This is a copy of a discussion post made for students in the course Philosophy of Mind at the Australian National University, 2019. It isn’t intended as a rigorous examination of ideas, more as a kickstarter for conversation. Please forgive (and point out!) any errors or missteps.

I wanted to share a few ideas and resources that others might find interesting. I hope someone finds them useful for expanding their knowledge in this field. Writing this all out took a bit of time, and I could’ve spent a lot more time still polishing it — so please recognize it’s a bit rough. I’m trying to connect a whole lot of disparate yet inter-related ideas, and I only had so much free time to do so. As such, this is not a perfect nor wholly accurate representation of these ideas, but hopefully it’s enough to spark some curiosity, discussion, interest, and a desire to do your own reading and thinking!

Tl;dr — You can get at least some of what I’m saying below out of this talk given by Peter Watts (2017).

-

Forget about answering what consciousness is. First, ask what it is good for.

In this course we’ll focus at times on the question “what is consciousness”? We’ve been trying to answer this question for millennia, and for most of that time, we’ve been trying to reason our way towards an answer. We haven’t gotten very far with that method when it comes to delivering conclusive answers. With the rapid technological and scientific advancement seen since the Renaissance, and accelerating through the Industrial Revolution and Information Age, we’ve been able to incorporate other methods beyond reasoning. We’re now at a point we can rephrase the question and instead ask: “What is consciousness good for?”

This question fundamentally changes things. It tries to aim instead at uncovering the functional role of consciousness. This rephrasing allows STEM disciplines like evolutionary biology and AI development to use the scientific method and other means to push our understanding of consciousness much closer towards something definitive. Why? Because the hypotheses emerging from this question are testable, falsifiable, and predictive. We can whittle away potential answers until only one remains as the likely solution. Many ideas enter, only one leaves. The Thunderdome is open for business!

Why would nature select for consciousness?

Under a theory of evolution, we must have evolved consciousness because it confers some kind of selective advantage. Here are some theories as to what that advantage might be:

Theory 1: It allows us to efficiently traverse physical space: Consciousness emerges from the solutions to the problem of navigating a physical space: Non-mobile species have much simpler (de-centralized) brains. Mobile species, by comparison, develop complex, centralized brains. This idea comes from Merker (2005) who suggests that ‘consciousness arose as a solution to problems in the logistics of decision making in mobile animals with centralized brains’. In this theory, consciousness is essentially the solution to a very complex problem.

Theory 2: It allows us to resolve conflicting motor commands: When multiple, simultaneous and conflicting commands are given to the skeleton-muscular system — that’s when we wake up. Any entity that cannot resolve the conflicting commands would be incapable of effectively influencing skeletomotor action — it might, almost literally, take two steps forward and one step back — and nature would select aggressively against that. This idea comes from (Morsella, 2005):

‘Supramodular interaction theory proposes that phenomenal states play an essential role in permitting interactions among supramodular response systems — agentic, independent, multimodal, information-processing structures defined by their concerns (e.g., instrumental action vs. certain bodily needs). Unlike unconscious processes (e.g., pupillary reflex), these processes may conflict with skeletal muscle plans, as described by the principle of parallel responses into skeletal muscle (PRISM). Without phenomenal states, these systems would be encapsulated and incapable of collectively influencing skeletomotor action.’

That’s a lot of jargon there, but essentially the idea is this: The brain is composed of many discrete systems. Some are input systems (vision, hearing, touch, and so on) and some are command systems (issuing the command to walk, breathe, and so on). These systems can conflict at times. Imagine, for example, that you are dying of thirst and need to run across extremely hot sand to get to water. Consciousness allows us to do that — to put aside the momentary pain of burning feet in order to achieve a longer-term objective. A less conscious, or non-conscious creature would turn around once its feet were burned. A conscious animal has a longer horizon and sets longer-term goals. Once again, nature would select aggressively for any creature capable of this kind of thinking.

This type of consciousness is possible because each discrete system (input and command) is fed into a centralized “supramodular” system. That centralized system acts as a kind of referee; weighing the different inputs and desires/commands and arriving at a final decision.

Importantly, Theory #1 and #2 are compatible, even complimentary. Navigating physical space is the kind of complex challenge that is likely to give rise to a consciousness and represent exactly the kind of conflict the hot desert sand and oasis illustrate.

I find Morsella’s paper especially fascinating, however, because it leaves the door open for other types of consciousness — different either in what makes them up (the building blocks), or what type of consciousness results. In other words, that consciousness evolved on Earth due to the biological systems we have only means that it was a sufficient condition for that emergence, but not a necessary one.

In terms of other types of consciousness, Morsella describes how our current model is good enough for consciousness to emerge but could still be optimized further. As many have argued, natural selection isn’t really “survival of the fittest” but of the “most adequate”. Once a solution is selected for, that system may become highly stable. Without any further advantageous mutations, there may be no further optimization to select for. This may be the case for human consciousness: it’s not the best it can be, but it was good enough to beat everything else it was up against.

How might human consciousness be considered sub-optimal? It has to do with the concept Morsella describes as “chronic engagement”:

‘Although one could easily imagine more efficient arrangements that invoke phenomenal states only under conditions of conflict, chronic engagement happens to be a rather parsimonious and, in some sense, efficient evolutionary solution to the problem of intersystem interaction. Just as traffic lights, pool filters, and ball-return machines at bowling alleys operate and expend energy continuously (regardless of whether their function is presently needed), chronic engagement is “efficiently inefficient” in the sense that it does not require additional mechanisms to determine whether channels of cross-talk should be open or closed. (In addition, not requiring a supervisory, decision-making component adds to SIT’s parsimony; Kimberg, D’Esposito, & Farah, 1997.) Such deceptively inefficient solutions can be observed in biological functions outside the nervous system, as in most biological filters (e.g., the kidneys) that continuously filter a substrate regardless of the status of the substrate.’

In other words, human consciousness seems to be ‘always on’ (if you’re thinking about exceptions to that idea, chances are I’ll address them shortly, so bear with me!). Given the energy requirements of maintain a constant state of consciousness, this could be viewed as inefficient. Better, perhaps, to have something that switches off and on. Of course, Morsella addresses this in the above quote, by pointing out how this seemingly inefficient state of ‘always on’ consciousness bypasses the need for yet other systems that would need to determine when there is a conflict, and thus, when to ‘boot up’ the consciousness subroutine. So, yeah, it’s not a given that more efficient systems could exist, but it remains a possibility, nonetheless.

It’s possible, therefore, that a more efficient form of consciousness could evolve. We can see glimpses of what this might look (and feel) like in ourselves. Most of us can probably remember a time when we were driving, cycling or walking from point A to point B, and essentially “zoned out” during that time with no recollection of the journey itself. This is known colloquially as “Highway hypnosis”. This strange behaviour suggests that perhaps we already have the more efficient model of consciousness that Morsell describes — that we are not like traffic lights which are always on, but that we “switch off” from time to time. We’d do this because it’s not efficient to be conscious of every little thing, and so the brain at times ignores (or deprioritizes) these tasks — relegating them to the unconscious mind (or, in an even stranger conception of consciousness: relegates them to another consciousness inside us that we are not [forgive me] conscious of — more on this shortly).

Simply put: There’s no need for consciousness to sit up there, sucking away precious glucose, when we’re performing a task that doesn’t require it. This, in turn, begs a question: What tasks actually require consciousness to be performed effectively?

You might think that some tasks will always require consciousness. But this is not as rock-solid of a position as it might first seem.

This, for example, is the art of Lee Hadwin. Lee is a nurse from the UK who draws complex pieces of art while asleep. He’s claimed to have no interest in art and is unable to draw with any degree of skill while awake. Yet when he is sleeping, images like these emerge. So maybe we don’t need consciousness to create art? If that’s true, what else can we achieve unconsciously?!

It turns out, a whole lot more. Things are about to get even weirder, and more disturbing. There are a small number of cases worldwide of something known as “homicidal sleepwalking,” in which the assailants commit murder while asleep. In some cases, they have been acquitted for their crimes because it is ultimately their body, and not their mind, that is deemed responsible. In those cases, the jury or the judge concludes that the mind is what constitutes the human, and thus if it wasn’t responsible, then the human isn’t either. Put another way, there are examples of the justice system believing in Cartesian Dualism! Importantly, this specific example demonstrates why this subject is of relevance to more than just philosophers — it has dramatic implications for notions of justice and personal culpability, when what we define as a “person” remains a contested concept.

When thinking about all this; about actions performed while asleep, about highway hypnosis, a thought may have occurred to you: that these people aren’t really unconscious. That isn’t to say that Lee Hadwin is faking it, or that homicidal sleepwalkers are lying, but rather that there is something else conscious inside them — something they don’t have (privileged) access to, something that they, in turn, aren’t conscious of. In essence: what if there’s two humans inside each of us?

Two minds, one brain:

The human brain has two cerebral hemispheres, something unique to vertebrates, and something effectively “locked in” or maintained despite ongoing selective pressures due to phylogenetic and developmental constraints (recall earlier the idea of ‘survival of the most adequate’ and the lack of any further mutation-driven optimization).

In our brains those two hemispheres are connected by the corpus callosum, a thick connective tissue that allows these two hemispheres to effectively operate in a synchronised fashion. You could think of the corpus callosum as a fibreoptic cable with very high bandwidth and very low latency connecting the two hemispheres.

Where things get interesting (and frankly, spooky) is when you sever the corpus callosum. While doing so might seem cruel, this procedure, known as a corpus callosotomy, is an effective treatment for some types of epilepsy. But it comes with some truly wild side-effects.

In some cases, patients develop something called ‘alien hand syndrome’. Remember the idea that consciousness exists to resolve conflicting motor commands? Well, alien hand syndrome is what conflicting motor commands looks like in practice: you go to put a shirt on, and your alien hand swats it away and picks up a phone instead! You pick up the TV remote to change the channel, and the alien hand throws it away!

One potential (and powerful) explanation here is that one hemisphere was enjoying watching My Kitchen Rules, and that the other hemisphere, the one that represents you, conflicted with that desire. The idea here is that there’s actually two brains inside you, but you only have privileged access to one of them. In a normal, healthy brain, there is a whole other person inside you that is suppressed. Split those brains in two, however, and suddenly both of them come out to play.

This idea gets even more obvious than just alien hand syndrome. In split-brain patients, it has been observed that two distinct personalities can emerge. During surgery on a man, doctors anaesthetized one of his hemispheres, and suddenly the once quiet and timid man started hitting on the nurses, making sexually lewd remarks, and otherwise behaving like an entirely different person. Once the anaesthesia wore off, the timid and polite person re-emerged (reassumed total control?). In another case, one hemisphere/personality was an atheist, the other a devout Christian!

A related idea to this is “confabulation”. This is a difficult concept to explain, and I could spend even more words trying to, but this video by CGP Grey does an excellent job at showing exactly what confabulation means in the context of a split-brain subject (Grey, 2016). I’ll assume, for this next part, that you’ve watched the video.

Getting into even weirder territory: The suppressed person inside you may actually be the one in control. Your job is to rationalise what they do. They’re the CEO, while you’re stuck doing PR.

It’s not just split brains that confabulate, arguably. It might be the case, for example, that many (perhaps even all) of the actions taken by humans with perfectly healthy un-split brains do the same thing.

This graph is adapted from a study back in the 1980’s by Benjamin Libet (Libet, et al., 1983). In this study, subjects are asked to wiggle their finger and their brain activity is recorded. At 204 milliseconds (ms) before any action is observed, subjects become aware of their desire to move the finger, and at 0ms, that’s when the finger actually moves. But that point way back on the left, at -535ms? That’s when the brain “boots up” its “I’m going to wiggle my fingers” subroutine.

In other words, before there is a conscious awareness of movement, it seems the order has already been given; processes are already in motion to wiggle that finger before there is any conscious command given to do so. This is a profoundly important (and spooky) study, replicated elsewhere in various contexts, and to even larger degrees. As Watts says: “What this seems to suggest is that even things we think of as conscious decisions actually aren’t.” Despite empirical evidence to suggest we aren’t as conscious as we believe we are, the results of this study, and its implications, are not as prevalent as they should be in the discipline we’re studying now.

This idea of consciousness can be deeply unsettling because it could mean that something else is calling the shots. It seems to counter the notion of free will, for one. The role of “us” is to simply offer up rationales as to why; confabulations that make us feel in control when we’re actually just passengers in the car, and something else has the driver’s seat.

In terms of the alien hand syndrome, it’s like we’re just rolling with what the alien hand chose: We’re watching My Kitchen Rules and coming up with reasons why “we” chose to watch it. Reasons that are satisfying to us, the consciousness supposedly in control, but are ultimately lies. You kind of have to ask yourself how popular an idea that is going to be, despite the evidence to support it. Our entire sense of self, and our societies, are built upon the foundation of humans exercising free will. As the homicidal sleepwalkers demonstrate, important societal institutions like the justice system depend fundamentally on the idea of conscious choice being possible.

Why modern psychology is a profound failure:

I imagine many of you are psychology students, so pay close attention to this section. It’s really important!

Once upon a time, psychologists used to regularly perform brain scans on their patients to inform what kind of treatment would be best. This makes sense at an intuitive level: cardiologists look at hearts, pediatrists examine feet, and so on. Psychologists, therefore, should look at brains.

Nowadays though, that practice has fallen out of favour; most psychologists and counsellors use speech-based therapy. An excellent overview of this problem can be found in the video here (Amen, 2013), in which a psychologist talks about how his profession is failing its patients badly by not looking at the organ at the root of their patient’s problems. Two quotes from that video should make obvious the relevance of this talk to our studies:

“Behaviour is an expression of the problem, not the problem.”

“Treatment needs to be tailored to individual brains, not clusters of symptoms”

Essentially, psychologists without brain scan data to treat their patients are forced to act like psychological behaviourists — an idea you should know, at this point, is widely discredited. Yet this is how we practice psychology today! It’s absolutely immoral, in my view. No wonder, then, that so many people with psychological problems are medicated in ways that only make their situation worse. The treatment for Dissociative Identity Disorder — the presence of two personalities in one body — is treated with talk therapy. Not brain scans but talk therapy. Talk therapy! To deal with a problem that seems almost inextricably linked to something happening within the brain! No wonder these people often suffer despite treatment.

Going cosmological: The mind-body problem in the context of the Fermi Paradox

I’ll finish by returning to the idea that evolution could spawn other types of consciousness, and even sentient intelligences that lack consciousness (Morsella’s point about earth-based evolution creating sufficient, but not necessary conditions, for consciousness to emerge).

One potential outcome here is that, on a cosmological level, evolution of the type of consciousness we possess is extremely rare — and undesirable. It may be the case that human-type consciousness represents something of an evolutionary dead-end; a cosmological accident that is rarely replicated across the universe, and results in unwanted outcomes that limit a species’ future development. A sense of self may be something that sucks up so much damn glucose and interferes so heavily in daily activity, that a more efficient system, which typically prevails against natural selection processes, would view creatures like us that develop a sense of self as failures, or even worse, as threats.

In this scenario, consciousness could be considered like a parasite. In the context of cosmological intelligences interacting with one another, it could provide a potential solution the Fermi paradox. In this case, the reason we cannot observe or interact with alien civilizations is because we’ve been quarantined. As a species possessing a sense of self, trying to communicate with intelligences that lack this, even the most basic forms of communication could be considered a form of attack — as us trying to inject a sense of self into these alien intelligences through our communications.

A seemingly benign utterance like “we come in peace” becomes problematic in this scenario because who is “we”? What is a “we”? The act of trying to compute that concept, as a non-conscious intelligence, could threaten the functioning of that intelligence — like a mutation threatening a new form of evolution, and even speciation. Language, in this case, conveys more than just the intended meaning, but also attempts to import the underlying phenomenological state that allows the “we” (and “I”) to make sense, and perhaps, to emerge.

If I just lost you with this thought, perhaps the movie The Arrival will make it clearer. In that story, something closer to the reverse of this process happens. Aliens communicate with the human Louise Banks (Amy Adams). These aliens have an entirely different kind of spatiotemporal perception (they can ‘see into the future’). As Banks begins to learn their language, she too begins to see into the future. Language between two different intelligences acts as a vector, as a memetic contagion. In the case of The Arrival, the result isn’t one Banks sees as an attack, but it nonetheless has profound effects on her cognitive capacities. Once she starts seeing into the future, she is arguably in the process of speciation; of becoming another species entirely.

The same idea applies to this concept I’m trying to explain: Communicating a sense of an individual self to a species that lacks it could easily be perceived as an attack on their core functionality, on their core sense of (lack of) self. It could be viewed as an attempt at forced speciation, an exgtremely violent act. The consequence could be that no communication is allowed, and thus, the Fermi paradox is explained. We see a dark, empty universe because we aren’t allowed a place at the table! Anything we utter would be deeply offensive, or worse, a declaration of a kind of cognitive war.

Humans, and potentially other intelligences like us, might be the WMDs of the cosmos. Cognitive anthrax that has to be hermetically sealed away and forgotten about.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts

Many of the ideas in this informal essay are covered in the science fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. The book is utterly brilliant, and recommended reading if this subject is of interest to you. The book is freely available in ebook, html, and PDF formats here: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Bibliography

Amen, D., 2013. The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans. [Online]

Available at: https://youtu.be/esPRsT-lmw8

[Accessed 2019].

Grey, C., 2016. You are Two. [Online]

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

[Accessed 2019].

Libet, B., Gleason, C., Wright, E. & Pearl, D., 1983. Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act.. Brain, 106(3), pp. 623–642.

Merker, B., 2005. The liabilities of mobility: A selection pressure for the transition to consciousness in animal evolution. Consciousness and Cognition, 14(1), pp. 89–114.

Morsella, E., 2005. The Function of Phenomenal States: Supramodular Interaction Theory. Psychological Review, 112(4), pp. 1000–1021.

Watts, P., 2017. Peter Watts: Conscious Ants and Human Hives. [Online]

Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

[Accessed 2 August 2019].