How Did Consciousness Evolve? (2016)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The term "Chit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit_(consciousness)) was introduced by The Upanishads for referring to consciousness/awareness long before any of the modern philosophers did so.
For more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfUXXKB_G_Q
On a separate note, I am interested in comparative theology (traditions in general) and the link you mentioned seems very interesting, thank you
---- Edit: For context: grew up in the middle east and living in California now, studied a ton about middle eastern theology and western theology, would love more resources on the east
The best explanation I've heard is that consciousness is an emergent property. The components are easily understandable but their complex interactions become increasingly hard to understand the more components you add.
Also, humans love to think they are special. And in some certain way we are. We are a big step of the evolutionary process of life. Usually, once such a big step happens, the first species (group) which figures it out becomes incredibly successful. E.g. the first plants that managed to live outside of water pools could colonize the barren landscape because there was no competition. Usually after such a step, this incredibly successful species then drifts and diversifies into multiple different sub-species and after a while there is a large ecosystem of species. We humans have discovered intelligence and now believe we are special, but in a few hundred years there'll likely be many types/kinds of intelligent structures we've built (not neccessarily our "biological" descendants, but this distinction matters little to life itself, which has a multitude ways of creating "biological" descendants anyways including things that don't involve any descendants at all like bacterial conjugation). Some of those structures we'll regard as conscious, others we won't. Consciousness will also vary in type and form, just how there are different ways for plants to vary in type of form. We are that first moss that colonized the lands. If you told that moss how plants could look like in 2020 (and it would understand the question), it would probably react similarly as people do to the Chinese Room argument.
No one can explain their own consciousness, so explaining someone else's consciousness isn't even ready to be discussd.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
I suppose you’d get the hard-problem of matter if that was the case? Or wouldn’t you? It seems that idealism doesn’t run into the same problem. It’s easy to see how matter could simply be simulated in consciousness (we feel that every day). Especially if individual consciousnesses are simply child processes of a parent consciousness. But it’s harder to see how consciousness comes from matter.
> It’s easy to see how matter could simply be simulated in consciousness (we feel that every day)
And we are incorrect or imprecise in these simulations all day, every day. For the physical world to depend on our consciousness (and not the other way around), it would have to be a lot more chaotic. The earth orbited the sun when humans believed otherwise, even when there were no humans to think one way or the other.
>A program ... knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mean.
At a certain level of complexity, it must "know what they stand for or what they mean" in its encoding of how to move them around in order to move them around correctly.
Axiom failed.
This sounds like it might be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
Edit, references to refutations of Chinese Room argument:
Hofstadter, D., 1981, ‘Reflections on Searle’, in Hofstadter and Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I, New York: Basic Books, pp. 373–382.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoo...
"Margaret Boden (1988) raises levels considerations. “Computational psychology does not credit the brain with seeing bean-sprouts or understanding English: intentional states such as these are properties of people, not of brains” (244). “In short, Searle’s description of the robot’s pseudo-brain (that is, of Searle-in-the-robot) as understanding English involves a category-mistake comparable to treating the brain as the bearer, as opposed to the causal basis, of intelligence”. Boden (1988) points out that the room operator is a conscious agent, while the CPU in a computer is not – the Chinese Room scenario asks us to take the perspective of the implementer, and not surprisingly fails to see the larger picture."
That's a very good question, what is the first thing our evolutionary ancestors ever did, the first thought they ever had that made them different from all other species on the planet and deemed us sentient?
Or is the question of consciousness purely a philosophical one? since we can't really define the difference between humans and other species? Or can we?
Am I missing something? The difference is genetics, manifested via neocortex and thumbs.
The question isn't purely philosophical though, as there are entire fields devoted to the topic (cognitive sciences, areas of neuroscience, areas of ai research)
Personally, I subscribe to something along the lines of attention schema theory and panpsychism, and the last time I mentioned this on HN, lots of people agreed with this notion: the state of physical imbalance is, in mathematical terms, both sufficient and necessary for consciousness to evolve. (So if there is an imbalance in the realm of electromagnetic forces on some atom, the atoms 'urge' to adapt is what we describe as consciousness, albeit we usually experience the same phenomenon from a vastly more complex and abstract viewpoint (through the attention-mechanisms of our brain))
Do mice? Probably.
Do insects? I doubt it.
Here's just one of the many articles about consciousness in insects: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/expanding-consciou...
May I ask why? Given there are single-cell-organisms which display complex, intelligent behaviour [1]?
Where do you draw the line, and why? Are lobsters with their 18 'neurons' conscious to you? Because they look very conscious to me, although I'm biased (since electromagnetical imbalance is a sufficient explanation for consciousness in my eyes)
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/this-single-celled-animal-can-m...
^ there's lots more to this than this single link. For example, I've read about single cell organisms that build shelter for themselves, not to mention 'the blob' (not sure if the ARTE-documentation was translated to english)
I don't know what consciousness is but I'm confident that it's more than just a page of if-then-else statements.
Are you? I'm not :/ I don't know what consciousness is either (if it is anything), but it doesn't seem unreasonable that it would be a spectrum. That the bottom of the spectrum would be as simple as "a page of if-then-else statements" doesn't seem particularly wild
The fact that millions of students taking intro CS courses haven't generated consciousness as part of their homework assignment leads me to believe that consciousness is a bit less trivial than a page of if then else statements.
Like all animals, we share a common ancestor with insects. At what point do you imagine our ancestors evolved this property that you imagine insects lack?
You personally began life as a single cell, which rapidly multiplied. At what point during your embryogenesis or subsequent development do you believe you gained the property of consciousness?
Would you claim that sub-atomic particles have consciousness? If not, and if you accept that humans have consciousness, then there are two options:
1) The step occured somewhere between sub-atomic particles and humans, so why not somewhere between insects and humans?
2) Consciousness is gradual, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if an insects consciousness is closer to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness than to a human's consciousness.
It makes no sense to say an atom has a little bit of temperature.
These are emergent properties that describe the interactions and interworkings of many many individual components.
It's not necessary that elementary particles have a "little bit" of consciousness. They also don't have any temperature, it not "a little" but undefined. It could be that you can only apply the concept of consciousness to sufficiently complex systems.
It reminds me of how some ancient Greeks felt there was a contradiction in 2 being large when compared to 1,but small when compared to 3. How can 2 possess the quality of smallness and largeness at the same time? Perhaps it has some smallness in it and also some largeness? Today we would say small and large are relative terms that apply to two things, it's a function that takes two inputs. They didn't have a solid grasp on concepts that exist in the relations between objects instead of them residing in the objects. I think today's consciousness debate is analogously misguided.
To be clear, when I say "closer to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness", I mean "not conscious at all". Hmm, I admit, that sentence could be misunderstood. Sorry, that was my fault.
How could that be what you meant? You laid out 2 options, and your corrected option 2 is the same as your option 1.
I don't get what you're saying. My "corrected" option 2 means that consciousness is a spectrum, that consciousness is not a binary property. A human is more conscious than a chicken, which is more conscious than an insect, which is more conscious than a bacterium, which is not conscious at all.
The more human something looks, the more plausible it seems that the being may be conscious.
But this begs the question of what consciousness is, and is not a scientific approach.
1) The step occured somewhere between sub-atomic particles and humans, so why not somewhere between sub-atomic particles and insects?
2) Consciousness is gradual, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if an insects consciousness is closer to a human's consciousness than to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness.
So we're back to the starting point of... nobody really has a clue what we're talking about :)
Did he? or did he begin at the point when that single cell multiplied into a sufficient number of properly organized cells?
That's what I take OPs argument to be, and you haven't provided any evidence as to why that isn't the case.
If you want to claim that an insect has consciousness or that a single cell does as well, why would you draw the line at a single cell? What would you say to someone who would claim that a virus has consciousness, or a ribosome? Why can't rocks be conscious?
At what number of cells do you figure consciousness exists? Call that N.
How does the addition of cells beyond N-1 imbue consciousness?
How did you determine N?
Sure, you could opt for the scientific version of panpsychism, where we attribute a property that we call consciousness purely by analogy to any system with some physical properties. But that still leaves you with the hard work of (a) proving that that property has anything to do with what we normally understand as consciousness (qualia, inner voice, etc.), and (b) defining the point/range where a system has enough panpsychism-consciousness to be considered conscious in the regular sense - e.g. at what size/age does a human have its first experience of thought? When the first neurons differentiate? When it is born? Later? Panpsychism could be a way to give an answer, but you still need to actually quantify this.
Of course, spiritual/religious panpsychism doesn't have this problem, it can posit that the soul should exists even outside of a physical body, that electrons can feel love etc. It is not provably wrong, but it is also outside the realm of what we can scientifically study, at least for now.
If you define consciousness as "something a child has that a sperm doesn't have" you are muddled up right at the start -- maybe thumbs are the essence of consciousness.
My point is that panpsychism seems to me to be using definitions to try to hide away the fact that it can't actually answer the questions of consciousness that we are really interested in any more than brain-based theories can.
What test do you apply?
I can well define "consciousness" formally as anything you like, even as something that vaguely intersects with the common-sense definition, like the information schema people did. But the fact of the matter is that we first have to understand consciousness, the vague common-sense concept, and only after we understand it can we give a precise formal definition that is actually useful.
Otherwise, it would be like defining the mass of an object to be the volume of an object - there is some overlap, and it is a perfectly formally defined, but it's just not the right definition for what you want to explain.
Let me ask you - do you believe that when a photon in the red wavelength hits an electron, the electron "sees red" in the same sense that you "see red" when that same photon hits your retina? What about your retina itself? Does it "see red" in the same sense that you do?
Consciousness of a physical system A is the difference between the behavior of A and the behavior of a system Aavg, that has the same content as A, but mixed randomly (think water and organics of the right weight and proportion simply mixed in a barrel).
This apparently breaks when you start using tools though.
Also, this definition does nothing to capture the difference between a philosophical zombie and a human, or help us tell if there is such a difference.
As for LHC, it actually needs quite a lot of people to be "conscious". E.g. to be powered and able to operate, so it makes sense, that, as an organization, it is more conscious than you are.
On the philosophical zombie I don't believe there's any difference in consciousness to a human, and the definition matches that idea.
Now I'd challenge anyone to give a better definition in terms of the number of examples contradicting it.
that is not very clear to me, care to explain how we know dogs have consciousness?
Spend enough time with dogs, and it becomes hard work explaining away that they are conscious, and most of the arguments you would come up with could be used to explain away that your neighbour is conscious, too.
So what we label “consciousness” is the ability to turn off the connectedness thing. We see ourselves as present and everything else as abstract or distant.
I think it’s evolutionarily adaptive, because the insect doesn’t _really_ care if it’s eaten by the flower. It’ll recoil from stress but it won’t fight to continue to exist with the same fervor that a “conscious” creature will.
But the irony for many of us is we are on a journey to rekindle that connected feeling. A major goal of life for some is to shed the lie of individualism and keep in mind the truth we knew before we became “conscious”—that we don’t really exist separately from the world around us. We are part of thousands of collective consciousnesses and we can only perceive the world at all through those collective eyes.
What I conclude from your statement is that you've never watched a nature documentary in your entire life.
A fly in a spider web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SkOXtq7Nw
Seems to me that this fly doesn't really consider itself a part of the spider web, and it very much cares whether it'll be eaten by the spider. It also seems to put up quite the fight. By your theory, that would mean the fly is conscious.
But... have you ever been in fight or flight mode? Subjectively it doesn’t feel like consciousness to me, it’s more a form of blacking out.
I’m not suggesting that “human consciousness“ is what allows us to recoil. I’m saying it adds another layer of survivalism on top of normal organism survival. It allows someone to move their family across an ocean, or spend your life building rockets to get off Earth.
Like, I don’t think Elon musk would be trying to get to Mars without his human consciousness telling him not just that humans are unique and distinct from the world, but that he personally is unique and distinct from the world.
And I guess I’m saying there’s another form of “consciousness” which I guess I have to call “life consciousness” to differentiate it from this “human consciousness” and that the differentiating factor that human consciousness feels separate from other consciousnesses.
And that was an evolutionary advantage for us apes and our survival.
Definitely not suggesting it’s the only way an organism fights for its survival.
He introduced me to the ideas in this paper that he induced from his own observations of his “mystical” experiences.
It is fascinating to realize these self models exist in a wide variety of animals and the modeling of others is what makes some animals different.
In “Sapiens” https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html
Yuval Harari argues that Homo sapiens took over all other Homo species because of the development of “myth” which may be related to the Hyperactive attribution of consciousness referenced in the article. Humans cooperate at scale much better than any other species (but also fight at scale more aggressively) because we can communicate about abstractions.
Very interesting inter-related ideas.
There is actually an immense amount of meditation on this very notion of an internal model, antecedent to the modern concept of consciousness we've been discussing since Kant, which guides a life form, from Aristotle down to St. Thomas Aquinas. See Daniel Heller-Roazen's "The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation"
Edit: The article makes an attempt, and posits that it is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
That agrees with my guess that attribution to others came first, and our own is an accidental byproduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069
Secondly, even if the finding is correct, it gives no information about which function came first. It is consistent both with the idea that 'consciousness is empathy/actor modeling applied to the self' and with the idea that 'empathy/actor modelling is consciousness applied to other actors'.
In general, it is very hard to guess evolutionary timeliness from present structures where we have no idea of the genetic encoding of the current structures.
[0] for example this study criticizing certain careless fMRI methods https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf
"In the AST [...] was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others."
On the face of it this AST theory would nicely support Susan Blackmore's work on the `meme`.
Recall Dawkins first proposed the meme, because he thought the gene was such a powerful mechanism there must be other similarly algorithmic mechanisms in nature.
In her 1999 book on the subject Blackmore proposed the theory `imitation` is at the heart of the evolution of human theory of mind
"...if you want to know whether that huge male gorilla is likely to attack you if you try to mate with this attractive female, you should try to imagine what you would do in the same situation." (Blackmore, 73.3)
"'Arms races' are common in biology, as when predators evolve to run ever faster to catch their faster prey, or parasites evolve to outwit the immune systems of their hosts." (Blackmore, 74.2)
"The turning point was when early hominids began to imitate each other. The origins of imitation itself are lost in our far past, but the selective (genetic) advantage of imitation is no mystery. [...] If your neighbor has learned something really useful - like which foods to eat and which to avoid [...] it may pay (in biological terms) to copy him. You can then avoid all the slow and potentially dangerous process of trying out new foods for yourself." (Blackmore, 75.3)
"I suggested imitation requires three skills: making decisions about what to imitate, complex transformations from one point of view to another, and the production of matching bodily actions. These basic skills, or at least the beginnings of them, are available in many primates and were probably available to our ancestors of 5 million years ago. Primates have good motor control and hand coordination, and good general intelligence which would enable them to classify actions and decide what to imitate. Some of them can imagine events and manipulate them mentally [...] and, most notably, they have [social intelligence] and the beginnings of a theory of mind." (Blackmore, 75.5)
Seems this AST theory would offer Darwinian continuity and fill gaps in the qualitative theories of mind between other organisms and the exceptional human condition.
Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (1999)
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (1976)
As the population dies out only those with consciousness and... I hesitate to say... smarts survive.
This would have to happen an untold number of times for us to get where we are today.
This passes for a scientific theory?
"In the theory, an attention schema did not evolve so that we could walk around claiming to have consciousness. Instead it evolved because it has fundamental adaptive uses in perception, cognition, and social interaction."
I have never seen anyone else say any of this. So maybe I'm missing some deeper revelation...
The way we empathize with others is exactly the opposite of what you describe - we notice certain outwards appearances and we imagine how we would have to feel to display the same, and so we identify their state as equivalent to what we have felt in the past. This is one reason why it is hard to empathize with situations that are way outside of our own lived experiences. Even this observation alone makes your argument dubious to me.
But it is much harder to expand this argument to our ability to visualize situations, to experience sensations as they come, to feel joy or sadness or helplessness etc in the first place.
My own belief (I don't believe we can say anything really scientific about this subject yet) is that consciousness will turn out to be a natural consequence of how a generally intelligent algorithm interacts with information, some necessary internal state. Most likely, as AI will advance in the next couple of centuries, we will be able to start observing this internal state in the first animal-level intelligence AIs.
Common sense can be usefully defined as the ability to predict the consequences of one's actions before doing them. That has clear survival value. AI systems are currently terrible at it. This is a reasonably well defined hard problem.