Consciousness and Play of Footsie

[Guest guest]

Sometime back, there was some hoopla on Consciousness, out here.

Extracts of articles on the subject, from the world of science.

Highlights are moi mischieving, away.

 

 

The mystery of consciousness is centred on the fact that while humans undoubtedly are conscious, and perhaps some other living things also, to the best of our knowledge everything else in the universe is not. We can usually tell easily whether a person is conscious, and most people would agree that being conscious is the most important fact about them. Everything they do, everything they think, and their very identity as people is related to the fact that they are conscious. And yet a meaningful definition of consciousness proves highly elusive.

Most dictionaries quote something like "a state of awareness" as their principle definition, but this is little more than tautology, since being "aware" is synonymous with being "conscious". Likewise, definitions involving the word "mind" do no more than provide different words for saying the same thing; having an idea "in mind" is simply to be conscious of it. A more substantial definition may use the word "knowing", but something is lacking from definitions of this type. To have knowledge of a fact is to have a record of that fact in the mind, in the same way that a record may exist in a book or in a computer. But whereas books and computers are not aware of the facts they contain, people are.

Indeed there sometimes seems to be confusion between consciousness and intelligence. This must stem from the fact that these are the two features which distinguish humans from inanimate objects, and both involve something happening in the brain. But it is essential to distinguish between the two ideas. There may be disagreement on whether computers should yet be described as "intelligent", but now that the world's greatest chess player has been beaten at his game by a machine, it must be admitted that some progress is being made in the field of AI.

But few people would attribute consciousness to even our most sophisticated digital machines. And yet their accomplishments are pushing us ever further into a corner as we seek to distinguish between the mere processing of information, in the mind or in a computer, from the subjective or experiential nature of consciousness. Computers respond to signals from their input devices as we respond to signals from our sense organs. They appear to decide what actions to perform in the light of the nature and content of these signals. They have memories of past events and can store memories of present ones. They can process information inwardly just as we can lie motionless and solve a problem, or picture an image, or plan a stategy. So none of these activities can be said to capture the essence of consciousness.

We are seeking those functions of the human mind which are not displayed by computers, certainly for the foreseeable future, and we can indeed find some of these. Computers do not feel pleasure or pain, they do not experience emotions such as love, hate, fear or envy. Nor do they understand the data they process. And although they may contain images of pictures and sounds, they do not integrate these into a representation of the outside world as we do. So perhaps the essence of consciousness consists of feelings, of emotions, of understanding, and the assembling of our sense data into a wider picture of the world and of ourselves. But we must be careful if we define consiousness simply in terms of those activities which computers cannot demonstrate. Such a definition will ensure that computers, on purely logical grounds, can never be conscious. And it runs the risk of proving at some future time that neither are humans!

The mystery of consciousness seems to deepen as we try to divine its nature by introspection. It is tempting to visualise all our sense data being collected together and relayed to a small screen at the back of the brain, where sits a little man, our consciousness, observing it all from a comfortable seat in the stalls! Even if this were a suitable analogy, however, it would bring us no nearer to an explanation or a definition, for it assumes that this little man himself is conscious. How do we define that?

In fact this picture is nowhere near the truth.

Modern brain research shows that when we view even a simple scene, such as a single object against a neutral background, different aspects of this affect many widely separated areas of the brain. The colour has its effect on one area of the visual cortex, the shape on another, and the motion of the object on yet another.

If we are studying the object, our attention must collect together these widely separated influences. We do not know how this "collecting together" occurs, but it seems likely to be metaphorical, rather than a coming together of real physical signals. Whatever the mechanism, however, it does seem that this attention is the essence of our consciousness.

We know from experience that we can think of only one thing at a time; we can give detailed attention to only one of the composite pictures our senses are making available, or if we are in reflective mood, to only one of the many sets of impressions that exist in our memory. It is this close attention that enables us to understand or recognise the particular picture on which we concentrate.

The jostling for attention by ideas in the mind has its most important influence when we need to decide on some course of action, whether immediately or in the future. This is the process which gives rise to our false belief that we are free agents, and that we can overrule by "free will" the natural processes of the brain.

A particularly powerful example of this motivation occurs when we experience an intense pleasure or pain, which in the former case impels us to behave so that the pleasure is prolonged, and in the latter case so that we escape from the pain. It is clear how evolution has conspired to build into us such potent driving forces, because of their obvious survival value.

Pleasures and pains, along with weaker influences such as emotions and sentiments, are the most forceful reminders to us that we are conscious, and are the characteristics we are most likely to believe will never be displayed by machines. But it is my belief that the pleasure consists solely of the tendency to seek the continuation of the stimulus which causes it, and the pain is nothing other than the compelling tendency to escape.

Despite the significant progress made in recent years in understanding the brain, and despite the disappointing results of our attempts to simulate it with man-made devices, I maintain that we still grossly underestimate the complexity of the brain, and of the thought processes which it can support. It is this immense complexity which raises its deliberations above the threshhold of consciousness.

 

---------

Consider the "lower" animals, i.e., animals with smaller brains, down to animals with no nervous systems at all. What do you find, in terms of their thinking, inasmuch as we can determine that, and in terms of their behavior?

You find less and less flexibility, less ability to adapt and change, less ability to break habits.

And when you finally get down to very low animals and plants, you find none, pretty much, except on evolutionary time-scales.

So then what is the function of consciousness, i.e., why does it arise?

Well, there you are; that seems to be the answer to that one.

There's an interesting breaking-point in behavior; interesting to me, at any rate.

Consider the animals who play. What are the lowest (for lack of a better term) animals who play, when they're young?

Well, fish never play (I don't mean dolphins or whales, etc.; they're animals).

Plants never play.

Reptiles never play, not as far as we can tell.

I mean, as soon as a fish or reptile hatches, they are adults, basically... small, but they won't ever change.

But take some birds, like crows, or dogs, or cats... etc... when they're young, and to a certain extent even as adults, they play with things.

It's almost symbolic behavior, isn't it... a bit of cloth or string or whatever becomes something else: not what it really is, as a piece of string.

Well, I think that's the point where we see the first bit of consciousness.

Play is a very flexible way of seeing and manipulating the world, much more than just seeing it as it is.

 

-------

 

Is it that Noumenon wanted to play?

Hence became conscious of itself.

To make the play interesting, decided to pretend to forget itself, being only itself.

And started playing footsie.