The Nature of Consciousness

think of it as evolution in action

I’ve added experimental audio to this so people can listen to it, because I hear that’s at thing now. Check it out and tell me if it works, or not!

I've talked at length about quantum mysticism and a lot of people think consciousness has a role to play in "solving" the mystery of existence, which is wrong: the mystery of existence doesn't have a solution. If it did, it wouldn't be a mystery. I'm a mystic, and mystics aren't people who sell solutions: they are people who contemplate mysteries.

So this is my view on consciousness. I'll get to the contradictions in the idea that "consciousness is necessary to collapse the wavefunction" next week.

Consciousness is an evolved trait. Its function is to extend the scope and complexity of behavioural regulation beyond the simple stimulus-response pattern that is all that is available without it.

Stimulus-response behaviour is local and immediate: an organism responds now to a stimulus it experiences now. It has the possibility of memory: Pavlov's dogs salivated in response to a stimulus that had been associated with food in the past. But it is not intelligent.

Consciousness is nature's way of producing intelligent behaviour.

It is not the only way.

There's been a lot of breathlessness in the press lately about machine intelligence, and how the behaviour of predictive text programs like GPT-3 implies that they are conscious.

This is very much like saying an automobile's ability to move across the ground implies it has legs, or at least feet: in nature, terrestrial locomotion is almost universally a product of something like a foot pressing against the ground, usually at the end of a leg. Even slugs and snails are of the class gastropoda, which literally means "stomach footed".

If you want to get terrestrial locomotion in nature, you probably need feet.

So do cars have feet?

Nope. Cars have wheels. The fact that they move across the ground implies nothing.

Artificial devices--machines--routinely emulate the behaviour of biological organisms even though they lack the features that are essential for the biological production of that behaviour.

It follows from this that intelligent behaviour is not evidence of consciousness.

This is a view counter to the one postulated in Turing's famous "imitation game", although the game itself is generally misunderstood. In the original version there were three participants communicating with an interrogator via teletype: a man, a woman, and a machine. The man's goal was to convince the interrogator he was the woman. The woman's goal was to convince the interrogator she was the woman. In some runs the man would be replaced by the machine. If the machine could do as well as the man in convincing the interrogator it was the woman, it should--in Turing's view--be considered able "to think".

The peculiar, gendered, nature of this test is papered over in the modern renditions, which describe a quite different test in which the interrogator is simply trying to distinguish between a human and a machine.

That aside... given the way modern word-predictors can respond to written input in ways that are intelligent, can machines "think"?

Sure, in precisely the same way cars can walk and boats can swim.

If we insist that any form of "moving by pushing against land" is "walking" and any form of "moving through the water" is "swimming" then there is no question that cars walk and boats swim. But no one in their right mind would insist on any such thing. We have different words for machine locomotion and animal locomotion for a reason: because they are not the same.

We do say both birds and planes (and helicopters and blimps) "fly" but machines have only been taking to the air for a hundred years. It takes time for language to catch up, as it took time for aeronautical inventors to realize that bird's wings were a terrible model for powered flight.

If we peer back into the depths of time we learn the Sumerian root "du", which means "to walk", can also be found in the word for "draught animal" and the root "uz", which means "to drive" (as in driving a cart or an ox) appears in the word for the rigging of a ship. Maybe when you have only recently invented carts and sailing, your language uses walking-related words for machines that move on land and water.

A thousand years from now planes will probably not "fly".

And machines will probably not "think", even though they exhibit intelligent behaviour.

Thinking is what conscious beings do.

Consciousness is the means that evolution stumbled upon to enable intelligent behavioural regulation, just as legs are the way evolution enabled terrestrial locomotion.

Like any other biological characteristic, consciousness differs between organisms and individuals. Just as my legs are not the same length as yours or taking the same steps as yours, my consciousness has different capacities from yours and is not thinking the same thoughts as yours.

Insect legs differ form dog legs, which differ from human legs. So insect consciousness--if it exists--differs from dog consciousness--which almost certainly exists--which differs from human consciousness.

Why do I say dog consciousness almost certainly exists? Because consciousness enables intelligent behaviour in organisms and dogs exhibit intelligent behaviour: they learn, they remember, they engage in complex behaviours like playing. Play, after all, requires a complex understanding of what the other animal is doing. Try playing with an insect and see where it gets you.

The "in organisms" part is important here: we know consciousness is how evolution generates intelligent behavioural regulation because we can see it in ourselves. We think about stuff, we reason about stuff, we decide stuff. Because evolution is an elaborative process it is implausible that we would be conscious and other organisms would not be. Our consciousness evolved from a foundation of non-human consciousness. To suggest otherwise is to deny evolution.

Human consciousness has a couple of features that make it unusual compared to the consciousness of other animals. The first is that our consciousness is capable of general representation, which does not seem to be the case for any other species. We can make anything stand for (represent) anything else. You're doing it right now: marks on the page or screen stand for sounds which stand for ideas, sensations, etc. No other animal is capable of that.

Human consciousness is also conscious of itself. I don't think this is unique to us. A dog knows the difference between itself and everything else. Lacking general representation it probably doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about that, because why would it?

Dogs have personality--so do cats, and pigs, and quite a few other creatures--and that reflects differences in individual consciousness. It is unlikely that animals are unaware of these differences, because dealing with them is fundamental to what consciousness was selected by evolution to do. A dog capable of figuring out which other dogs are nasty and mean and which ones are friendly and generous is going to have more puppies than one that can't. In evolutionary terms that's called "selective pressure".

The bigger difference that human consciousness has from other animals is the degree to which our conscious self is able to work in concert with others. This too is an evolved trait.

The human self has four layers. The first two are relatively simple and shared with many other animals: the inchoate awareness of everything in a newborn, and the consolidated self of early infancy, which clearly distinguishes between itself and everything else.

The next layer is the interpersonal self, which develops between seven and fifteen months if the child is given stimulation, interaction, and nurturing. It can be seen in multi-modal play, where the child cannot respond appropriately unless it can define itself in contrast to another knowing subject. A care-giver might hear the child making a rhythmic sound--as children are apt to do--and move their hand to the beat. The two modes--sound and motion--are completely unrelated, except through the mind of the care-giver. The child, recognizing that, begins to understand themselves as part of a loop, in relation to other minds: me, the world, you, the world, me.

A child that is not given adequate opportunities for this kind of experience in the crucial development window of seven to fifteen months will struggle with human interaction for the rest of their life. Even more-so if the reason why they were subject to parental neglect is that they were autistic, and therefore perhaps possessed of a somewhat less robust capacity for the development of the interpersonal self to begin with.

Beyond the inter-personal self is the verbal self: the kind of consciousness that uses words, abstractions, concepts, ideas to represent the world and itself to itself. Hyper-verbality can be a compensation for a poorly-developed interpersonal self.

The interpersonal self allows consciousness to produce highly organized behaviour in groups of individuals. A person with a robustly developed interpersonal self is capable of identifying not just with their own consciousness, but with what they imagine the consciousness of others to be. This is most powerful and effective when the others are "like them" in the organization of their own consciousness: when they have the same biases, presumptions, and proclivities. But it can be made to work among virtually any group of humans.

Social insects exhibit a degree of organized group behaviour in response to their environment--this is nature's version of "intelligence without consciousness", just as snakes are nature's version of "terrestrial locomotion without feet"--but social insects are extremely limited in their behaviour repertoire compared to what humans are capable of, both in terms of complexity and scope. An ant colony is a very organized place, but it's nothing compared to a country, where far-distant people with almost nothing in common can co-ordinate their activities effectively to bring about desired outcomes.

Consciousness is an evolved characteristic that enables behavioural complexity which nature has no other way of achieving. Just as everyone has different legs with different capabilities, everyone has a different consciousness with a different personality. The interpersonal self allows neurotypical humans to weakly connect their individual consciousnesses to each other well enough to coordinate large-scale behaviour in a way not available to most other animals, which is what is behind the folk ontology that "all consciousness is one". Taking this folk ontology literally necessarily involves Creationist-level evolution-denial, which is a surprisingly popular thing among people who do not in the ordinary course of things consider themselves evolution-deniers.