The feeling of consciousness is an illusion

Stanislaw Dehaene’s book, Consciousness and the Brain, identifies various kinds of consciousness. It helps to separate the various uses of the words “conscious” and “consciousness”. The kind of consciousness that he has studied and reported in his book has measurable effects. This allows the scientific method to be applied.

After reading Dehaene’s book, I am more convinced that science will eventually fully explain how we hold thoughts in our minds, how we recognize things, form ideas, remember things, process our thoughts, and act on them. To be conscious “of” something – whether it be the presence of a person, a thing, or a fleeting thought – is a form of consciousness that can have a particular signature – physiological markers that demonstrate a telltale change in the brain that coincide with a person reporting on becoming aware of something.

Brain imaging will soon advance to such a degree that we will begin to see signatures of many kinds of thoughts and associate them with outward behaviors and expressions. It it also being used to show that some people who are in a vegetative state are actually aware of what is going on, even if they have no way to express this fact outwardly. So much will be explained. We are at a stage in brain research where consciousness is becoming recognized as a measurable physical phenomenon. It is making its way into the domain of experimental science. Does this mean that consciousness will soon no longer be a subject of philosophy?

Qualia

There is one kind of consciousness which we may never be able to directly measure. And that is the subjective feeling of being alive, of being “me”, and experiencing a self. It is entirely private. Daniel Dennett suggests that these subjective feelings, which are referred to as “qualia”, are ineffable: they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than one’s own direct experience.

This would imply that the deepest and most personal form of consciousness is something that we will never be able to fully understand; it is forever inaccessible to objective observation.

On the other hand, the fact that I can write these words and that you can (hopefully) understand them means that we probably have similar sensations in terms of private consciousness. The vast literature on personal consciousness experience implies a shared experience. But of course it is shared: human brains are very similar to each other (my brain is more similar to your brain than it is to a galaxy, or a tree, or the brain of a chicken or the brain of a chimp). The aggregate of all reports of this inaccessible subjective state constitutes a kind of objective truth – indirect and fuzzy, sure – but nonetheless a source for scientific study.

So I’d like to offer a possible scenario that could unfold over the next several decades. What if brain scientists continue to map out more and more states of mind, gathering more accurate and precise signatures of conscious thoughts. As more scientific data and theories accumulate to explain the measurable effects of consciousness in the brain, we may begin to relegate the most private inexpressible aspects of qualia to an increasingly-smaller status. Neuroscience will enable more precise language to describe subtle private experiences that we have all experienced but may not have had a clear way to express. Science will nibble away at the edges.

An evolved illusion

And here’s an idea that I find hard to internalize, but am beginning to believe:

It’s all an illusion.

…because self is an illusion; a theatre concocted by the evolving brain to help animals become more effective at surviving in the world; to improve their ability to participate in biosemiosis. Throughout evolution, the boundary between an organism’s body and the rest of the world has complexified out of necessity as other organisms complexify themselves – this includes social structures and extended phenotypes. Also, the more autonomous the organisms of an evolving species become, the more self is needed to drive that autonomy.

The idea that we are living in an illusion is gaining ground, as explored in an article called: “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality“.

Feelings are created by the body/brain as it interacts with the world, with thoughts generated in the brain, and with chemicals that ebb and flow in our bodies. The feeling of consciousness might be just that: a feeling – a sensation – like so many other sensations. Perhaps it was invented by the evolving brain to make it more of a personal matter. The problem is: being so personal is what makes it so difficult to relegate to the status of mere illusion.

Thoughts on the Evolution of Evolvability

It is early February. The other day, I observed some fresh buds on a tree. When I lived back east, I remember seeing buds on bare trees in the snowy dead of winter. I used to wonder if these trees are “preparing” for the first days of spring by starting the growth of their buds. Trees, like most plants, can adapt to variations of weather. All organisms, in fact, exhibit behaviors that appear resourceful, reactive, adaptive, even “intelligent”.

We sometimes talk about animals and plants in terms of their goals and intentions. We even use intentional language in relation to computers or mechanical machines. Even though we know a machine isn’t alive, we use this kind of language as a form of shorthand.

But there may be something more than just verbal shorthand going on here.

The Intentional Stance

Daniel Dennett proposed the concept of the Intentional Stance. When I first learned about this idea, I felt a new sense of how our own human intelligence is just a special case of the adaptive and goal-directed nature of all life on the planet.

When I saw those buds on the tree the other day, I realized that there is so much goal-directed behavior happening all over the place – in plants, animals, and even in ecological systems. Are humans any more adaptive or “intentional” than any other organism?

The Evolution of Self and the Intentional Stance

Could it be that our human brains have simply…

…wrapped a fully-evolved self around our intentions?

…that we are really no more goal-directed or intentional than any other organism…except that we reflect on it with a higher level of consciousness, and apply a fully-formed language to that intentionality?

The Evolution of Evolvability

I first learned of the evolution of evolvability from a paper by Richard Dawkins. It’s a powerful idea, and it helps to make evolution seem less magical and perhaps easier to imagine. Not only have organisms continued to evolve, but their ability to evolve has improved. An example is the evolution of sexual reproduction, which created a huge advantage in a species’ ability to exploit genetic variation over evolutionary time.

A recent article titled “Intelligent design without a creator? Why evolution may be smarter than we thought” makes reference to the Evolution of Evolvability. It helps to cast the notion of intelligence and learning as prolific and pervasive in the natural world.

It would appear that the ability to evolve better ways to evolve predates humans. (It might even predate biology).

Of course we humans have found even better ways to evolve – including ways that overtake or sidestep our own human biology. This constitutes a new era in the evolution of life on earth – an era in which technology, culture, and ideas (memes) become the primary evolving agents of our species (and possibly the whole planet – assuming we humans make the planet so sick that we have to fabricate artificial immune systems in order to keep the planet (and thus ourselves) healthy.

While many people will cast this Singularity-like idea in a negative light, I see it as a new protective organ that is forming around our planet. Biology is not going away. It is just one regime in a progression of many emergent regimes. Biology has given birth to the next regime (via Dennett’s crane), which then reaches down to regulate, modulate, and protect the regime which created it.

Evolvability is the higher-level emergent system over evolution. It is a higher-order derivative. When seen in this way, biology comes out looking like just one step in a long process.

(Thanks to Stephen Brown for editorial assistance)

How the Future Changes the Present (Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature)

In his book, Incomplete Nature – How Mind Emerged from Matter, Terrence Deacon tackles some of the deepest and gnarliest philosophical questions about life and mind, and how they emerge from the physical world despite the fact that the laws of physics can only explain lifeless, mechanical processes. Regarding the second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything is in an eternal state of eventual decay, Deacon says this:

“There is the dead, pointless, uncaring world and its rules, and the living, striving, feeling world and its rules, and the two seem to be working in quite contradictory ways. Because the spontaneous order generation that is so characteristic of life and mind runs counter to this otherwise exceptionless current of nature, it demands that we take seriously the possibility that our usual forms of explanation might be inadequate. When unrealized future possibilities appear to be the organizers of antecedent processes that tend to bring them into existence, it forces us to look more deeply into the ways we conceive of causality and worry that we might be missing something important.”

I am in the process of re-reading the book, which is fat and dense.

Deacon makes little attempt to help the reader by phrasing his sentences and paragraphs for easy digestion. Subsections are rare, and I feel like I’m often wading in a vast ocean without a view of an outcropping to pause and catch my breath. I beg for a period, perchance a comma. But despite the relentless texture of the writing, what Deacon has to say is inspiring…almost breathtaking. Actually, the breath-taking happens after I allow Deacon’s ideas to percolate in my mind during a short walk – which I find necessary for getting the depleted oxygen back into my brain.

…which reminds me of a core concept of the book. Billions of years of evolution have gone into the making of this unlikely spacetime dynamical event, which is me: a fully conscious human who happens to be writing words for you to read at some point in the future. The fact that I can choose to go for a walk for mental and physical health, and maintain my equilibrium (on many levels of consciousness, mostly un), is nothing short of a miracle. This is especially true when you consider the general trajectory of atoms in the universe.

But in fact it is not a miracle. It can be explained with a systems-attitude overlaid on top of physics that includes emergence. “Emergence” is so wonderfully explained by Daniel Dennett in his descriptions of skyhooks and cranes. Here’s my take on the topic: when a higher level of structure emerges in the world, it reaches down to manipulate the lower levels that brought it into existence – it regulates and modulates those lower levels for its own survival. Then another level of emergence comes into being, and begins to regulate and modulate the previous structures. This upward cascading of order – this ever-complexifying hierarchy of constraints – is particular to life and mind, and it runs counter to the entropy that is the general rule of the universe. This is sometimes referred to as negentropy.

I had previously struggled to understand the “incompleteness” aspect of Deacon’s thesis. In the first part of the book, he spends a lot of time re-stating the notion of things that “aren’t there” or that exist “for the sake of something missing”, after only briefly defining this concept up-front. In my first reading I had started out with a limp. Perhaps some training wheels with familiar language would have helped, as these are new and subtle ideas.

This is not unlike a small criticism from Daniel Dennett, in a book review. Overall though, Dennett’s review is very positive. In fact, Dennett says the book has him re-examining his fundamental working assumptions. When something rocks Daniel Dennett’s world, you stop and take notice.

The Future Does Change the Present

Living things have inner representations of the world they find themselves in – that’s part of the holographic picture of life. For us humans, these representations are not just in our brains; they are infused in our technology – distributed throughout our extended phenotypes. Organisms with minds not only put a lot of effort in trying to predict the future (which is necessary for survival), but they act in accordance to those predictions.

This has the effect of creating alternate futures – of changing the course of events – based on something represented in the mind of the organism – represented but not actually “there” (though it could be there in the future). I believe this is what Deacon means by incompleteness, things that are missing, or, in his own words: “absential features“.

According to Raymond Tallis in a Wall Street Journal book review, An absential is a phenomenon “whose existence is determined with respect to an . . . absence.” This sounds somewhat opaque but captures something essential to mind. In the push-pull universe of mechanical causation, only that which is present shapes the course of events. In our lives, by contrast, we are always taking account of things that are no longer present or not yet present or that may never come to pass. Thus “absentials” include our beliefs, the norms to which we subscribe and those great silos of possibility such as “tomorrow” and “next year.”

Alan Kay is once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it“. This is not just good advice for entrepreneurs; it might also be the motto for all living things. How else can we explain the fact that life on Earth has continued to exist for billions of years, with robust self-similar structures that persist for several millions of years – gradually changing, only to become better at predicting the future.

Why do we not expect every living thing to quickly dissolve into a gas, or at least some entropic state of uselessness? This is what classical physics would predict for such a rare, unlikely, and delicate assemblage of molecules. The answer is that living things have their futures infused into their DNA, their minds, and their societies. We fight the force of entropy, and we succeed.

For the most part.

Physics does not (at least not yet) adequately explain how the future effects the present. For this reason, Deacon is helping to build the foundations for a new kind of physics (or perhaps a new kind of meta-physics), which includes…

you, me, our consciousness, and everything that has meaning.