So long and thanks for all the consciousness

(Picture from here.)


I've been off line for a bit with work. But I have been thinking about a panel I attended at worldcon.

The panel could be paraphrased as Consciousness: Threat or Menace. The star of the panel was Peter Watts (and here). For the two of you who might remember, I wrote some about his work here.

The premise of the panel was that consciousness was expensive both computationally and in terms of required biological resources. There was nothing a conscious machine could do that an unconscious machine could do better and more efficiently. An interview with Watts is here. To quote him, "Blindsight didn't start out as a radical stand on the maladaptiveness of consciousness. I'd just spent the better part of a decade musing over what consciousness might be good for and I kept coming up blank." This rolls into zombie consciousness (and here) pretty quickly. One statement made at the panel went something like this: I worked hard a my thesis, tried to solve the central problem and got nowhere. Then I went to sleep and woke up with the answer. There's this mechanism inside that solves the problem and consciousness takes the credit.

There were other, equally contentious, statements made. One was that there appeared to be no good reason for consciousness to evolve-- as Watts said in the article cited above, "no tapeworm is going to argue that it is a threat to the body it inhabits, and should therefore be exterminated."

I had my own opinions to pontificate but didn't get the opportunity. That's what blogs are for.

Personally, I think this is the opposing endpoint of the Intelligent Design movement. ID posits a world that is so complex and special (especially in its glorification of human beings) that it had to be made. This no-consciousness movement is analogous. Consciousness is so special and amazing it must be maladaptive; a tapeworm on the underside of the brain. Neither does much to figure out why consciousness is there and both presume a uniqueness in human consciousness that just isn't supported by the facts.

Let's presume consciousness is maladaptive for a moment-- the falsification principle. Consciousness is expensive-- the brain in human beings takes 20% of the energy taken in by the human being. If you look at the way circulation is shifted when the organism is in trouble, the brain is on the same level as heart and liver: essential for life.

Now, if we posit two populations of proto-hominid, one that can save even 1% of that energy by virtue of being unconscious, that would give the unconscious proto-hominid a clear advantage. Yet, no such hominid exists. (I put zombies in the population in the same realm as UFOs. Not there by reason of sanity.) So, we can presume from that thought experiment one of two things: 1) consciousness is adaptive and therefore losing it is maladaptive or 2) the mechanism of consciousness was already ingrained in the genetics of hominids before it became maladaptive and therefore could not be escape. One would presume, therefore, that the precursors of consciousness predate the splitting of humans from the great ape lineage about six million years ago.

That's a long time for any maladaptive qualities of consciousness to reproductively show itself.

There's also the current thinking that chimps, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas are conscious. They pass all of the tests that we apply to ourselves to show consciousness. I suggest, therefore, that consciousness itself cannot be shown to be maladaptive.

But, for the moment, presume that it was, at one point.

Two lines of evidence suggest that, in fact, this hypothesis does not survive falsification either.

The first of these is the mirror test. You place an indicator on a subject unknown and undetectable by the subject without some sort of mirror. Then, detect if the subject determines from the reflection that the indicator is on the subject rather than on some nefarious image in the mirror. This is not an indicator of consciousness, per se, but I submit that it is a necessary precursor to consciousness.

The following animals have passed the test: (See here.) bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, bottlenose dolphins, Orcas, elephants, European Magpies and humans. I also think Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex is sufficient to warrant inclusion. What's interesting is that, because of the bird experiments, the precursors of consciousness were with us back before the dinosaurs-- nearly 250 million years ago. Even if the birds are excluded, the primates branched off of elephants about 60 million years ago.

Watts point of view that consciousness itself might be maladaptive is, I think, incorrect.

But the article quoting Watts is entitled "The Overexpressed Phenotype"", implying that human consciousness might be maladaptive. I think that's a different question and I think the context of Watts statement don't leave any wiggle room there since he continually talks about consciousness in a human dimension. Either he things consciousness is unique to humans (something I think clearly false) or that whatever humans have that is called consciousness is completely and qualitatively different from other animals. Which I think is equally false.

The second line of reasoning is a bit more subtle and zeroes in on the "consciousness takes the credit" concept. This comes from athletic training research. The common term for this is muscle memory.

Muscle memory is a training phenomenon. As athletes work at learning a new skill they think it through. They assimilate what they need to do and model it consciously. Then, as they practice it they move the training out of the conscious mind and deeper into nervous system. Humans are adept at this from skiing to gymnastics. From playing a musical instrument to small talk on dates. It's what we do all the time. It is so ubiquitous in human society that we forget that its actually adaptive. It is, I suggest, one of the supreme uses of consciousness.

We have no idea what animals experience in this way-- the subjective experience of turning training to accomplishment has to date only been communicated between humans. However, reduction in task accomplishment time has been well recognized across species tested from fruit flies to human beings. I'm not saying fruit flies are conscious. But I am saying that consciousness of some sort that resembles ours does occur in many of our relatives and some fairly distant species and can be demonstrated.

To refute the issue described by the "consciousness takes the credit" problem. One could also say, and I think with better support, that the consciousness did all the work of gathering the information, making sense of it, storing it and categorizing it only to have some tiny mechanism come along and put a couple of facts together and take all the credit.

But the problem the consciousness debate exhibits is deeper. Far deeper.

If you look at the skin, hair, muscles, bone, nervous system, teeth and fingernails of mammals and see that they are in mechanism the same, though specialized between groups, why would we expect brains to be so different? Could it be the case that we as humans value our brains and set it apart from all the rest? Would not a horse view the world of hooves similarly? A fish its fins? Etc? This is the fallacy that Alfred Wallace fell into and why, I think, he showed himself to be a lesser mind than Darwin's in the whole evolution story.

By elevating human consciousness in the way many of these philosophers have is to create a problem where in fact none exists. This is the same sort of reasoning found in ID. If you pare down what is defined by consciousness to be only human, only recent, and (I think) only destructive western civilization, the conclusion you come to is that it is maladaptive. But the problem is a manufactured one. It has no basis in actual fact and there is, I think, no evidence for it.

I'm not sure the Disposable Civilization is, in fact, adaptive. We may kill ourselves. But in terms of Darwinian evolution, we have the reproductive success of all reproductive successes, all due to human motivation, which comes from consciousness.

It may be that we ultimately run into a civilization of ants that function as well as we do but without consciousness. I see no evidence for it in our own little biological experiment but our corner of the universe is only a sample of one. I, for one, believe that if we do run into people crossing the void to say hello, that it will be the motivation of consciousness that pushed them there just like it has us.

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The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
Arlington, Texas, School District

Blunderbanking
Economists

Links of Interest
Hot Ice Computer
Chimps with spears
Solar Coal
Plasmonics
Gasoline from vinegar
Avenging Narwhal Playset and others. Including bacon mints
Flowers for Algernon
Dawn Mission
Virus induced prostate cancer and here
Genetic origin of the four chambered heart
Reverse engineering the brain
Light Sport Aircraft Manufacturers