New theory of consciousness

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-consciousness-evolved/485558/

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

Nice article.

Consciousness evolved as a system of reflex. When the organism bumps into something, it reacts. It’s the very same logic of a rock, only more sophisticated: when a hard object hits a rock, the rock “reacts” by dispersing that force throughout its molecular structure, and passing that force through and out of itself to the extent possible to do so. But the molecular bonds can only hold so much dispersed force, so if the force is sufficiently large those chemical bonds break – the rock shatters.

Living organisms are no different, its just that this same mechanism of force-dispersion was copied at a meta-level from molecules up to the cellular level (and in humans, even more so and up from the cellular to the mental, linguistic, existential levels…). You eventually get simply life evolving to incorporate more and more molecules in itself, more and more cellular structures, complex protein systems and eventually the same logic that defines the rock begins to define these larger cellular structures: as they encounter a force that force is dispersed throughout the structure as best as possible, which means given the actual nature and dynamics as govern that particular kind of cell and structure.

A cellular structure composed of tens of thousands of individual molecules has an exponentially greater capacity to force-disperse than do those individual molecules alone, sans cell. The rock is uniform in its structure whereas the organism is diverse, heterogeneous, composed of many different kinds of parts. This means that the organism can “learn” how to “adapt” to many different kinds and strengths of forces which the rock cannot treat individually, or possibly even respond to at all. If you pet a rock, it will not react. If you pet a dog, it will react. This is an easy example but illustrated the idea.

Consciousness is basically just a system of complex reflex-response that got hard-wired over historical time to respond to particular kinds of forces that happened to come up against it; the mechanism of genetics via simple natural selective pressures ensured that organisms would tailor their consciousness to their situational needs. Eventually the consciousness became able to actually respond to the forces within itself, to meta-respond: to take those incoming forces, split them into many subtler flows, direct those flows in innumerable ways in order to stimulate various parts of its own structure. Incoming forces provide the impetus for more developed consciousness to “self-stimulate” and begin evolving at the meta level, becoming even more refined and sophisticated. Eventually this developing consciousness succeeds at modeling every significant object in its environment, modeling relations between these, modeling possible rearrangements of those objects and relations, all by the simple mechanism of taking incoming forces and dividing these into innumerable and subtle flows, which pass throughout the organism’s structure and stimulate it.

Eating food is only the barest minimum example of this. Food simply breaks down to provide the basic molecules needed to keep the whole organic system operating and growing, but the really interesting work is in what happens at the neurological level, when forces act as stimuli through any of the five senses, or when consciousness “stimulates itself” endlessly due to having so many countless little flows of force bouncing around inside its neurology at all times. You could completely cut a human off from all stimuli, total sensory deprivation, and the human would still be self-stimulating itself mentally, at least for a while. We’re nicely primed with a near-endless quantity and quality of forces to forever reflectively react.

Wow. Wall of impenetrable text much…? =; Nobody sees it.

C’mon Wyld, as the current science-heads of ilp our job is to clear the muddy waters, not chuck in more sand. :smiley:

Synopsis of article.

If you are a vertebrate, hint: check your spine, is it there…? Nice. You have a ‘tectum’ fancy word, means roof in latin, sits on the top of your brain. The tectum’s job is to point your senses at the most interesting thing in the room. A tiger for example, or a hamburger, or sex object of choice, maybe key-shaped objects, if you are looking for your keys.

Remember when you were a kid playing peekaboo…? Or maybe ‘now you see me now you don’t…?’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt46WxdKUPQ

Well, the tectum on its own is like that, if something is present, now, it will coordinate the brains attention on it. If it passes from view, it can’t. Hidden tiger=no tiger.

Sorry, back in a tick.

Okay back.

Obviously, hidden tiger=no tiger is bad. Because, death.

So from reptiles on up, a secondary centre, the ‘wulst’ later in mammals to balloon and become the cerebral cortex, this part of the brain upgrades the function of the tectum to allows you to pay attention not only to the now tiger, but also to the hidden tiger, when it’s passed from sight.

Hidden tiger=tiger.

i.e… the brain can process unobservable, invisible objects, and behave accordingly. An internal eye, if you like.

You can see this at work in babies, pre language. Some guy shows the baby an object, baby goes ‘whoo’, then the guy puts the object behind a screen. Removes screen, object is there, baby not impressed. Guy does it again, but this time guy 2 sneakily removes object unseen to baby. First guy removes screen, object not there. Baby goes ‘whoo’.

i.e… Baby was expecting hidden object to still be there, even though it had passed from baby’s senses. And was surprised when it was not.

Hidden object=object.

To go from here, to what we would understand as the experience of consciousness, the guy who wrote the article simply adds language.

The cerebral cortex doesn’t have to grasp and consider only recently observed phenomena, it’s linked to memory, and can direct attention to constructs as well as real objects. The self is such a construct, so the cerebral cortex allows the brain to direct its attention to its own processes i.e. you.

Et voila. Consciousness.

/Synopsis.

I wasn’t aware that five paragraphs was so far beyond the reading level and attention span of ILP users. If someone is turned off by the fact of encountering five paragraphs of text then I have absolutely no interest in even conversing with them.

You could at least offer your thoughts on the ideas I raised.

As for the tectum, directing attention is one thing, but in no way can you reduce consciousness to this kind of “well brain region X here performs this task, then region Y over there does this…”, because that isn’t actually telling you much: you can’t answer “why?” by looking at where in the brain a particular behavior is localized. The tectum may be involved in directing attention but what does that really mean, why is one thing considered more important than another? Why do two different people respond different in the presence of the same environment? What is it about certain objects that draw our attention more than others? What is the “inner content” of our perceptions, i.e. what does it really mean to say that I focused my attention on a chair, or another person, or a piece of food, or anything else? We aren’t merely robots performing set tasks for no other reason than certain brain areas tell us to, there are while realms of meaning, significance, and value that can only be truly addressed philosophically, which is why any understanding of theory of mind must heavily involve both phenomenology and existentialism.

It’s the difference between a description and an explanation. Neuroscience is good at describing WHAT happened in the brain when a behavior occurred, but can’t tell you WHY it happened. You can’t open up the neural structures and see an idea, or a value or feeling-- ideas must be understood by thinking, feelings and values by feeling and valuing, etc… subjective experience over time is all about this sort of direct learning. Science is a great tool to supplement this, but is no substitute for it.

To your recent addition: yes, of corse we can direct attention to objects now-removed from our momentary sensation, and we react directly to the memory of the object as if reacting to the object itself. And yes of course this has a clear survival benefit, as does the “over-priming of attention” mentioned in the article (our tendency to ascribe too much consciousness to things rather than too little)… But again, any philosopher worth anything would have been able to tell you these same things without needing scientific research to come to these insights.

Tab is a dimwit. Pearls before swine. Break it down to something a child can understand for him.

The this that reacts to the that is the basis of atomic reactions and consciousness in animals. Animals, from microrganisms to man evolved to see the that as food or threat. Sophistication of this distinction is probably due to evolution of a part of the brain, as the OP proposes. Human consciousness is the ability of the human brain to make sophisticated distinctions. I’d recommend Nicholas Humprey’s “A History of the Mind” as a good primer on the evolution of human consciousness.

Sorry mate, you kinda lost me at rock.

I’m not overly concerned with the conversing bit, what’s to say anyway…? I’m more concerned with getting the message across. The best ideas/philosophy in the world are useless, if no-one can grasp them, or be led to grasp them. A teacher’s perspective if you like.

Yeah, because after centuries of arseing about, phenomenology and existentialism have brought us so far…

It looks too simple. Same way from the outside in everything looks simple. I didn’t bother pointing up how the brain designates importance, because that’s a textbook right there. A textbook I have read, I hasten to add, luckily it had pictures.

Basically, we focus our attention on a chair, not because a region of the brain tells us to, but because our legs are tired. And people with chronically tired legs get eaten by tigers with fresh, springy legs. There’s more going on under the hood, but basically, it’s just plumbing.

Philosophers have always had a lot invested in ‘whys’ in the same way I guess, priests have an investment in ritual.

The whys of consciousness are very very simple. Consciousness>no consciousness with regard to reproduction for a certain class of life form.

Sure. Trouble is, that’s as far as it goes. Philosopher infers presence of A. Well done philosopher. However, because he or she doesn’t have the wherewithal to actually confirm A., any further progress beyond A., to B, to C, begin to suffer from an increased margin of error, as the philosopher at some point, without the ability to perform reality checks on his or her inferrals, unlike a scientist, fucks it all up, simple probability theory demands it.

Plus of course, there is the problem of emergence. Some things simply cannot be inferred from earlier conditions, because they cannot exist prior to a very specific set of pre-requistes being met. You cannot look at two plastic cups, linked by a piece of taut string, and infer the selfie-stick.

Yes, I’m a dimwit. Dimwit and proud. It saves time. And if you can’t explain your ideas in a form a dimwit can understand, then you’re a double dimwit. You see how that works…?

Swine don’t eat pearls, so why would someone even offer them…? If the object of the business is to lead swine from X to Y, then, the pearl-maker must learn to make swinefood. Unless the pearlmaker is a vainglorious asswipe, simply in love with his or her own intellect.

Tab, you brought up a good point about how philosophical inference/deduction suffers from an increasing margin of error. This is true. This is the real problem that philosophy faces: derviving A is fine but then B, C and D and… becomes more difficult. But difficult does not mean impossible, it just means difficult. There are two main ways to stabilize our speculative reason against this limit you mention: one is to continually check it against scientific discoveries and the other is to continually check it against itself, which means in the realm of our self-experience and world-experience.

A good philosopher always continuously tests and juxtaposes his ideas against each other, against his experiences, and against scientific discovery. The METHOD of philosophy is essentially different from that of science: philosophy introspects, which means that philosophy poses problems before the mind, in thought, and reconciles those problems in that same domain. From the purely scientific empirical perspective you are at least seeming to adhere to, such introspection is considered almost worthless, but in fact we can arrive at untold discoveries and insights simply by thinking. Even in the scientific method you need thought processes to make sense of the data that is observed and collected.

Existentialism and phenomenology have indeed given us very much, but what these and “pure philosophy” give is more intangible than things like computers and iPhones-- intangibles like a basis capacity for rational thought, logical positing, balancing our emotions against each other, moral sanity, aesthetic vision and values, and the whole range of developed subjectivity and more comprehensive, stabilized personality. The entire “self” is a philosophical construction first and foremost.

You shouldn’t underestimate the degree to which human subjectivity and “self” has changed over human history. Each major world-religion reflects a certain stage in this development but again, it’s intangible. If you’re only interested in tangible objects you can hold and see with your eyes then you’ll miss all this other progress that has been going on the so many thousands of years.

For example, without Greek culture and philosophy there would be no Christianity, and Christianity is just an outward representation of a new kind of human subjectivity-consciousness. I can refer you to more specific and elaborated theory on this if you want, just let me know… the bottom line is that subjectivity or “the self”, our self-experience, isn’t simply a given or fixed thing produced by the brain, but is in fact a complex entity evolving over time and formed largely by the experiences and ideas we are exposed to. No theory of mind can be complete without a detailed reckoning of the myriad ways in which individual brains interact with the extant history of accumulated ideas, social norms, and text that brains encounter after they are born and as they grow up through childhood and into adulthood.

The real “work” of human being is out there in the accumulated shared history of meaning, concepts, writing, affective norms and standards that we all encounter as we grow through childhood. The brain is a system for recording and responding to all of these things; but without them you simply have feral children, and no true humanity.

Precisely what we take as most given and which goes most unnoticed, namely our self and our subjective experience, is the primary thing being created and evolving over human history. This is why Being is invisible to itself along the dimension of its most necessary self and laws, at a certain point Dasein cannot apprehend itself quite simply because it is this “itself” already-always. A contradiction ensues along two fronts: 1) knowledge of oneself creates more self, leading to a forever-receding horizon line of Dasein, and 2) that which we most are, and would therefore most aim to bring into awareness, is precisely the most difficult to apprehend.

Of course scientific empirical knowledge doesn’t suffer from this kind of limit, since it is purely externalized knowledge. This is why science progresses so much faster in an overt sense, also why science doesn’t achieve very much in the way of actually shaping the development of human being over time. Christianity will continue to exert far more influence on the development of the self and subjectivity than will cognitive neuroscience, for example.

Nice post. Gotta go shopping but will be back.

Are you a teacher?

Wyld said:

I agree, perfectly possible to create a self-referentially consistent set of philosophic axioms about subject X, and play around with them to see what postulates fall out. With or without scientific reality checks. Euclid springs to mind. Huge difference between topic matter like ‘basic geometry’ and ‘mind’ though, and adding variables, the values or meaning of which must essentially guessed at, sans a means to explore them empirically, exponentially multiplies the possibilities for a catastrophic boo-boo.

Science is not immune to this, string theory runs into the same problems. It’s possible to produce umpteen squillion self consistent string theories, but because they don’t make any predictions we can test… There’s no way of discerning which, if any, is right, or even on the right track. So a lot of good minds end up wasting their most productive time, on well, bollocks.

Godel Escher Bach translates this to recursion in philosophy, a philospher can model till he’s blue in the face, but that model’s worth cannot be judged from within the model itself, it lacks the ability to be proven false based solely on its own axioms, which is an absolute necessity for any useful theory, about anything.

Philosophic theories of mind and whatever, have been rattling around forever, it’s only in recent times, now that cognitive science, neurophysiology and fMRI scanners etc.have caught up, that any useful progress has been made, and philosophers like Dennett and Searle admit this. Philosophers prior, may as well have learned a useful skill, like carpentry.

Sure, simply by the old random walk through the possible library of all ideas, we can come up with untold discoveries, some of which, by utter chance, might actually turn out not to be utterly wrong. But hmm. A wee bit like trying to get to London by travelling all possible roads in England. Waiting for GPS to be invented might be a better use of your time, not to mention the savings on petrol, and avoiding humongous pile ups. Mein Kampf, I’m looking at you here.

Question, how is a philosophy, formed in advance of science which would confirm it, any different from religion…? Something if I seem to remember, you kinda depise.

Yes.

Teachers have a certain quality about them that is fascinating.

In fact all that is wrong. The thing that makes science able to deduce and deduce without losing depth of precision is because its philosophical framework.

Its just that most “philosophers” arent philosophical in their discipline.

What philosophy does if its not some old hags chit chat is create semantic certainty. That implies solidity of correspondence between the empirical and the logical.

Philosophy as practiced by the capable has been only the development of methods to integrate the empirical and the logical. Why Leibniz is still important and why Wittgenstein never was.

But carry on.

Someone also wins the lottery nearly every week. But I agree Heidegger/Witty should have been born in an era that might have given their brains something useful to do. The philosophy of language was philosophy’s string theory period.

Fixed. Sorry. That was dismissive, I’m being dismissive because you intimidate me. You intimidate me, because I don’t know you, you have a bit of a scary avatar, your writing style is declarative and impersonal, and my knowledge of the areas you seem fluent in is well, too sparse to judge veracity. So, you get one-liners.

Either explain better, or well, more one-liners.

‘Semantic certainty’ for a start, preferably with examples.

Thanx. I think. :-k

Or/ consciousness is the adaptive value in nature.

Possibly all life, but if it is only in more complex beings then it is there to unify that complexity, to round things up into one.

Someone didn’t read the article. Jus’ sayin’.