Hacker News Reader

Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details.

Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it?

Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and the subconscious in the brain.

It's like the "I" is an impostor taking over the body. Theories and writings around the "soul" have been around since the dawn of civilization.

Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke?

View on HN

Even as a physicist (sorry) I can see a clear evolutionary utility of consciousness. If all organisms as a rule are guided towards an optimal state (survival, reproduction, etc.) based on sensory input and a learned world model, then the second order evolutionary trait that would help an organism the most is executive access to the optimizer itself or the ability to synthesize a phase space of possibilities through imagination/dreaming. Both of these aspects may be what we call consciousness.

This was really well stated. Are you actively doing any work on this theory?

>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

Think of it in terms of salience. Why do we need multiple levels of salience, such that some signals are intrinsically more important than others to the bearer of those signals? The answer is that once organisms were able to move under their own power, there needed to be a mechanism for the organism to have an intrinsic interest in its own well-being. A plant doesn't move under its own (intentional) power. It has no power to move itself into a damaging state nor move itself out of one. An intrinsic salience to its bodily integrity would serve no purpose. But once organisms were able to move based on goal-directed behavior, say to seek out food, it needs to have an interest in its bodily integrity such that it doesn't intentionally move into a damaging state.

An intrinsic salience to nociceptive signals, i.e. the suffering of pain, gives organisms an innate interest in its bodily integrity. To evolve the same behavioral patterns without pain's intrinsic suffering quality would require evolving an organism that had an innate comprehension of why it is important to avoid damaging states, i.e. declarative representations of value which would require complex intelligence to co-evolve. Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.

> Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.

I sense the signature of Dan Dennett.

An interesting read for the curious: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe...

Indeed. He is always good for pithy quotes.

> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious.

But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...

Have a read of Blindsight by Peter Watts, it has an interesting take on this very idea. An alien species with advanced intelligence but not consciousness takes our attempts to communicate with it as an attack, intended to cause it to waste valuable resources on decoding our low information chatter. The implication is that consciousness is empty of content, merely supposed to be the relay from my subconscious processes that do the driving to other individuals corresponding processes. Our over-developed conscious behaviors are thus viewed as a kind of computer virus by other lifeforms.

Blindsight is also the name of a phenomenon that provides some evidence for the fascinating hypothesis that cognition and consciousness are at least to some degree, separate.

The articles are more focused on how the brain works, which imo is equally as important (though not as interesting for me), for purposes of copying/replicating consciousness/intelligence, for example.

Maybe it is important to replicating consciousness, maybe it is not. At some point people thought that an ability to perform arithmetic operation is an exclusive ability of a human mind, but then machines grown to perform calculations better than humans without need to replicate human mind itself.

Maybe consciousness is like calculations? Maybe to replicate it we need to understand it, not the underlying mechanisms of a particular device (brain) with an ability to be conscious?

It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future.

Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.

> why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

It may be just a property of matter. If you set up matter in certain way, it gains consciousness. And that certain way is needed for intelligence.

Maybe another good question is can intelligence exist without consciousness ?

The book Blindsight by Peter Watts addresses this in a sci-fi context.

I would rather assume that basic consciousness is a property of a certain kind of computation over time that keeps state in a way that allows you to experience the events of the world as a continuous process and track your state in it over time.

Of course one could say that the way that is implemented for us is using matter. Then again one could argue that all matter is just a manifestation of a huge amount of computation.

So we are just computers built on a substrate of manifested computation, and we built even more computers ourselves that way.

Thus I'd argue that anything that can compute and keep state can have consciousness. How intelligence fits into this all, I am not sure.

The 'self conscious I' can make logical inferences about the future and decisions about one's own wellbeing that are sometimes at odds with our lower impulses which govern most of our behaviour, and that's mostly it I think.

'Hunger' is something that has been with us for 200 million years of evolution.

'Emotions' since the dawn of Mammals roughly.

Developed cognition to the degree where we can even try to very conscientiously adapt our behaviour towards achieving goals - this is a very new thing.

I think it makes a lot of sense that we 'really want to eat that cupcake, but also try not to'.

Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique.

This explains, for example, the complexity of language.

But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our role in society, the benefits we gain from pro-social behaviour, etc

Basically, without an "I" there's no "we".

> Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims [...] makes us unique.

counter-example: thermites, ants, bees.

Good point!

I feel what humanity is capable of is on a whole other level, though, as we combine collective action with shared goals, novelty/intelligence, etc.

But I won't claim that's a well articulated argument.

These insects are pre-coded to fill a certain niche in their society. A human is born into a role to some degree but can use intelligence to change that role as well. This requires some ability to reason about the self, and to some extent being able to reason about the self improves the ability to reason about others.

I often see the question asked as "what if there was something that behaved just like you, but without consciousness, isn't it just as evolutionarily fit?" But it presupposes that such a creature could exist, and a creature that behaves like a conscious one without consciousness seems like a bizarrely inefficient solution to me.

> "Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke? " This suggests a common bias that you feel like the human species is the only one on this planet that has attained consciousness. Many other species are conscious, sentient, we just happen to the one that have gone into space. Regardless of it's a fluke or not it's clearly an advantage used by many species on the earth.

>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex

Yeah, I think it's as simple as you start modeling entities in the world around you, for making predictions when deciding on behavior, then include a self in that model.

Start simple, "there's delicious food lodged between those fingers and if the fingers relax the food will fall to the ground, falling food is bad, don't relax those fingers", then add depth. Eventually you reach a point where you also model peer animal entities ("if food falls because fingers relax, that guy will take it") and from there it's only a very small steps to also model a "self" to go with all those "others". That's basic consciousness. At this point you are only a few linguistic principles away from diving into philosophy.

> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?

I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert.

We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of being hungry and sleepy, etc. It also takes care of basic memory storage and emotional imprinting. It's the oldest brain, evolved as a simple logic operator, where it evaluates an input, and then triggers a response. Hungry? Look for food. Scared? Run. Etc. It learns and stores memories too. I nearly got eaten when I went over there, scary, tag that place memory with a bad feeling.

Then we have a more advanced mammalian cognition level, where more advanced behaviors came from, more complex memory indexing making the reptile brain more useful for long term storage and more nuanced learning. Daytime over there is fine, night can be scary. Oh, that scary thing over there is actually safe, but let's be careful there anyway. More advanced social interactions, forming packs and such with social hierarchies.

Now we also have a more advanced logical component and pattern matching ability. A rustling of that specific type of bush tends to mean there's a lion in there. When I see dark clouds, I should find shelter because water might fall. I can take this stick and push it in this anthill to get ants, or I can take this other stick and knock down fruit I can't reach. Rocks from over here chip really well when I bang them together the right way, and I can use the result to cut things. Now we see high order logical cognition emerge.

That leads to a part of the brain that helps coordinate the other parts of the brain leading to the ability for abstract thought, symbolic thought, and internal monologue for enhanced creative thinking. This part of the brain is what we think of as "us", our "mind" but it's just a part. Other parts aren't as verbal. That's why sometimes ideas "just come to you", and something you can't quite recall is on the tip of your tongue, another part of the brain was working independently, and pushed that information over to your forebrain, or your forebrain remembers a trigger for a memory, but the memory part isn't quite picking up on the index cue. It's why we "sleep on things", or go for walks and need time to think, we're letting our various parts work independently so they can not worry about communicating with each other for a bit and focus. It's why you get "in the zone" when you're really productive, and it's even why we go on "autopilot" and get home but don't remember the drive, our forebrain shuts up for a bit, or is naval gazing and the other parts took over the drive.

I'm not saying these are the only parts, but ever since reading Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" and learning evolutionary physiology it's a concept that made a lot of sense. I don't think it's all as subdivided or mindless as Minsky think, but I REALLY think is over all concept is dead on.

In short, consciousness doesn't arise FROM anything, consciousness is what the brain is doing. It's not a side effect, it's the main one. We just think it's special and different from animal cognition because we have language. We think and feel just like dogs and cats and elephants, just in a more complex fashion.

Very interesting, thank you for the input!

Apparently be models are improved by adding a kind of attention to them. I thought that was a good way to think of it.

Language is probably a prereq.

You can't be in great battles with yourself without language arising. So where ever language arises, Consciousness of some sort follows.

Ants I doubt have great self control problems cause language hardware is primitive.

Like always it would be better to start with trying to define what the word consciousness even means BEFORE such speculation.

Why are you assuming that humans are the only conscious animals?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com