can't think of any.

Graziano says that "at some point, as social interactions become more sophisticated, we develop the ability to model others." But long before social interactions mattered, the predator / prey relationship would have dominated the natural selection of minds that could make models of others. And here is a big realisation. Those models....would not have had any physical inputs for them! To say it like a philosopher, I cannot know what it feels like to be a bat, but I may need to know how a bat might attack or elude me, so I will build a model in my head of that bat, even though I have no physical inputs into that model. In more philosophical jargon, the epistemic barrier created by living in a physical world where mental phenomena do not just leap across organisms is exactly the reason why our theories of minds have to feel non-physical.

[I feel like I hit on something big there.]

By the time our model-building of others could turn inwards, these models would have experienced a runaway arms race between predators and prey that shaped them into sophisticated, but non-physical, models. Such sophisticated external models would do just fine for understanding our internal selves, so there would be no need to develop a new model using all of the internal physical processes going on. In fact, there would likely be evolutionary harm to even try because the resources expended on such a project would be wasted with no chance to catch up to the existing model-making skill. (Note: even if the internal models were being built at the same time, the external ones would have faced much stiffer competition and developed more rapidly.)

>>> "With this Attention Schema, we don’t need another explanation for the philosopher’s qualia because there it is. Chalmers, after the Hard Problem, now talks about the Meta Problem. The Hard Problem is how do we get qualia, or that inner subjective feeling. The Meta Problem is why do we think there is a Hard Problem? The Attention Schema solves the Meta Problem. It explains why people think there is this magical non-physical thing inside us. It does an end run around the Hard Problem."

As we saw in my post about Chalmers, that's not an accurate description of the Hard and Meta problems. You can't make an "end run" around the Hard Problem. Chalmers doesn't consider the Meta Problem to be beyond it. (He called it another "easy" problem about behaviour.) I think my explanation works better as to why this magical thing inside of us feels non-physical. And it's an impossible question to ever answer all the whys behind the Hard Question.

>>> "We seem to model attention as if it were a fluid flowing out of their eyes, which explains all kinds of folk beliefs about feeling eyes on the back of the neck, telekinesis, the Force in Star Wars, the evil eye, etc., etc."

I think Graziano is mixing up the possible uses of attention here. His Attention Schema is about choosing to pay attention to *some* senses rather than others. Modelling the attention of another being is about modelling *everything* that that being can see. We model the fluid as if it were on all the time, not as if it were being paid attention to only occasionally. My idea — lets call it an ExteroSchema for now — may still build its model of vision as a fluid flowing out of others' eyes. That might be the easiest way to do it and it's a cool explanation of that range of folk beliefs.

>>> "IIT is a fundamentally magical theory."

Finally, Graziano finishes with a critique of Integrated Information Theory that sounds pretty dismissive. Our next post will be all about IIT though, so I look forward to diving into it and seeing how it is presented by a strong proponent.

What do you think? Do you agree with me that Graziano has some evolutionary ideas backwards? Does my explanation of modelling others first make more sense? I'd love to hear what you think of this in the comments below.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves

8 Comments

Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves

4/6/2020

1 Comment

Good thing that soul patch is only used in one of his specialties.

We're in the home stretch now for this series on consciousness. In the last three posts, I went over the summaries of books that Dr. Ginger Campbell provided in one of her Brain Science podcast episodes. That one episode was particularly useful, but it was just the first of a four-part series on consciousness. The next three episodes were one-on-one interviews with three more neuroscientists about their own studies of consciousness. Those interviews will provide the last three pieces of external research for my series.

The first interview was with Joseph LeDoux about his book The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. What a great evolutionary title! LeDoux is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU who has spent the last thirty years studying the brain mechanisms of fear and emotional memory. He's also the guitarist and songwriter for a funky band called The Amygdaloids who gave us the hep-cat, jazzy, yet informative little number Fearing. (Pretty awesome.) For a more straightforward lesson about consciousness, however, here are the highlights from LeDoux's interview with Dr. Campbell:

Higher-order representations is the category LeDoux prefers from among the 20 different theories of consciousness.
How far back in evolution does the ability to detect and respond to danger go? Other nonhuman animals do this. Even bees. But it’s much older still. Protozoa like paramecia or amoeba do it. Even bacteria do. In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning of life.
It's not just detecting danger either — incorporating nutrients, balancing fluids and ions, thermoregulation, reproduction for the species to survive — all of these behaviours exist in animals, but also in single-cell microbes. Value / valence / affect has also been present since the beginning of life (e.g. bacteria swim toward or away from things).
So, behaviour and even learning and memory do not require nervous systems.
When we do those things, we have subjective experiences about them, but those subjective experiences are not essential to the actions.
What is the relationship between behaviour and consciousness? We see behaviour in others so we attribute the same thoughts and feelings that we do. This makes sense for other human brains, but it is more and more dissimilar for other brains.
When we detect danger, we feel fear. But that may not always be the case. Split brain cases show one side getting a signal, the body acts, but then the other side can’t say why.
I hypothesised that emotional systems could generate non-conscious behaviours. I was able to trace the pathways through the amygdala to do this. Other research showed the amygdala is involved in implicit / non-conscious memories as opposed to conscious memories about detecting and responding to danger. I used this model for memories and applied it to emotions—i.e. implicit vs. explicit emotions. I thought of conscious explicit emotions as the product of cortical areas. Non-conscious emotions come out of the amygdala. The amygdala doesn’t experience fear; it just produces responses.
When stimuli are presented to patients, but masked so they can’t detect it consciously, the visual cortex and amygdala are activated and that’s it. When the stimulus is not masked, you get activation in the visual cortex, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex as well. ... In order to be conscious of an apple, it not only needs to be represented in your visual cortex, it needs to be re-represented, which involves the prefrontal cortex. ... So, the prefrontal cortex is emerging as an important area in the consolidation of our conscious experiences into what they are.
In other words, the ability to respond to and detect danger may be as old as life, but the feeling of fear may be a much more recent addition.
[Here's my 1st crazy idea.] What came first was cognition not emotion. I’m defining cognition as the ability to form internal representations of stimuli and to perform behaviours based on those representations. Cues are enough to stimulate the behaviour independent of the presence of the stimuli themselves. The representation alone is enough to guide the behaviour. That capacity exists in invertebrates, and on into all vertebrates, e.g. fish and reptiles. When you get to mammals, you have a much more complex form of cognitive representation, where it begins to look deliberative, i.e. the ability to form mental models that can be predictive of things not existing. It’s a much more complicated thing than having a static memory of what was there.
We assume that because mammals behave in much the same way that we do, they must be experiencing the same things. But the amygdala example of fear gives us some reason to be cautious about that. The short summary is that you should actually assume behaviour is unconscious unless proven otherwise.
In humans, we all know that we have these conscious experiences. In an experiment, we ask, “Can the response in this experiment be explained by a conscious state?” We have to rule out that the response is not coming from a non-conscious state. But we have a vast cognitive unconscious repository of information that allows us to get through the day without having to consciously evaluate everything we do (e.g. speaking grammatically, anticipating what we are looking at before we see it, completing patterns on the basis of limited information). To separate these conscious and non-conscious responses you can do experiments, and these have indeed happened.
The gold standard for whether a response is conscious or not is whether you can talk about it. This doesn’t mean language and consciousness are identical, just that you have access to the experience to think about it (and we use language to discuss that access with one another). In non-human animal research, that doesn’t exist. It would be good for animals to treat them as if they had conscious experiences, but it’s not a scientific demonstration to watch behaviour and say that they do.
Darwin, when faced with resistance about humans evolving from animals, responded not by saying that people have bestial qualities, but by saying that animals have human qualities. This set the debate on a track that has been difficult to get past. There was tremendous anthropomorphism in the late 19th century. That led to the radical behaviourist movement in psychology where all cognitive experience was eliminated from research. The cognitive revolution brought back the mind, but as an information processing system with inputs being conscious and unconscious. This gave us the “cognitive unconscious”, which is a middle ground between the choice the behaviourists gave us between conscious vs. reflex machines.
Anthropomorphism may be an important innate human quality, but that doesn’t mean it’s an accurate concept. And maybe we just can’t know either.
As a brief aside, usages of the limbic system, triune brain, and serial evolution of additive brain functions are all outdated now.
[Here's my 2nd crazy idea.] Emotions are not initially a product of natural selection. Emotions are conscious experiences constructed by cognitive processes. The possibility then exists that the cognitive abilities that are unique in the human brain might be responsible for those emotions. Maybe emotions came in with the early humans. Maybe they came in as byproducts, or what Stephen J. Gould called exaptations. If this cognitive model is correct, then emotions are based on mental schema (bodies of memories about certain categories of experiences), for example, a fear schema. When in danger, a template is activated. This has implications for medicine to treat emotions. For example, people taking medicine for social anxiety find it easy to go to parties (they are less timid), but they still feel anxious when there. ... Drugs alone won’t be enough to treat problems. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is required in the end.
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. They can also have shifts in perspectives to those of others, but they don’t have this notion of the self that is part of these experiences. Non-conscious alternatives can always account for the behaviour in animals.
Every person has the same human brain. There are things in our prefrontal cortex, structures (“frontal pole”), and connections that are unique to humans. But mice have their own unique brain area. Other animals may also have their own unique ways of experience. We have to be subtle and not simply say conscious or nonconscious. Consciousness isn’t one thing. There's autonoetic consciousness. There's noetic consciousness (an awareness of facts and the world). Working memory, for example, is very similar in other primates but not other mammals. There's anoetic consciousness, which is a body awareness (i.e. Jaak Panksepp's core consciousness, which is a primitive, almost unconscious level of consciousness). Understanding brain structures and pathways might help us understand what forms of consciousness are possible, even if we can never measure it.

Brief Comments
LeDoux seems to draw a pretty narrow definition around consciousness, but then shows the clear evolutionary history of aspects of consciousness along the way, and really advocates for a more subtle use of the term. I'll present my own subjective labelling system for all this at the end of the series (because we sure could use another!), but hopefully the contents of facts within that system will be uncontroversial, and they will surely draw on LeDoux's work.

Like Damasio, whose strange inversion was that emotions preceded feelings, LeDoux's first crazy idea is his own inversion, where he says cognition preceded emotion. In one respect, these guys are actually saying the same thing, that the "subjective experience of moods" came last. But Damasio calls that "feelings" while LeDoux calls it "emotion". Clearly there is a split here between the chemical changes that cause behaviour, and the subjective experience of these changes, but it's frustrating that the field hasn't settled on consistent terminology yet of what's on each side of this divide, which makes discussing these ideas so much more difficult. (It's another good example of the value that philosophers of science can be to scientists.)

What I don't see from LeDoux in this crazy idea is any discussion of affect or value. The amygdala may be able to non-consciously produce behaviour in response to stimuli. It may even learn to do this differently throughout a lifetime. But it could only do so (successfully) by valuing some responses positively and others negatively. Since LeDoux does state that valence goes all the way back to the beginning of life, maybe he just lumps this in as part of "cognition", which then looks even more like Damasio's "emotions", which both men claim came first during evolution.

As for LeDoux's second crazy idea, it's hard for me to see how he can advocate for the need for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to regulate emotional feelings, but then suggest that these emotional feelings weren't initially a product of natural selection. Perhaps it comes down to how narrowly one defines "initially" but if CBT can improve one's life, then it sure seems plausible that the advent of emotional feelings would have provided an advantage that could have been selected for. Maybe I'm just being overly critical of anyone quoting Gould, though, since I'm of the opinion that he generally lost the Darwin Wars.

Finally, as an evolutionary thinker, I note that LeDoux offers a really good critique of anthropomorphism and the role that Darwin may have played in going down that path. Such attributions to non-human animals can obviously be taken too far. But so can anthropodenial (as Franz de Waal has coined it) for the people who go in the other direction and tout human exceptionalism. I really appreciate LeDoux's openness about this and his search for hard evidence. I also like his recognition that it would be better for us to treat animals as if they had valuable internal experiences, since we are currently faced with the barrier that we may never know about that. So, one form of human exceptionalism that exists may just be that we are profoundly ignorant of life....except for what we can know about ourselves. Perhaps it would be better to pay attention sometimes to that wide ignorance rather than any narrow knowledge.

What do you think? Are LeDoux's two crazy ideas really that crazy? What else jumped out at you from his deep history of ourselves?

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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

1 Comment

Consciousness 11 —Neurobiological Naturalism

4/4/2020

5 Comments

Two books that look pretty applicable to this series...

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

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

In The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, Feinberg and Mallatt conted that consciousness is about creating image maps of the environment and oneself. But systems that do it with orders of magnitude less sophistication than humans can still trigger our intuition of a fellow conscious being.
After assembling a list of the biological and neurobiological features that seem responsible for consciousness, and considering the fossil record of evolution, Feinberg and Mallatt argue that consciousness appeared much earlier in evolutionary history than is commonly assumed. About 520 to 560 million years ago, they explain, the great “Cambrian explosion” of animal diversity produced the first complex brains, which were accompanied by the first appearance of consciousness. Simple reflexive behaviours evolved into a unified inner world of subjective experiences. From this they deduce that all vertebrates are and have always been conscious—not just humans and other mammals, but also every fish, reptile, amphibian, and bird. Considering invertebrates, they find that arthropods (including insects and probably crustaceans) and cephalopods (including the octopus) meet many of the criteria for consciousness. The obvious and conventional wisdom–shattering implication is that consciousness evolved simultaneously but independently in the first vertebrates and possibly arthropods more than half a billion years ago.
To Feinberg and Mallatt, real consciousness is indicated by the optic tectum making a multi-sensory map of the world, attending to the most important object in this map, and then signalling behaviours based on the map.
Isomorphic maps are the cornerstone of image-based sensory consciousness. These maps evolved in early vertebrates more than 520 million years ago, and this process was the natural result of the extraordinary innovations of the camera eye, neural crest, and placodes. These events led to the mental images that mark the creation of the mysterious explanatory gaps and the subjective features of consciousness.
The Defining Features of Consciousness are: Level 1) General Biological Features: life, embodiment, processes, self-organising systems, emergence, teleonomy, and adaption. Level 2) Reflexes of animals with nervous systems. Level 3) Special Neurobiological Features: complex hierarchy (of networks); nested and non-nested processes, aka recursive; isomorphic representations and mental images; affective states; attention; and memory.
The Ancient Origins of Consciousness does not address higher levels of consciousness: full-blown self-awareness, meta-awareness, recognition of the self in mirrors, theory of mind, access to verbal self-reporting.

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

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

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

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

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self

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Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self

4/2/2020

5 Comments

Photo by Alberto Gamazo (https://is.gd/KVwanB)

In the last post, I noted that I was going to be relying on Dr. Ginger Campbell's Brain Science podcast for summaries of the latest work on consciousness by neuroscientists. She kicked off her recent four-part series on consciousness with an episode called What is Consciousness? where she gave summaries of some of the latest and best books on this subject. Three of the five books she covered were written by neuroscientists. (The other two were by Sean Carroll and Dan Dennett who I've already covered.) The first of those was by Stanislas Dehaene, which I discussed in the last post. Next up, is Antonio Damasio's book The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. Here are the most important points from that:

Damasio defines consciousness as: mind + self.
A mind emerges from the brain when an animal is able to create images and to map the world and its body.
Consciousness requires the addition of self-awareness. This begins at the level of the brain stem, with “primordial feelings.” The self is built up in stages starting with the proto self made up of primordial feelings, affect alone, and feeling alive. Then the core self is developed when the proto self 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.
Mind precedes consciousness.
Consciousness includes wakefulness, mind, and self.
Consciousness is the feeling that my body exists independent of other objects.
Affect or feelings came first. Long before consciousness. (A la Panksepp.) Feelings evolve from homeostatic signals and so affect evolved very early. Damasio called this “the strange order of things” because it’s the opposite of what many scientists assume.
Damasio stresses the importance of embodiment because homeostasis is the primary mechanism driving life. Feelings are mental experiences that are conscious by definition. The emotive response triggered by sensory stimuli are the qualia of philosophical tradition. This subjectivity is the critical enabler of consciousness.
Emotions are chemical reactions. Feelings are the conscious experience of emotions. (This can be slightly confusing as it is not always used consistently in Damasio's work.)
Early life was regulated without feelings and there was no mind or consciousness. Then, during the Cambrian explosion, vertebrates appeared and all vertebrates have feelings.
Valence / value evolved much earlier. Even bacteria can go toward food and away from danger.
Feelings are not neural events alone. They are interpretations of body signals (such as a fast heartbeat). Feelings are, through-and-through, simultaneously, and interestingly, phenomena of both bodies and nervous systems.

For just a bit more on this, Antonio Damasio gave a TED talk in 2011 called, The quest to understand consciousness. Here are a few extra details from slides he used during this talk:

Three levels of self to consider: proto self, core self, and autobiographical self.
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.

Brief Comments
I may be jumping the gun here, but Damasio's distinction between the mind and the self appear to me to map neatly onto the two brain networks scientists just proved are key to consciousness. The DAT (dorsal attention network) sounds like it produces the streaming images of the outside world, which Damasio calls mind. And the DMN (default mode network) monitors the internal states of our bodies, generating the sense of a relatively stable but historically changing identity, which Damasio calls the self. As the article I linked to says, consciousness is reported when the DAT and DMN are both activated. In other words, when both mind and self are active. This is something to consider as we go forward. (And, by the way, default mode networks have been detected in macaques, chimpanzees, and even rats.)

I also like Damasio's distinctions between emotions, feelings, and valences. This fits very well with my own system for mapping cognitive appraisals (i.e. judging if something is good, bad, or unknown, aka valenced) onto different events in the past, present, or future, in order to generate the things we typically call emotions (but which Damasio would distinguish as feelings). I can certainly get behind his distinction here. I could also adopt his labelling. And I think he's got "the strange order of things" right by saying the chemical emotional responses would have come first before the feelings in our self became able to identify them. This would clearly be the order of things in a material universe where physics led to chemistry, biology, and then psychology. This is another thing to consider as we put together the evolutionary story of consciousness.

Finally, I'll just explain the brief reference Damasio made to Panksepp. In my first peer-reviewed philosophy paper about Bridging the Is-Ought Divide, I mentioned Panksepp's work when I said: "Evolutionary neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University has identified seven emotional systems in humans that originated deeper in our evolutionary past than the Pleistocene era. The emotional systems that Panskepp terms Care (tenderness for others), Panic (from loneliness), and Play (social joy) date back to early primate evolutionary history, whereas the systems of Fear, Rage, Seeking, and Lust, which govern survival instincts for the individual, have even earlier, premammalian origins." I cited this work as potential evidence for the evolution of morality from care of the self to care for others, but of course it is also evidence of the development of the concept of the self too.

What do you think? Do Damasio's distinctions make sense to you? Do they map onto concepts you find helpful or not? Let me know what you think of this in the comments below.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

5 Comments

Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory

3/31/2020

8 Comments

Stanislas Dehaene — if I'm implicitly biased towards him, I now know why.

For the rest of the research in this series, I'm going to be going over the work of neuroscientists. This is because, as Patricia Churchland stated in the last post, "Philosophy is a proto-science that must remain in touch with empirical discoveries." As a philosopher, however, my goal here is not to gain or present a detailed lesson of all the most complicated inner workings of the brain (read neuroscientists for that). Nor is it to get into a deep debate about the methodologies, assumptions, and conclusions of the people working in this field (read philosophers of science for that). What I'm looking for in this series are findings or hypotheses which have implications for the rest of my philosophical worldview. Is that going to require *some* knowledge of brain anatomy and mechanisms? Yes. But it's not that scary or difficult.

One of the best guides for this world is Dr. Ginger Campbell, whose podcast Brain Science is up to 170 episodes now as of this post. Recently, Campbell posted an incredible four-part series on consciousness that was really a key inspiration for me to finally tackle this subject as well. In the first of these podcasts (called What is Consciousness?), Campbell gave her own summaries of some of the latest and best books on consciousness. Before she dives into them, Campbell notes that while they do have their differences, there are still three concepts they all share:

Consciousness requires a brain
Consciousness is a product of evolution
Consciousness is embodied

While I'm always happy to hear from people with an evolutionary perspective, previous posts in this series make it clear that there are enough quibbles about the term "consciousness" to remain wary of saying it is a coherent enough concept to deserve a label. That throws into question whether a brain is required for it or not. But, if you grant each neuroscientist their hypothetical definition of consciousness, then we can understand what they are talking about and the rest of their claims remain valid within that perspective.

Okay. Time for the first summary. Campbell kicked off her series by discussing Stanislas Dehaene's book Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. Here are the most important points from that:

Three key ingredients were required to move the study of consciousness into the lab: 1) a better definition of consciousness; 2) methods to manipulate consciousness experimentally; and 3) a new respect for the study of subjective phenomena (compared to behaviourism).
The definition Dehaene uses is called Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (an offshoot of Bernard Baars' Global Workspace Theory)
GNWT states: consciousness is global information broadcasting within the cortex.
Consciousness adds functionality, ability to hold information in mind, and flexible behaviour.
Wakefulness, vigilance, and attention enable conscious access, but they are separate things.
Some of the main methods used to study this are: binocular rivalry, attentional blink, and masking.
No amount of introspection can tell us how our brain works.
Most of what our brain does is outside of our conscious access. Many phenomena do not require consciousness to occur. We drastically underestimate this.
If our brains can do so much without consciousness, then what is it for?
Brains make unconscious predictions as if they were using Beysian logic, but seem to need consciousness to interpret ambiguous images. Also, consciousness plays a very important role in learning (e.g. subliminal learning doesn’t work).
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].
Our self is just a database that is filled through social experience. Consciousness is the mind’s reality simulator.
When conscious access occurs: brain activity is strongly activated when a threshold of awareness is crossed. At that point the signal spreads to many brain areas. There are four highly reproducible signals associated with this. Signature 1: activation in parietal and prefrontal circuits. Signature 2: a slow web called P3 that pairs late, approximately 1/3 sec after stimulus (i.e. consciousness lags behind the world). Signature 3: deep brain electrodes detect late and sudden bursts of high frequency oscillations. Signature 4: information exchange across distant brain areas.
Virtually every circuit in the brain, cortical and subcortical, can participate in conscious and unconscious processes.
In Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, conscious access occurs when perception, or any other signal, crosses a critical threshold and is broadcast across the brain.
50 milliseconds seems to be a limit for the shortest exposure to a signal that we can detect.
We can only perceive one signal at a time. And there is a 1/3 second time lag. Error prediction makes up for this.
Consequences of consciousness include: the ability to respond, the ability to hold ideas in our mind, and the ability to act flexibly.
Dehaene does not show mere "correlates of consciousness" because correlation does not show causation. Correlation just finds things that are present when consciousness is perceived, and absent when it is not perceived. Dehaene's four signatures fit this. Causation would require recreation of conscious states using artificial means and this is now being done using deep brain stimulation.
Higher brain regions do appear to be essential.
Putting together all the evidence inescapably leads to a reductionist conclusion. The electrical activities of neurones can create a state of mind, or equally destroy an existing one.
Dehaene thinks Chalmers swapped the labels. It is the easy problem that is hard, while the hard problem seems hard because it engages ill-defined intuitions. Once our intuition is educated by cognitive neuroscience and computer simulations, he thinks Chalmers' hard problem will evaporate.

Brief Comments
Dehaene offers lots of persuasive evidence for the brain activities that occur during events that we humans can report (i.e. conscious vs. unconscious activities). It is fascinating to see the list of functions this enables as that presumably provides some guides about what is likely to have evolved later as the long evolutionary history of consciousness has unfolded. For example, it seems plain to me that there would be a massive evolutionary advantage for a brain to be able to predict reality rather than wait 1/3 of a second for the processing of inputs. So far, that seems like a good candidate to help answer the question of what consciousness is for. I'll wait to look at more evidence from other scientists, though, before proclaiming too much. Stick around for that in the next few posts.

What do you think? Is Chalmers' hard problem fading away as our understanding of the correlates of consciousness grows? Or as we even begin to dabble in the causation of our conscious experience itself? If this is all too new or confusing to give an answer to that, I recommend trying a short video on Global vs. Local Theories that is part of a recently released introductory course on the brain and consciousness. Let me know in the comments below if that helps or if anything else would.

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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

8 Comments

Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy

3/29/2020

2 Comments

As I make the transition in this series from philosophy to neuroscience, a natural step between these two disciplines (some might even call it an evolutionary step) would clearly be with the work of Patricia Churchland. She's a philosopher and neuroscientist who thinks that "philosophers are increasingly realising that to understand the mind one must understand the brain."

I'll start with a few snippets from the podcast Nous, and its episode: Patricia Churchland on How We Evolved a Conscience. Churchland has a book out now called Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, which I know is not the same thing as consciousness, but her discussion still has some relevant information for us.

There were some philosophers who thought that if we went off and really studied the language of what we MEAN by the word consciousness, we’d be able to understand it. But other philosophers said, wait a minute, we might be mistaken about what we mean.
Philosophy is a proto-science that must remain in touch with empirical discoveries. Science cannot tell us why something is right or wrong. However, science gives us all sorts of information that we take into account.
Why did we become social? It started when we became warm blooded. Warm blooded creatures need about 10 times more nutrition though. One way to compensate for this requirement was for mammals to develop a new structure in the brain—a cortex—which allowed them to store a tremendous amount of information in the brain and to integrate it. The cortex relied on the subcortical parts of the brain for motivations, sleep/wake patterns, etc., but the cortex allowed for a kind of predictive prowess that had not been seen on the planet before.
This all comes with a cost though. You can’t have memory unless you can build structure on the neuron. To tune the brain up to an environment requires that you are super immature when you are born. Snakes just are born and go off into the world. Mammals can’t. It was like evolution took a step backwards. This immaturity then led to the need for caregiving, which led to parents who care. Once caring for offspring turns on, family units, sociality, norms, and morality all take off.

That's a nice short, sharp, prod to get us philosophers studying the evolution of brains. A much more rigorous argument can be found in Churchland's essay "Neurophilosophy", which was a chapter in the fantastic edited collection How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism. Here are some useful points from that essay:

The words “mind” and “brain” are distinct. Even so, that linguistic fact leaves it open whether mental processes are in fact processes of the physical brain. … [For physicalists] the important problem concerns how the brain learns and remembers, how the brain enables us to see and hear and think, and how it enables us to move our eyes, legs, and whole body. Their problem concerns the nature of the brain mechanisms that support mental phenomena. Interestingly, dualists also have a closely related set of problems: how does soul stuff work such that we learn and remember, see and hear and think, and so forth. Whereas in neuroscience, physicalists have a vibrant research program to address such questions, dualists have no comparable program. No one has the slightest idea how soul stuff does anything.
Studies of a few patients who had suffered bilateral damage to the hippocampus showed them to be severely impaired in learning new things. … Memory losses associated with dementing diseases also linked memory with neural loss and further suggested the tight link between the mental and the neural. Important also are studies of attention using brain imaging along with single neuron physiology. These varied studies suggest that at least three anatomic networks, connected but somewhat independent of the other, are involved in different aspects of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control.
Developments in psychology, especially visual psychology, also implicated neural networks in mental functions, and this work tended to dovetail well with neuroscientific findings on the visual system. Explanations of color vision, for example, depended on the retina’s three cone types and on opponent processing by neurons in the cortical areas. … Visual hallucinations were known to be caused by physical substances such as LSD or ketamine, and consciousness could be obliterated by drugs such as ether, as well by other substances employed by anesthesiologists, such as propofol. No evidence linked these drugs to soul stuff.
Short-term memory can be transiently blocked by a blow to the head or by a drug such as scopolamine; emotions and moods can be affected by Prozac and by alcohol; decision making can be affected by hunger, fear, sleeplessness, and cocaine; elevated levels of cortisol cause anxiety. Very specific changes in whole-brain activity corresponding to periods of sleep versus dreaming versus being awake have been documented, and explanations for the neuronal signature typifying these three states have made considerable progress. In aggregate, these findings weighed in favor of the physical brain, not of some spooky “soul stuff.”
A methodological point may be pertinent in regard to the dualist’s argument: however large and systematic the mass of empirical evidence supporting the empirical hypothesis that consciousness is a brain function, it is always a logically consistent option to be stubborn and to insist otherwise, as do Chalmers and Nagel. Here is the way to think about this: identities—such as that temperature really is mean molecular kinetic energy, for example—are not directly observable. They are underwritten by inferences that best account for the mass of data and the appreciation that no explanatory competitor is as successful. One could, if determined, dig one’s heels in and say, “temperature is not mean molecular kinetic energy, but rather an occult phenomenon that merely runs parallel to KE.” It is a logically consistent position, even if it is not a reasonable position.
With the benefit of contemporary physics, we can see that the causal interaction between nonphysical stuff such as a soul with physical stuff such as electrons would be an anomaly relative to the current and rather well-established laws of physics. More exactly, it would affect the law of conservation of energy. If brains can cause changes external to the physical domain, there should be an anomaly with respect to conservation of energy. No such anomaly has ever been seen or measured.

Brief Comments
In previous posts, we saw how argument alone could make the case that thinking of consciousness as a non-material or panpsychic phenomenon is not helpful. Now, we see a glut of empirical evidence supporting the idea that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. Does that prove the case? Of course not. Knowledge is never proved in this way. Churchland's point, however, is exquisite, and right on the nose, that one can always dig their heels in about this and remain consistent, while also being unreasonable. This is something all philosophers should keep in mind.

What do you think? Any other important points jump out at you from these quotes? Let me know in the comments below.

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution