I knew the answers to these questions on every psychedelic trip I ever took. Afterwards, I didn't remember what the answer was, but I knew there was an answer and that was a bit of progress that could get me through a day, a year, a decade, many decades. I seem to feel most drawn to answer #4, a field that permeates spacetime. Yep, I almost recall that that is the beginning answer.
Consciousness is an ordinary evolved characteristic, like legs or jawbones. Organisms with a greater endowment of physical capacities that permitted meta-regulatory behaviour were more reproductively successful than those with less.
Awareness, and self-awareness, are powerful behavioural regulatory tools.
Does this "contradict physics"?
It happened. Ergo it does not contradict physics, even if we don't understand it.
Declarations of impossibility do not have a good history when talking about evolution, so I'm happy wallowing in ignorance for another few thousand years while we dig more deeply into the details and understand what's going on better. While doing so I like to meditate on Orgel's second law: Evolution is smarter than I am.
There's already a bunch of stuff we know, like conscious control only comes into play when everything else fails, and that conscious likes to think it's in charge, so any experiments that involve choices that *could* be made subconsciously (all the action potential work, so far as I know) are investigating the subconscious, not consciousness.
But we also know consciousness is capable of solving problems non-conscious intelligence can't--there's a theorem by Church that demonstrates we can solve the halting problem for cases a Turing machine, the ultimate unconscious intelligence, can't--so that's a strong pointer that it evolved for purely utilitarian reasons, like everything else.
Again: I don't know *how* this happened or how it works, but the why is pretty clear: consciousness is an evolved capability that allows organisms that possess it to regulate their behaviour in ways that organisms lacking it can't. Not knowing how it works is just ordinary science, in a state of total confusion for decades or centuries while we figure it out. But in this case at least we know where to look!
I think this (the "hard problem of consciousness") is the type of problem that feels mysterious because of an assumed Cartesian dualism. As in, the assumption is that what we each really are is a detached, purely neutral observer that can sense what is going on without any messy contact with reality. Or in other words, that the mind is a container that merely represents nature rather than actually being a part of it. When you start with these assumptions, yes, it does feel very mysterious how such a pure separate thing that merely represents facts could interact with the world of matter. I think if you don't start with the assumption that the mind is over and above and separate from matter, then the problem doesn't feel as mysterious. Basically the answer is that feelings aren't something tacked on excessively to minds, but they are (part of) the functioning of the mind.
For related ideas on pragmatist views of the mind:
1 - Feelings ARE useful as ways of processing and communicating stimulation both internally and externally.
2 - Consciousness is just the ability to communicate with one's self which is, for now, less useful as it often leads to things like "why am I here?" and over analysation = depression...
Thank you very much for taking this question seriously. I've struggled with it all my life (as I talk about https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ ) but so few people really take it seriously. It is simply crazy that matter and energy evolved into something that feels!
Maybe I missed the argument against Answer 1, but I’m not sure why you discard so fast the idea that consciousness could do anything (the ability to “push atoms”). Ignoring for an instant the issue of “where it comes from”, consciousness appears intuitively to be one of several agents in the brain that influence behavior to maximize gene replication. It’s one link in the chain of checks that culminate in taking action. It might very well be a deterministic process of atoms firing in a pattern shaped by experience, but it’s still atoms moving around, leading to more atoms moving around (or not, if you “decide” not to act), all according to the laws of physics. So, consciousness IS helpful and capable.
Now, why is it “there”? I think it has to do with “memory”, memory of both the past and the future. Consciousness is what ties your self to time, the process by which you remember who you (whatever that is) were the moment before (let’s call that “refresh rate”), recursively all the way back until the process started. That’s the past. But it’s also the process by which you can plan the future, because it assumes consistency of the world model of the past into the future. Feelings are part of this process, and equally helpful. Memories of good feelings will reshape the pattern of neurons in a way that pushes you to pursue the behaviors in the future. Memories of painful feelings will push you to avoid them. Bio organisms that didn’t abide by these laws of physics plucked themselves out of the gene pool.
Reasonable enough so far? Still, why do we report consciousness? My take is that it’s a necessary property of any system that keeps a model of the world consistent over time, and evaluates that model. Once there is a model of the world that can be evaluated, or “scanned”, or “watched”, consciousness simply is where you put the camera. Saying “I am conscious” is the response you give to all stimuli that amount to “where is the camera?”. It’s not _doing_ anything, but it’s there, which is why I think it’s sometimes referred to as an “illusion”. More, by contrapositive, it cannot be not there, because if it weren’t then your brain couldn’t have a model of the world that remains consistent over time.
So the key ingredients for consciousness seem to be: a ** sensory input system**, that can shape a **memory store**, which is in turn scanned by an **evaluation program** that leads to **output in the form of action**. Note that by this definition, animals are definitely conscious, in much the same way humans are (stones and thermostats, not so much). And, for better or worse, that affords computer programs a shot at consciousness. Right now, the level of consciousness they reach is infinitesimal: both the range of their inputs and the architecture of their memory stores are incapable of holding much of a model of the world (compared to us at least). More importantly, the refresh rate of their evaluation program, their “scanning” of the memory, is extremely low (I’m not talking about CPU cycles, but rather input-update-evaluate-act cycles, which in a game of minesweeper will happen perhaps 50 times? 50 moments of consciousness of a 10x10 grid of mines and safe spots is not a lot, but it’s not nothing). If all these shortcomings are addressed in the future, I’d bet money that these programs will report consciousness any time you ask.
Maybe I’m wrong for finding that answer “satisfying enough”, but it does the trick for me.
TL;DR: consciousness emerges because time exists as a continuous function updating the universe, as per the laws of physics (can’t help you with those though).
Your arguments all start from the standpoint that consciousness and physical reality are of different and completely separate natures, which is why answer #1 talks about magical "little souls" which could not possibly be causally effective because (by definition) they are non-physical.
The best kind of naturalist answers that I've seen to this question is the idea that they are actually one and the same thing. Evolution created organisms with brains able to form enduring patterns of attraction / repulsion for classes of objects, because of obvious benefits, and since the world in which these organisms live is quite complex and changing, it also created a system of attention, i.e some kind of brain module that shuts most of the sensory input out most of the time, so that neural resources can be applied to one thing at a time. That is what we know as "paying attention", and we see even animals doing it. At least with higher animals like monkeys and apes, and probably most mammals, these is also an internal model of the world that is rich enough to include a representation of the individual itself within it (known in psychology as "self"). When you put these two together, you get the possibility to "pay attention to self", which has all the ingredients needed for the human individual to be able to say something like "I feel sad" in response to its own internal state after a loss. But then, if we've explained the ability to say the sentence, and in the absence of any intentional deception, we've also explained how the individual comes to "feel sadness" itself.
I think ideas in this area go by names like "embodied cognition". It's probably not 100% the same thing, but philosophers have elaborated theories called "neutral monism" which are also kind of in this area: what is really there is not what we know as matter or what we know as consciousness, but something prior to both.
Then of course there is panpsychism - consciousness came first, and pysicality just appears in it. There is an obvious tension with the mathematical regularity of science, but experientially it's unassailable.
And before we discount mind-body dualism entirely - the "detached, purely neutral observer" that N0st mentions as a problematic assumption is exactly what many advanced practitioners of meditation have reported!
"It just happens in this answer that the 'this is good do more of this' pattern evolution programmed into your brain also manifest as 'a sentience experiencing pleasure'. That’s weird.'
I pasted your article into ChatGPT 4 and asked it to "Summarize" and then "Create a new explanation" and I think it elaborated a bit on your #4 with this one:
=====================
Explanation 5: Panpsychism and Evolutionary Interaction
In this explanation, we consider that consciousness and feelings are inherent properties of the universe, as suggested by panpsychism. According to panpsychism, all matter possesses some form of consciousness, albeit at different levels of complexity.
When evolution came into play, it didn't create consciousness or feelings but instead developed mechanisms for these inherent properties to interact with the physical world. In other words, evolution fine-tuned the connections between consciousness, feelings, and biological organisms, allowing the organisms to have experiences and respond accordingly.
As organisms became more complex, their consciousness and feelings also evolved, enabling them to adapt and survive in various environments. This process led to the development of sophisticated neural networks, such as the human brain, where consciousness and feelings could interact with cognitive processes in more intricate ways.
In this perspective, consciousness and feelings are not created by evolution or any external force but are natural properties of the universe that become more refined and interconnected through evolutionary processes. This explanation suggests that the relationship between consciousness, feelings, and evolution is one of mutual interaction and co-development rather than a one-way influence.
This is a good angle. My suspicion is that "consciousness" is mostly a muddled, confused term. It shares a lot of discursive properties with "elan vital", which seems suspicious. Showing the parallel with "feelings" like you do is a nice way to highlight that aspect—Does anyone really believe in something like panemotionism?
That said, operationalizations of consciousness are where the meaty discussions happen, IMO. I recently was reading an article (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Wikipedia?) that overviewed current testing methodologies for subquestions that intersect concepts like consciousness, awareness, perception, intentionality, etc. Wish I could find it again.
I am not subscribing to my own thought and will change my mind if I find other reasons, but this is what I am thinking as of today -
Perhaps consciousness is a perpetual engine that has a definitive (or not) timeline. We don’t exactly know if a child before its born has consciousness and when it comes outside the womb and breaths the hospital air that jumpstarts consciousness. Similarly when we die, where does all this awareness and sense of self and feeling go ?
It seems like some energy wave that’s abundantly available and all around us is able to jumpstart a engine called consciousness in matter that’s capable of perpetually holding on to this energy and taking on a creative direction and self evolve.
I don’t know if consciousness was intended to be this way, but we also don’t know if a lot of things were intended to how they are today in the universe.
Questions
1. If we find an alien race that’s conscious the parameters of our understanding of our own conciseness would change.
2. Does consciousness have any benefit ? Are there common benefits that we all gain from ?
3. Are your sense especially your eyes key to the concept consciousness ? What we can’t see, hear or touch impact how aware of those things ?
4. Why does when one sees something completely mind-blowing feel a sense of heightened consciousness/feeling ? The ups and down of consciousness state means it’s reactive to change or stimuli
5. When consciousness is aware of new things, does it mean the learning existed before and it was refreshed or it evolved to a new state completely like a new avatar. What happened to the old state of consciousness and where does it hide or does it vanish completely.
Bill Powers' Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) interprets all living systems as control systems. This is very different from regarding living systems as biochemical machines reacting to external stimuli as if they were billiard balls. Powers:
"Nearly all life scientists, particularly those who
try to achieve objectivity and uniform methodology,
have interpreted behavior as if it were caused by events
outside an organism acting on a mechanism that
merely responds. This hypothesis has become so in-
grained that it is considered to be a basic philosophical
principle of science. To explain behavior, one varies in-
dependent variables and records the ensuing actions;
to analyze the data, one assumes a causal link from
independent to dependent variable and calculates
a correlation or computes a transfer function. This
leads in turn to models of behaving systems in which
inputs are transformed by hypothetical processes into
motor outputs; those models lead to explorations of
inner processes (as in neurology and biochemistry)
predicated on the assumption that one is looking for
links in an input-output chain. One assumption leads
to the next until a whole structure has been built up,
one that governs our thinking at every level of analysis
from the genetic to the cognitive."
Instead of the billiard ball model, here is an example of how Powers interprets biochemistry,
"There are workers in biochemistry who are inves-
tigating feedback control processes. One significant
process involves an allosteric enzyme that is converted
into an active form by the effect of one substance, and
into an inactive form by the effect of another. When
these two substances have the same concentration,
the transition from active to inactive is balanced; the
slightest imbalance of the substances causes a highly
amplified offset toward the active or the inactive form.
In one example, the active form catalyzes a main reac-
tion, and the product of that reaction in turn enhances
the substance that converts the enzyme to the inactive
form—a closed-loop relationship. The feedback is
negative, because the active form of enzyme promotes
effects that lead to a strong shift toward the inactive
form. This little system very actively and accurately
forces the concentration of the product of the main
reaction to match the concentration of another
substance, the one that biases the enzyme toward
the active form. This allows one chemical system to
control the effects that another one is having on the
chemical environment.
A person without some training in recognizing
control processes might easily miss the fact that one
chemical concentration is accurately controlling the
product of a different reaction not directly related to
the controlling substance. The effect of this control
system is to create a relationship among concentra-
tions that is imposed by organization, not simply
by chemical laws. This is the kind of observation
that a reductionist is likely to overlook; reduction-
ism generally means failing to see the forest for the
trees. Even the workers who described this control
system mislabeled what it is doing—they concluded
that this system controls the outflow of the product,
when in fact it controls the concentration and makes
it dependent on a different and chemically-unrelated
With PCT in place, human purpose and feelings have an engineering basis, consistent with physics, but based on the organizational control systems of the human organism (rather than responding to external stimuli as if we were billiard balls). Thus here is how he explains emotions,
"So-called emotional behavior is simply ordinary
behavior. However, strong feelings are involved
because the errors are considered very important,
so a small error produces a large output, and large
outputs call for strenuous action and a high degree
of physiological preparedness to support the action.
The technical term for this state is “high loop gain.”
In most circumstances the actions take place, the error
is corrected before it can become large, and the physi-
ological state returns to normal with no noticeable
emotional state being seen. But if the actions are not
allowed or if they fail to correct the error, the result is
a continued state of preparation that does not return
to normal, and the result is what we recognized as an
emotional state.
Therefore emotional behavior and emotional
thinking are simply ordinary behavior and think-
ing concerning subjects which are very important
to the person, so that strong actions will be used as
required to correct errors, and even small errors are
"Feelings" are how we experience the need for our control systems to correct error.
On top of Powers universal account of living things as control systems, in the case of human beings we have:
1. "Play" or "degrees of freedom" in our systems, most likely evolved because such experimentation allowed us to adapt to more diverse conditions;
2. Cognition that allows us to assess the expected value of various uncertain courses of action;
3. High stakes social status and coalitional decisions under uncertainty; and
4. Emotionally-laden symbolic cognitive processing through culturally defined symbols (whose meaning and coalitional salience are constantly shifting)
These four additional conditions have led to an internal landscape of experiences of feelings with far greater complexity than exist for feelings of warm, cold, pain, pleasure, hunger, etc.
Ultimately in the West (and now around much of the world) the combination of high stakes uncertainty in error correction in a soup of symbolic processing gave rise to individual self-consciousness (see Julian Jaynes for the key hypothesis, even if, as Daniel Dennett says, the details of his account happen to be wrong).
Personal identity (aka "consciousness") has become part of a control system with feelings associated with error correction signals. Our error correction mechanisms today are working on multiple levels of complexity and uncertainty. Conflicting feelings have become the norm rather than the exception among many WEIRD homo sapiens.
With respect to the relationship between consciousness and physics, consciousness is no more strange than feelings in Powers account (though the fact of consciousness is still remarkable, as are many evolved living systems).
His paper on the origins of purpose coinciding with the origins of life, via control systems accidentially coming into existence in the primordial soup billions of years ago, is especially fascinating,
https://qualiacomputing.com/ has some good stuff on this, and I suspect from personal experience meditating and other people's reports that the reason people think consciousness is non-causal is because pure consciousness without formed content (imagine knowing without an object to know in particular) is very close to an informationless state. However, consciousness is used for binding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ&ab_channel=Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson) which is quite computationally important and gives a reason for it to be recruited from the EM field (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/12/1248) by natural selection.
I think maybe these are both the same problem. What if feelings are just an internal representation of the reward circuitry, a way of our consciousness trying to "make sense" of what just happened that made us prefer eating more pizza in the future. Using that thinking, one can also perfectly rationalize himself into eating meat - animals have outward expressions (with some evolutionary purpose, sometimes even explicitly deceiving humans) that we mistake for feelings, but since they are "zombies" we don't have to care. Or maybe everything is conscious, just with varying degrees. But I think consciousness and feelings are fundamentally interlinked
Hello, I would just like to point something that's really bothering me: the way you talk about evolution, like it has some kind of purpose. This is really not the case, and I feel describing it this way really is harming scientific thought.
"Evolution" as we can observe emerges from conjunction of two phenomena: mutations, and selective pressure. These are very dumb phenomena, and do not "know" or "want" anything - they are forces, just like gravity.
There are multiple consequences of this:
- there is not "good" or "bad" evolutions; this doesn't make sense. All there is are random mutations, and environment that kills individuals, creating selective pressure.
- it's not because a behaviour / phenomena emerges, that it has to be related to evolution. There are plenty of mutations that barely change the fitness function of a population (see genetic drift).
I knew the answers to these questions on every psychedelic trip I ever took. Afterwards, I didn't remember what the answer was, but I knew there was an answer and that was a bit of progress that could get me through a day, a year, a decade, many decades. I seem to feel most drawn to answer #4, a field that permeates spacetime. Yep, I almost recall that that is the beginning answer.
Consciousness is an ordinary evolved characteristic, like legs or jawbones. Organisms with a greater endowment of physical capacities that permitted meta-regulatory behaviour were more reproductively successful than those with less.
Awareness, and self-awareness, are powerful behavioural regulatory tools.
Does this "contradict physics"?
It happened. Ergo it does not contradict physics, even if we don't understand it.
Declarations of impossibility do not have a good history when talking about evolution, so I'm happy wallowing in ignorance for another few thousand years while we dig more deeply into the details and understand what's going on better. While doing so I like to meditate on Orgel's second law: Evolution is smarter than I am.
There's already a bunch of stuff we know, like conscious control only comes into play when everything else fails, and that conscious likes to think it's in charge, so any experiments that involve choices that *could* be made subconsciously (all the action potential work, so far as I know) are investigating the subconscious, not consciousness.
But we also know consciousness is capable of solving problems non-conscious intelligence can't--there's a theorem by Church that demonstrates we can solve the halting problem for cases a Turing machine, the ultimate unconscious intelligence, can't--so that's a strong pointer that it evolved for purely utilitarian reasons, like everything else.
Again: I don't know *how* this happened or how it works, but the why is pretty clear: consciousness is an evolved capability that allows organisms that possess it to regulate their behaviour in ways that organisms lacking it can't. Not knowing how it works is just ordinary science, in a state of total confusion for decades or centuries while we figure it out. But in this case at least we know where to look!
https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-consciousness
have you listened to joscha bach? are you averse to podcasts? if no to both, would you consider listening to joscha on lex fridman and reporting back?
I think this (the "hard problem of consciousness") is the type of problem that feels mysterious because of an assumed Cartesian dualism. As in, the assumption is that what we each really are is a detached, purely neutral observer that can sense what is going on without any messy contact with reality. Or in other words, that the mind is a container that merely represents nature rather than actually being a part of it. When you start with these assumptions, yes, it does feel very mysterious how such a pure separate thing that merely represents facts could interact with the world of matter. I think if you don't start with the assumption that the mind is over and above and separate from matter, then the problem doesn't feel as mysterious. Basically the answer is that feelings aren't something tacked on excessively to minds, but they are (part of) the functioning of the mind.
For related ideas on pragmatist views of the mind:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/#Mind
Or for a book length treatment:
Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing by Don M. Tucker and Mark Johnson
Interesting book on similar ideas:
The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold
1 - Feelings ARE useful as ways of processing and communicating stimulation both internally and externally.
2 - Consciousness is just the ability to communicate with one's self which is, for now, less useful as it often leads to things like "why am I here?" and over analysation = depression...
KISS
Thank you very much for taking this question seriously. I've struggled with it all my life (as I talk about https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ ) but so few people really take it seriously. It is simply crazy that matter and energy evolved into something that feels!
Maybe I missed the argument against Answer 1, but I’m not sure why you discard so fast the idea that consciousness could do anything (the ability to “push atoms”). Ignoring for an instant the issue of “where it comes from”, consciousness appears intuitively to be one of several agents in the brain that influence behavior to maximize gene replication. It’s one link in the chain of checks that culminate in taking action. It might very well be a deterministic process of atoms firing in a pattern shaped by experience, but it’s still atoms moving around, leading to more atoms moving around (or not, if you “decide” not to act), all according to the laws of physics. So, consciousness IS helpful and capable.
Now, why is it “there”? I think it has to do with “memory”, memory of both the past and the future. Consciousness is what ties your self to time, the process by which you remember who you (whatever that is) were the moment before (let’s call that “refresh rate”), recursively all the way back until the process started. That’s the past. But it’s also the process by which you can plan the future, because it assumes consistency of the world model of the past into the future. Feelings are part of this process, and equally helpful. Memories of good feelings will reshape the pattern of neurons in a way that pushes you to pursue the behaviors in the future. Memories of painful feelings will push you to avoid them. Bio organisms that didn’t abide by these laws of physics plucked themselves out of the gene pool.
Reasonable enough so far? Still, why do we report consciousness? My take is that it’s a necessary property of any system that keeps a model of the world consistent over time, and evaluates that model. Once there is a model of the world that can be evaluated, or “scanned”, or “watched”, consciousness simply is where you put the camera. Saying “I am conscious” is the response you give to all stimuli that amount to “where is the camera?”. It’s not _doing_ anything, but it’s there, which is why I think it’s sometimes referred to as an “illusion”. More, by contrapositive, it cannot be not there, because if it weren’t then your brain couldn’t have a model of the world that remains consistent over time.
So the key ingredients for consciousness seem to be: a ** sensory input system**, that can shape a **memory store**, which is in turn scanned by an **evaluation program** that leads to **output in the form of action**. Note that by this definition, animals are definitely conscious, in much the same way humans are (stones and thermostats, not so much). And, for better or worse, that affords computer programs a shot at consciousness. Right now, the level of consciousness they reach is infinitesimal: both the range of their inputs and the architecture of their memory stores are incapable of holding much of a model of the world (compared to us at least). More importantly, the refresh rate of their evaluation program, their “scanning” of the memory, is extremely low (I’m not talking about CPU cycles, but rather input-update-evaluate-act cycles, which in a game of minesweeper will happen perhaps 50 times? 50 moments of consciousness of a 10x10 grid of mines and safe spots is not a lot, but it’s not nothing). If all these shortcomings are addressed in the future, I’d bet money that these programs will report consciousness any time you ask.
Maybe I’m wrong for finding that answer “satisfying enough”, but it does the trick for me.
TL;DR: consciousness emerges because time exists as a continuous function updating the universe, as per the laws of physics (can’t help you with those though).
Your arguments all start from the standpoint that consciousness and physical reality are of different and completely separate natures, which is why answer #1 talks about magical "little souls" which could not possibly be causally effective because (by definition) they are non-physical.
The best kind of naturalist answers that I've seen to this question is the idea that they are actually one and the same thing. Evolution created organisms with brains able to form enduring patterns of attraction / repulsion for classes of objects, because of obvious benefits, and since the world in which these organisms live is quite complex and changing, it also created a system of attention, i.e some kind of brain module that shuts most of the sensory input out most of the time, so that neural resources can be applied to one thing at a time. That is what we know as "paying attention", and we see even animals doing it. At least with higher animals like monkeys and apes, and probably most mammals, these is also an internal model of the world that is rich enough to include a representation of the individual itself within it (known in psychology as "self"). When you put these two together, you get the possibility to "pay attention to self", which has all the ingredients needed for the human individual to be able to say something like "I feel sad" in response to its own internal state after a loss. But then, if we've explained the ability to say the sentence, and in the absence of any intentional deception, we've also explained how the individual comes to "feel sadness" itself.
I think ideas in this area go by names like "embodied cognition". It's probably not 100% the same thing, but philosophers have elaborated theories called "neutral monism" which are also kind of in this area: what is really there is not what we know as matter or what we know as consciousness, but something prior to both.
Then of course there is panpsychism - consciousness came first, and pysicality just appears in it. There is an obvious tension with the mathematical regularity of science, but experientially it's unassailable.
And before we discount mind-body dualism entirely - the "detached, purely neutral observer" that N0st mentions as a problematic assumption is exactly what many advanced practitioners of meditation have reported!
"It just happens in this answer that the 'this is good do more of this' pattern evolution programmed into your brain also manifest as 'a sentience experiencing pleasure'. That’s weird.'
INDEED IT IS.
I pasted your article into ChatGPT 4 and asked it to "Summarize" and then "Create a new explanation" and I think it elaborated a bit on your #4 with this one:
=====================
Explanation 5: Panpsychism and Evolutionary Interaction
In this explanation, we consider that consciousness and feelings are inherent properties of the universe, as suggested by panpsychism. According to panpsychism, all matter possesses some form of consciousness, albeit at different levels of complexity.
When evolution came into play, it didn't create consciousness or feelings but instead developed mechanisms for these inherent properties to interact with the physical world. In other words, evolution fine-tuned the connections between consciousness, feelings, and biological organisms, allowing the organisms to have experiences and respond accordingly.
As organisms became more complex, their consciousness and feelings also evolved, enabling them to adapt and survive in various environments. This process led to the development of sophisticated neural networks, such as the human brain, where consciousness and feelings could interact with cognitive processes in more intricate ways.
In this perspective, consciousness and feelings are not created by evolution or any external force but are natural properties of the universe that become more refined and interconnected through evolutionary processes. This explanation suggests that the relationship between consciousness, feelings, and evolution is one of mutual interaction and co-development rather than a one-way influence.
This is a good angle. My suspicion is that "consciousness" is mostly a muddled, confused term. It shares a lot of discursive properties with "elan vital", which seems suspicious. Showing the parallel with "feelings" like you do is a nice way to highlight that aspect—Does anyone really believe in something like panemotionism?
That said, operationalizations of consciousness are where the meaty discussions happen, IMO. I recently was reading an article (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Wikipedia?) that overviewed current testing methodologies for subquestions that intersect concepts like consciousness, awareness, perception, intentionality, etc. Wish I could find it again.
I am not subscribing to my own thought and will change my mind if I find other reasons, but this is what I am thinking as of today -
Perhaps consciousness is a perpetual engine that has a definitive (or not) timeline. We don’t exactly know if a child before its born has consciousness and when it comes outside the womb and breaths the hospital air that jumpstarts consciousness. Similarly when we die, where does all this awareness and sense of self and feeling go ?
It seems like some energy wave that’s abundantly available and all around us is able to jumpstart a engine called consciousness in matter that’s capable of perpetually holding on to this energy and taking on a creative direction and self evolve.
I don’t know if consciousness was intended to be this way, but we also don’t know if a lot of things were intended to how they are today in the universe.
Questions
1. If we find an alien race that’s conscious the parameters of our understanding of our own conciseness would change.
2. Does consciousness have any benefit ? Are there common benefits that we all gain from ?
3. Are your sense especially your eyes key to the concept consciousness ? What we can’t see, hear or touch impact how aware of those things ?
4. Why does when one sees something completely mind-blowing feel a sense of heightened consciousness/feeling ? The ups and down of consciousness state means it’s reactive to change or stimuli
5. When consciousness is aware of new things, does it mean the learning existed before and it was refreshed or it evolved to a new state completely like a new avatar. What happened to the old state of consciousness and where does it hide or does it vanish completely.
Bill Powers' Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) interprets all living systems as control systems. This is very different from regarding living systems as biochemical machines reacting to external stimuli as if they were billiard balls. Powers:
"Nearly all life scientists, particularly those who
try to achieve objectivity and uniform methodology,
have interpreted behavior as if it were caused by events
outside an organism acting on a mechanism that
merely responds. This hypothesis has become so in-
grained that it is considered to be a basic philosophical
principle of science. To explain behavior, one varies in-
dependent variables and records the ensuing actions;
to analyze the data, one assumes a causal link from
independent to dependent variable and calculates
a correlation or computes a transfer function. This
leads in turn to models of behaving systems in which
inputs are transformed by hypothetical processes into
motor outputs; those models lead to explorations of
inner processes (as in neurology and biochemistry)
predicated on the assumption that one is looking for
links in an input-output chain. One assumption leads
to the next until a whole structure has been built up,
one that governs our thinking at every level of analysis
from the genetic to the cognitive."
Instead of the billiard ball model, here is an example of how Powers interprets biochemistry,
"There are workers in biochemistry who are inves-
tigating feedback control processes. One significant
process involves an allosteric enzyme that is converted
into an active form by the effect of one substance, and
into an inactive form by the effect of another. When
these two substances have the same concentration,
the transition from active to inactive is balanced; the
slightest imbalance of the substances causes a highly
amplified offset toward the active or the inactive form.
In one example, the active form catalyzes a main reac-
tion, and the product of that reaction in turn enhances
the substance that converts the enzyme to the inactive
form—a closed-loop relationship. The feedback is
negative, because the active form of enzyme promotes
effects that lead to a strong shift toward the inactive
form. This little system very actively and accurately
forces the concentration of the product of the main
reaction to match the concentration of another
substance, the one that biases the enzyme toward
the active form. This allows one chemical system to
control the effects that another one is having on the
chemical environment.
A person without some training in recognizing
control processes might easily miss the fact that one
chemical concentration is accurately controlling the
product of a different reaction not directly related to
the controlling substance. The effect of this control
system is to create a relationship among concentra-
tions that is imposed by organization, not simply
by chemical laws. This is the kind of observation
that a reductionist is likely to overlook; reduction-
ism generally means failing to see the forest for the
trees. Even the workers who described this control
system mislabeled what it is doing—they concluded
that this system controls the outflow of the product,
when in fact it controls the concentration and makes
it dependent on a different and chemically-unrelated
substance."
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/intro_papers/crossroads.pdf
With PCT in place, human purpose and feelings have an engineering basis, consistent with physics, but based on the organizational control systems of the human organism (rather than responding to external stimuli as if we were billiard balls). Thus here is how he explains emotions,
"So-called emotional behavior is simply ordinary
behavior. However, strong feelings are involved
because the errors are considered very important,
so a small error produces a large output, and large
outputs call for strenuous action and a high degree
of physiological preparedness to support the action.
The technical term for this state is “high loop gain.”
In most circumstances the actions take place, the error
is corrected before it can become large, and the physi-
ological state returns to normal with no noticeable
emotional state being seen. But if the actions are not
allowed or if they fail to correct the error, the result is
a continued state of preparation that does not return
to normal, and the result is what we recognized as an
emotional state.
Therefore emotional behavior and emotional
thinking are simply ordinary behavior and think-
ing concerning subjects which are very important
to the person, so that strong actions will be used as
required to correct errors, and even small errors are
not tolerated. "
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/intro_papers/on_emotions.pdf
"Feelings" are how we experience the need for our control systems to correct error.
On top of Powers universal account of living things as control systems, in the case of human beings we have:
1. "Play" or "degrees of freedom" in our systems, most likely evolved because such experimentation allowed us to adapt to more diverse conditions;
2. Cognition that allows us to assess the expected value of various uncertain courses of action;
3. High stakes social status and coalitional decisions under uncertainty; and
4. Emotionally-laden symbolic cognitive processing through culturally defined symbols (whose meaning and coalitional salience are constantly shifting)
These four additional conditions have led to an internal landscape of experiences of feelings with far greater complexity than exist for feelings of warm, cold, pain, pleasure, hunger, etc.
Ultimately in the West (and now around much of the world) the combination of high stakes uncertainty in error correction in a soup of symbolic processing gave rise to individual self-consciousness (see Julian Jaynes for the key hypothesis, even if, as Daniel Dennett says, the details of his account happen to be wrong).
Personal identity (aka "consciousness") has become part of a control system with feelings associated with error correction signals. Our error correction mechanisms today are working on multiple levels of complexity and uncertainty. Conflicting feelings have become the norm rather than the exception among many WEIRD homo sapiens.
With respect to the relationship between consciousness and physics, consciousness is no more strange than feelings in Powers account (though the fact of consciousness is still remarkable, as are many evolved living systems).
Lots of Powers' content available here,
http://www.pctweb.org/bill/billpowers.html
His paper on the origins of purpose coinciding with the origins of life, via control systems accidentially coming into existence in the primordial soup billions of years ago, is especially fascinating,
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/intro_papers/evolution_purpose.pdf
https://qualiacomputing.com/ has some good stuff on this, and I suspect from personal experience meditating and other people's reports that the reason people think consciousness is non-causal is because pure consciousness without formed content (imagine knowing without an object to know in particular) is very close to an informationless state. However, consciousness is used for binding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ&ab_channel=Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson) which is quite computationally important and gives a reason for it to be recruited from the EM field (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/12/1248) by natural selection.
I think maybe these are both the same problem. What if feelings are just an internal representation of the reward circuitry, a way of our consciousness trying to "make sense" of what just happened that made us prefer eating more pizza in the future. Using that thinking, one can also perfectly rationalize himself into eating meat - animals have outward expressions (with some evolutionary purpose, sometimes even explicitly deceiving humans) that we mistake for feelings, but since they are "zombies" we don't have to care. Or maybe everything is conscious, just with varying degrees. But I think consciousness and feelings are fundamentally interlinked
Hello, I would just like to point something that's really bothering me: the way you talk about evolution, like it has some kind of purpose. This is really not the case, and I feel describing it this way really is harming scientific thought.
"Evolution" as we can observe emerges from conjunction of two phenomena: mutations, and selective pressure. These are very dumb phenomena, and do not "know" or "want" anything - they are forces, just like gravity.
There are multiple consequences of this:
- there is not "good" or "bad" evolutions; this doesn't make sense. All there is are random mutations, and environment that kills individuals, creating selective pressure.
- it's not because a behaviour / phenomena emerges, that it has to be related to evolution. There are plenty of mutations that barely change the fitness function of a population (see genetic drift).