Thoughts on the Evolution of Communication

My dog and I engage in a lot of signaling. But it is not always deliberate, and it is not always conscious, and it is not always a two-way process.

In the morning, Otto licks my bald head. He can probably smell what I have been dreaming. I hold him and we have a nice cuddle. Just one of our many routines. He looks at me and I look at him. He is always checking me out. In the process of getting to know each other over several years we have come to read each other’s signals – our body language, interactions, responses, vocalizations…and smells.

image from http://projectdolittle.com/

Semiosis emerges in the process. If there is a coupling of signals – a mutually-reinforcing signaling loop – two-way communication emerges. It is not always conscious – for either of us. Sometimes, a mutually-reinforcing signaling process which I was previously unaware of becomes apparent to me. When this happens, I become an active agent in that semiosis.

Otto is so intensely attentive to me – my routines (and deviations from them). He probably tunes-in to many more of my signals than I do to his. But then again, I am a human: I generate a lot of signal. Does he see this as “communication?” It is not clear: his brain is a dog brain, and mine is a human brain. We don’t share the same word for this experience (he only knows a few English words, and “communication” isn’t one of them).

I can be sure of one thing: we share a lot of signaling. And, as members of two highly-social species, we both like that.

I would conclude from this that communication among organisms in general (the biosemiosis that has emerged on Earth over the last few billion years) came about pretty much the same way that Otto and I established our own little world of emergent semiosis. As life evolved, trillions of coupled signaling channels reinforced each other over time and became more elaborate. Eventually, this signaling became conscious and intentional.

And so here we are: human communication has reached a level of sophistication such that I can type these words – and you can read them. And we can share the experience – across time and space.

Abilities Change with Age

If you make it to age 100, what will your ability profile look like?

How will medical science and technology change this profile?

We are always dreaming

Take a large pot of water and leave it out in sub-freezing temperatures for a few days. It will turn into a block of ice.

Now take that pot of water and put it on the stove and crank up the flame. Before long, it will start to boil.

Let it cool for a few hours at room temperature and it will resume its familiar liquid form.

If you drop a live fish into liquid water it will swim around and do fishy things.

Things would not go so well if you drop a fish onto a block of ice. Fish are not good skaters.

And if you drop a fish into boiling water…well, the fish will not be very happy.

Think about these states of water as metaphors for how your brain works. A block of ice is a dead brain. A pot of boiling water is a brain having a seizure. Water at room temperature is a normal brain.

The fish represents consciousness.

………………….

Liquid brain

There is a constant low level of electrical activity among neurons (like water molecules bouncing off of each other, doing the Brownian dance). Intrinsic random neuronal activity is the norm – it keeps a low fire burning all the time. In a sense, the brain has a pilot light.

A bit of randomness is helpful for keeping the mind creative and open to new ways of thinking – consciously and unconsciously. Like the ever-present force of natural selection that curates random mutation in genetic evolution, there are dynamical structures in the brain that permit more meaningful, useful energy to percolate from the random background.

Command and control

The majority of the brain’s activity is unconscious. At every second of your life a vast army of dynamical structures are buzzing around, managing the low-level mechanisms of multi-sensory input, attention, memory, and intent. These structures are vast, short-lived, and small. And they are entirely inaccessible to the conscious mind.

The command and control area of the brain is located at the front-top of the neocortex. The signature of consciousness is a network of relatively stable, large-scale dynamical structures, with fractal fingers branching down into the vast network of unconscious structures. The buzz of the unconscious mind percolates and fuses into something usable to the conscious mind. It offers up to the conscious mind a set of data-compressed packets. When the command and control center relaxes, we experience wandering thoughts. And those thoughts wander because the brain’s pilot light provides constant movement.

These ideas are derived from Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain.

Surrender to dreaming

When we start falling asleep, the command and control center begins to lose its grip. The backdrop of randomness sometimes makes its way past the fuzzy boundary of our consciousness – creating a half-dreaming state. Eventually, when consciousness loses out, all that is left is this random, low-level buzz of neural activity.

But dreaming is obviously not totally random. Recent memories have an effect…and of course so do old but powerful memories. The physical structure of the brain does not permit total randomness to stay random for very long. Original randomness is immediately filtered by the innate structure of the brain. And that structure is permeated with the leftovers from a lifetime of experience.

So here’s a takeaway from recent neuroscience, inspired by the findings of Stanislas Dehaene: WE ARE ALWAYS DREAMING. That is because the unconscious brain is continually in flux. What we recognize as dreaming is merely the result of lifting the constraints imposed by the conscious mind – revealing an ocean – flowing in many directions.

The unconscious brain can contribute to a more creative life. And a good night’s sleep keeps the conscious mind out of the way while the stuff gathered in wakefulness is given a chance to float around in the unconscious ocean. While in the ocean, it either dissolves away or settles into functional memory – kicking out an occasional dream in the process.