20 Questions on Consciousness
It is most important to understand self-organization and emergence and how this relates to meaning in the universe. From this we find certain kinds of systems that evolved and form what we can understand consciousness to be.
What is self-organization?
There are so many things in the universe the self-organize. They’re all around us, but routinely ignored.
The simplest example I go to is the snowflake. Snowflakes form all on their own. What does that mean? There’s really nothing that makes a snowflake become a snowflake other than the properties of the water molecules themselves. One oxygen, two hydrogen, and the shape of the resulting molecule and electric field allows them to stick together in some positions. When a bunch of them are stuck together, there are certain places where new molecules are likely to stick while other places they’re not. Molecules are floating around in the gas randomly hitting the growing snowflake, but only the ones that hit the right places stick. And so the entire crystal becomes more organized than the gas it grows out of. No external intelligence is required, no external will is needed, it simply forms by the water itself. That is self-organization.
To avoid problems with the several meanings of the word “organization” let me introduce a new term “orgos” as the name of the particular quality that is increased by self-organization. Each kind of self-organization creates a different kind of order, but we can generalize with the term “orgos.” Orgos is idea that something has structure with parts that are distinguished from each other. Orgos does not mean things are ordered (organized), such as alphabetical order. Orgos does not refer to anything about a human company (organization). When you take something and put it in a blender, you decrease orgos: you take something that was structured and differentiated, and blend it into a somewhat smooth, undifferentiated soup.
So many things self-organize. A whirl pool in a stream. Ocean waves. A tornado or hurricane. A river valley. Plants. Animals. Stars. Galaxies. They are literally all around us.
Self-organization seems non-intuitive because when humans build things, they never fall together, instead they always fall apart. We have a false intuition that everything at all scales are just like the machines that humans build. It is wrong to generalize your intuition about a human built machine, (e.g. a watch) and to apply it to things that self-organize.
What is life?
The most prolific example of self-organization is life: plants, animals, bacteria, archaea — they all self organize. Put a seed in the ground and a plant will grow. It will take disorganized CO2 from the air and organize it into the structure of the plant itself. All by itself without any external intelligence needed. People used to believe that an external “stuff” was needed — elan vital — to get life to work. But now we know that elan vital does not exist, and life is fully explained by chemical interactions of complex carbon molecules.
What is emergence?
That is the ability for new properties to appear out of a large number of individual parts, while that property does not exist on the individual.
Temperature: Is temperature separate from the matter in the thing that you are measuring the temperature of? Absolutely not. Temperature is just a measure of the motion of the molecules.
Pressure: This is the way a gas or substance pushes back when you push on it. Again it’s not a separate property of the underlying molecules, it’s really just the motion of the molecules.
Temperature and pressure are concepts that do a lot of work for us. We can make predictions on how a gas will react when pressurized or when heated. We don’t have to be concerned about the actual motions of the 10^30th molecules involved. By speaking only a pressure and temperature we can design a steam engine the functions. Acoustics is a field that is defined entirely by pressure waves and how they travel. It would be mind boggling difficult to calculate the path of each molecule, but pressure allows us to measure and make predictions without knowing the individual molecule paths.
Ocean Waves: A large body of water will spontaneously form waves. The “waviness” of water can not be seen in the molecule, but instead is an emergent property on a large body of water. Throw a rock in a pond and it will cause waves, but then watch as the waves cause motion in the water far from where the rock was thrown. That is an example of top-down causality.
When you look at an individual molecule doesn’t have any temperature or pressure or waviness. We don’t need to say that the universe has some “stuff” that is pressure, nor do we need to say that each molecule has a little bit of pressure in it. Temperature and pressure or simply emergent properties that appear on large aggregates of molecules.
Other emergent properties: crystal structure, hurricane force, life itself, all human capabilities, and even consciousness.
What drives self-organization?
A lot of people — particularly Christian apologists — think incorrectly that the second law of thermodynamics prevents self-organization. Entropy (disorganization) always increases, but it does not do so evenly, and some parts can increase in orgos while the overall orgos decreases. The big bang appeared with remarkably low entropy and tremendously concentrated energy. Then it starts organizing itself. The interplay between matter and gravity amplifies very very small differences to create very large effects. Stars start forming. Galaxies start forming. Planets start forming. And on the surface of planets rather amazing things start forming.
Note: (1) they form spontaneously from their own internal properties. (2) there is energy is flowing through them. These are what Prigogine calls “dissipative structures” and it is the flow of energy that allows orgos to increase. The escaping energy carries off the excess entropy. (See Why Is There More Than Mist)
The surface of a planet very special place. I like to say we live on the edge of chaos. For miles and miles below us solid rock. Go more than a few miles over our heads and it’s empty space. We live on the edge, the boundary between a solid and a vacuum. The boundary is warmed by the sun and cooled by radiation into space. Energy flows through it, and allows self-organization to happen. It is not coincidence that we live on the surface of a planet because it’s a very special place.
What exists (Level 1)?
It is important to think about the universe in the right way. Level 1 is matter and energy. I call it a continuum to remind us that it’s just a big expanse of waveforms interacting with each other. There are no tables; there’s no chairs; there’s no martini glasses, it’s just a big sea of particles. There’s no real boundary to the particles in fact the wave form for every particle extends to infinity.
Everything at level 1 is essentially permanent and immortal. 99% of the hydrogen formed at the beginning of the universe is still around today as hydrogen. Energy is always conserved. Momentum is always conserved. Charge and other quantum properties are always conserved.
What is a pattern (Level 2)?
Level 2 we have patterns built out of material in level 1. This is the way that fundamental things in the first level combine together into persistent patterns. A molecule for example. A water molecule has one oxygen and two hydrogen, but the combination into a molecule makes it different from the atoms alone. The molecule is created when the atoms come together, and when they split up, the molecule simply ceases to exist. Molecules can be created and destroyed.
Most of what we think of as existing materially is actually patterns. Tables, chairs, and martini glasses are just primitive material put together in a way such that the pattern is identifiable. The pattern might be stable at level 2, but the identification of a pattern (an object) occurs in level 4, so keep those separate.
What is a process (Level 3)?
Level 3 we have processes built from patterns at level 2. A process is a patterns that has a dynamic time component to them. They have motion and flow through a series of patterns. The simplest process is the orbit of a planet around a star. The position of the planet is always changing, but we can see that it repeats in a predictable way.
The process can persist even though the matter in the process is constantly changing: like a river where the water is constantly being exchanged for new water. A storm or a tornado or a hurricane or more examples of processes. Ocean waves are a process. Wind and weather are processes.
Life is a process. A tree is a pattern, but the living tree is a process that starts from a seed and matures quite a bit larger. The operation of nerves is a process. Thinking is a process. Speaking and listening are processes.
It’s interesting that when we talk about creation and destruction we’re almost always talking about the beginning and ending of a pattern or a process. I will refer to patterns and processes together as forms. Much of what we consider to be objects in our world are simply forms. Creation of a form is really just putting stuff together in a particular pattern or process. Plant a seed and the tree forms. This is an act of creation, but we can see it’s really just rearranging matter that was already there.
What is intentionality (Level 4)?
Level four is a little harder to define. Let’s call it for the moment intentionality. It is “aboutness”. By intentionality I mean that one process can be about another process or pattern. A symbols is the closest we can get to pure intentionality: it is one thing that stands for another. Concepts and ideas are forms of intentionality.
Let’s perform a little demonstration to illustrate: please, right now, raise an arm. Just do it momentarily and we can discuss the implications of this. How is it that I am able, here, to do something that causes your arm to go up? This is clearly not a simple process. What has to be happening is that I start with the concept which has the intentionality about the action of raising the arm. This is translated into words which are also about other things. Those words are translated into various forms, either written, stored on a hard disk, transmitted over the internet, or spoken, recorded as pressure waves, again stored on a hard disk, and replayed back into air vibrations. Each of these steps has an “aboutness.” I am not saying that intentionality is a magic “stuff” that travels along through all these different media, but instead that when the command is finally received by the listener, it is the listener that matches the transmission with the thing it is about, and then finally makes it happen. This happens only because we agree on what the command was about.
All of the “things” that we deal with in daily life are actually relationships of this sort. A “table” is a set of experiences and expectations that we associate with the physical material of the table. Money is about a set of expected behaviors around the symbols that we pass around. Concepts such as “king” and “country” exist exclusively in level 4. All social behavior and all community agreements are in level 4. Symbols for all of these exist within the material world, but they are about things that are purely immaterial.
What is consciousness?
By consciousness I mean the awareness of being aware of things. Some people call consciousness second level awareness. First level awareness seems fairly straightforward. A frog is aware of a fly within its reach and that initiates an attempt to capture it. Second level awareness is harder to understand: it’s the awareness that you are aware of things. You need intentionality about intentionality. We need to understand a bit more about how the nervous system works.
When you look through the binoculars you can’t see the prisms that are there turning the image over. It’s the same with thinking and consciousness, it’s very hard to understand what thinking is by using thinking. We must not use our intuition, but instead run careful experiments on human behavior and get some idea of what consciousness must be doing in the overall picture. Is see four essential ingredients to have consciousness: sensing, perceiving, memory, and an ability to act on the world.
What is sensing?
Most people have an intuitive grasp of sensing and so I won’t belabor it. Clearly we have basic senses which are sensitive to conditions in the world. We can feel whether in object is hot or cold. Vibrations in the air can be detected by the ear. Chemicals in the air can be detected by the nose. And light enters the eye and is detected by the retina. All of these are converted to signals in the nerves which are brought to the central nervous system.
What is perception?
To be conscious you need a perceptual system that decodes the raw sense signal into recognized, repeatable objects. We can detect patterns to understand what it is that we’re looking at. I look around the room and I don’t just see a bunch of matter. Instead I see tables and chairs and walls and lights and books and computer screens. My perceptual system has to translate the information coming at me into discrete higher level units which I can understand.
This is accomplished with a perceptron which is a kind of neural net. It is a web of nerves connected with varying strength on each connection. A set of nerves attached in this way can “learn” that is, gain the ability recognize patterns. This is well understood because machine learning works on the same principles. A simplified view is that a bunch of nerves go in carrying raw optical nerve information and what comes out is a nerve that fires when you see a table, another nerve that fires when you see a chair, another nerve that fires when you see Aunt Judy, another that fires when you see Jennifer Aniston. (This highly simplified model is not perfect, but it will help to explain how the pieces fit together.) It is the perceptual system that takes the raw material, patterns, and processes, and breaks it out into conceptual objects that form our daily world.
The perceptual system also aids language. A pattern of air pressure in the ear is sent to a similar perceptron which is able to pick out distinctive features like consonants and vowels and ultimately distinguishes words. This allows there to be output nerves that represent particular words. The perceptual system can also decode chemical signals into “the smell of apple pie” and so on.
What is memory?
To be conscious you need memory. Imagine how life would be if you didn’t remember anything from moment to moment. You would simply be thinking the same thing over and over and over until the scene in front of your changed. Awareness requires not only the presentation of the current sensory input, but also the ability to compare that to what had been there before, and to act on the difference.
Memory is accomplished simply by connecting nerves together. The nerve that represents shopping is connected to the nerve that represents a shipping list which is connected to nerves that represent eggs and another for milk. These nerves and these connections are fixed in the network of nerves. When you think of shopping list, you activate the nerve that represents this. Because that is connected, this in turn activates the nerves that represent milk and eggs. Once your perceptual system can differentiate the various actions and things in your environment, memory is simply the physical linking of these nerves together.
Consider learning what fire is. Your senses recognize (1) warmth, (2) a reddish color, (3) a crackling sound and (4) a smell of smoke. Because they are presented at the same time, the nerves that represent these are physically connected together. The network is also connected to nerves that represent the written word “fire” and the sound of the pronounced word.
Remembering a memory, is an act of re-experiencing those sensations. Someone says the word “fire” to you. This is decoded into the right nerve and then because this is connected to the others, you actually experience in a small degree the warmth, reddish color, crackling sound, and smoke. The original experience was these nerves being activated, and memory causes those same nerves to be activated and you actually, at some level, re-experience the fire. If you smell the smoke, the related circuits are activated, so that you re-experience the warmth, reddish color, and you are reminded of the word “fire” in case you would like to speak it. A memory is simply a set of nerves connected in such a way, that activation of one causes activation of the others: the presentation of one feature “reminds” you of the other features of fire.
What are muscles?
Also to be conscious you need a way of acting upon the world. Most people have an adequate intuition about muscles as our ways of acting upon the world. They take signals from the central nervous system and produce actions in the world.
Consciousness requires the complete set: muscles to act on the world, senses to detect, perception to decode, and memory to make persistent associations. This is a process that has an emergent property called consciousness.
How do we learn meaning?
Basic learning is just making connections between sensations in order to re-experience related sensations. Learning meaning is about learning the intentionality that a particular sensation is about. This is trickier to understand, but it happens all the time when any teachers teaches a student the meaning of a new word.
A passive observer of the world can never learn anything about it. By simply receiving in processing information you might notice some patterns but you can never understand the meaning of those parents. George Lakoff talks about embodied cognition and how important it is to have a complete loop acting upon the world and sensing what happens in the world in response.
As a baby and small child we interact with the world, and we learn a core set of meanings. Spacial extend, time duration, hardness, softness, hot, cold, etc. These basic sensations are remembered and they are “about” related things in the real world. On top of this, we build more complex concepts using the simpler concepts as metaphors. We “run” for elections. We “fill” a job position. We “nail” a proposal. We let a task “slip”. An so on. We memorize the associations of complex meaning with symbols by having them explained in terms of simpler meanings.
What are universals?
The universal is a unit of shared meaning. When you and I both use a word, how do we know that we’re speaking about the same thing? That’s where the universal comes in. When I say the word “cow” there is a concept the word is referring to.
One way of dealing with universals is to say that they are real. This is what Plato did by inventing his realm of forms. He felt that when your ears heard the word “cow” your mind would reach out into the realm of forms and find there a “perfect cow.” By touching that perfect cow with your mind you came to know what a cow is. The way that you and I have the same meaning for the word cow is it there’s only one perfect cow in this realm of forms. Kind of a crazy idea. Even his student Aristotle rejected this idea.
Aristotle also felt that there was a distinction between substance and form but he felt that the form of a cow was inherent in the cow itself and not in a special realm on its own. Again the mind recognizes the form because of its uniqueness and we can use words to talk about cows and the meaning of the word is in the form of the particular object itself.
I there’s a third way of dealing with universals known as nominalism introduced by William of Ockham. The universal simply does not exist as an entity. All you have is the word. The word “cow” is just a name for the form but the universal form has no reality. The universal is a figment of our imagination.
But how does this work? I mean when I say the word “cow” and it’s just a name and you hear me say the word cow how do I know that you have the same meaning that I have? Well the short answer is: you don’t. Differences in understanding happen all the time. My meaning for a word is slightly different than your meaning for the word. If there really was a universal then these kinds of mistakes of meaning would never happen. What normally happens is that our meanings are close enough that we can ignore the difference.
This idea that universals don’t exist extends to formal abstract systems like mathematics. The number are formally defined, but have no existence other than a figment of our imagination. We understand the definition of a triangle, but there is no perfect triangle to refer and compare to, other than a figment of our shared imagination. The numbers in the equation “5 + 7 = 12” are just names for things that are formally defined, but exist no more than Harry Potter exists.
What are ideas?
An idea is it kind of thought. An idea is a relationship between basic concepts. That relationship is mapped directly by connections between neurons in the brain.
If I think that strawberry ice cream is sweet then I’m associating the concept of strawberry ice cream with the sensation of sweet. In my brain I have a nerve that represents strawberry ice cream and I have another nerve that represents sweet and those two nerves are connected. when the nerve for strawberry ice cream is activated, maybe because I see an advertisement with a picture of strawberry ice cream, the nerve that represents sweet will also be activated. I happen to like sweets and so when the sweet nerve is activated this also activates nerves associated with pleasure. What I described here is the essence of a thought. I see a picture of strawberry ice cream, these nerves are activated, and if I asked you what you were doing you would say “I’m thinking that ice cream would be good right now.”
What is thinking?
So an idea for a thought is simply a pattern of connection of nerves in your nervous system. You experience a thought when those nerves become activated. Thinking is the practice of activating networks of nerves in succession. do you think of ice cream edit remind your food which reminds you of dinner which reminds you of getting home which reminds you of your car which reminds you of weather the car has enough gas which reminds you of your wallet and whether you’ve brought your credit card with you and so on. Each of these steps in this thought pattern or ideas which are represented by static patterns of connections in the brain. You can sort of think of each idea as a little frozen concept stored in the brain which can be activated, and when activated that’s when you’re thinking that concept. Now I said they’re static but it’s of course not completely static you’re always building new connections between things all the time that’s called learning and that’s how you have new ideas, but it any moment in time most of what you’re thinking, say 99% or more are static neural connections that you made long ago.
These patterns of neural connections in the mind have intentionality. There is a pattern that represents a “cow” and the intentionality is the idea of that pattern actually represents a cow. This is a direct consequence of the fourth level of existence I talked about earlier. Our brains have formed the ability to use intentionality to represent and remember concepts about the world. The neural pattern for a cow is about the general idea of a cow. Not only that but we construct and use words in written and spoken language to denote the idea of a cow and if you and I speak the same language we will have similar enough understanding of a cow to be able to talk about it. But the universal cow does not exist. We actually are dealing with the name of the concept. The name refers to a concept and it refers to something that does not exist.
We should not be surprised that we can refer to things that don’t exist. After all I can talk about a mythical character Harry Potter Who clearly does not exist. But we have the name Harry Potter which is associated with many other concepts and we have learned those associations the same way we learn all complex concepts: by discussing them.
So we see that layer for of existence consists of intentionality which is the way that some thing can be about something. A symbol is the essence of intentionality. consciousness is then built upon the brains ability to use symbols.
How did consciousness come about?
I started this talk on the concept of self-organization. Self-organization builds on self-organization. Storms and valleys and snow crystals and whirlpools are all simple forms of self-organization. Life is another form of self-organization and it’s special because it can replicate: life can make copies of itself. It is replication that enables Darwinian evolution which is a faster, more effective self-organization. Evolution explains how the wide variety of species have formed on the planet. Life is able to find new and more complex forms.
Along the way nerves were discovered and brains were discovered. The senses create signals about the external wild which are processed through our perceptual systems so they were able to recognize patterns in the world and we store those in memories the capture that are about those patterns those concepts. Were able to represent desires and goals and throw muscles Were able to act on the world the cycle of acting and observing gives us the basis of meaning which way can store in the brain because of the basic principle of intentionality.
So what I’m saying is that consciousness itself is a very real thing built on physical components. It exists because the brain and the nervous system have the right capabilities to bring it about. Consciousness is in emergent phenomenon that can appear when the right conditions exist. The right conditions came about because of the principle of self-organization.
What is dualism?
I reject the idea that consciousness is a special “stuff” either inside or outside the universe. Instead, it is a property that emerges from patterns of matter. I also reject the idea that consciousness is a special property of matter. I reject both metaphysical dualism as well as property dualism. We don’t need them. Snowflakes and water waves emerge from large collections of water molecules. Life emerges from large collections of hydrocarbons. A cell has properties which emerge from combining the ingredients into that pattern. An animal body forms from a large number of cells and has properties beyond those of the cells itself. And consciousness emerges and has properties beyond those of the underlying nerves themselves. Interpreting consciousness this way seems consistent with a long line of things that were once thought to be separate stuff or properties (elan vital, phlogiston, ether, etc), and ended up being simply emergent properties.
I’m intrigued by the idea that consciousness might be the fundamental below space and time and matter. Don Hoffman describes a universe where matter and form I just the user interface for to consciousness is to communicate through. It’s an interesting idea but over elaborate. If you see consciousness as an emergent phenomenon then this concept is not needed.
So I don’t think the tables and chairs are conscious at any level: not even a little bit. Oceans have waves but small water drops simply do not. Not even tiny waves. There are no little splinters of consciousness laying about.
Consciousness appears as an integral thing only when you have a functioning nervous system that senses the world perceives the world can remember the world and can act on the world. Those four ingredients are necessary for the emergence of consciousness. When those ingredients are brought together and functioning you will have consciousness. That means I am predicting that someday we will build machines with all of these pieces and they will be to all extents conscious. To be clear the kind of consciousness that will emerge from our information systems will be dramatically different than the consciousness of humans. Entirely different. We won’t have robots that are conscious like humans. It will be conscious like robots which might be tremendously more conscious than humans, I don’t know.
I laugh at the idea of out-of-body experiences. A free floating spirit has no way to sense the world: no way to interact with light in order to detect it. Even if it did have a way to sense things, there is absolutely no want to translate those experiences into memory. You could never remember an out of body experience. The picture of the mind that I’ve drawn clearly lays how senses and perception and memory and action work together to create consciousness. Without those four pieces you simply don’t have consciousness. The out-of-body experience is a fantasy, and those remembering an out-of-body experience are simply remembering a dream; nothing more.
What does this all mean?
The universe has an ability to automatically and spontaneously self-organize. Things in the universe can increase orgos, and have been doing so for billions of years to create new patterns and processes. Along with this, in large aggregates of things in the universe, new properties not seen in the individual can emerge. The tendency to self-organize eventually found a pattern that replicates (life). This open the gates for much faster evolution, and brought about the basic information processing that is required for intentionality. Basic intentionality self-organized to the point where full-blown consciousness emerged.
Was this all random chance? Not exactly. It feels to me more like a “search” of all the possibilities. When you lose your keys, you search for them, and subsequent finding of the keys is not considered random chance. You found them because you were searching for them, and I see the actions of the universe performing something that looks very much like a search: a search for new types of organization. Once a pattern of orgos is found, that organization is used to find yet more elaborate forms of orgos.
Another way to say this: the universe is expanding into the space of possible orgos. Humans represent the most organized units that we know of, and a lot of people have assumed that this is as organized as it gets. I don’t see any reason to believe that. I think we are still “mid-scale” and newer, more elaborate forms of organization are possible. Consider culture as a possible organization that emerges from the basic human ability to share intentional symbols. Cultures produce things that are far grander than an individual could, for example the highway system, or the great wall.
I don’t believe that the end state of the universe has been determined. Instead, I believe that the universe is forming novel states — new patterns and new processes — that have never been conceived before. The universe is searching, but the end “goal” of the universe is not determined. There is no guiding “telos” or “logos” that has decided the final end state. Instead the universe has been set up in a way to find the optimal form.
We are part of that creation, and we participate in that creation. Level 1 exists at the big bang, but levels 2 and 3 emerged from that. Level 4 also emerged from those. Is there a level 5? More important: will there be a level 5? Why not?