Chapter 11: The function of consciousness

• James: "The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebulae, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of the brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed ... But with the dawn of consciousness and entirely new nature seems to slip in.  (1890, i: 146)
• Two questions related to the "dawn of consciousness" question
  
• When does consciousness arise during human development?
• Which creatures alive today are conscious?
• Wildly divergent ideas about the first appearance of consciousness
  
• gradual vs. sudden onset
• gradual: "consciousness is not all or none but comes in degrees" (Greenfield 2000: 176)
• sudden: "One thing of which we can be sure is that wherever and whenever in the animal kingdom consciousness has in fact emerged, it will not have been a gradual process" (Humphrey 2002: 195)
• time of development
• panpsychism: from the beginning, before there ever was life or evolution, though more complex consciousness may still be evolved
• vitalism: approximately four billion years ago, consciousness being inseparable from life
  
• with the origins of sensation?
• with the origins of brains?
• Julian Jaynes hypothesis: only a few hundred years since it required certain social-psychological conditions to cause the breakdown of the bicameral mind
  

Nature's Psychologists

• Humphrey's "just so" story
• consciousness is an "emergent property": properties which are had by composites without being had by their components
• e.g. the wetness of water
• the solidity/liquidity/gaseousness of the things
• the drivability of cars
• etc.
  
• "either we throw away the idea that consciousness evolved by natural selection, or else we have to find a function for it." (Humphrey, 1987: 378)
• The function of consciousness is social: surviving in social groups favored evolution of behavior prediction skills & as a result our ancestors evolved to be "natural psychologists."
• Empathy evolved to enable us to "do" this psychologizing introspectively by asking What would I do if I were they?
• "Whosoever looketh into himself and considereth what he doth when he think, opine, reason, hope, fear, &c. and upon what grounds, he shall thereby read and know what are the thoughts and passions of all other men upon the like occasions." (Hobbes, 1648)
• "Now imagine that a new form of sense organ evolves, an 'inner eye,' whose field of view is not the outside world but the brain itself." (Humphrey, 1987: 379; 2002: 75)
• "Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself" (Dawkins, 1976: 59)
• Humphrey's hypothesis: "[C]onsciousness is a self-reflexive loop whose function is to give human beings an effective tool for doing natural psychology." (SB: 155)
• Implications (SB: 155)
  
• "only intelligent social creatures are conscious"
• "most creatures throughout evolutionary history, and most alive today, would not be conscious at all"
  

Assessing the Social Theories

• "Why this particular [self-reflexive] arrangement should have what we might call the 'transcendent,' 'other-worldly' qualities of consciousness I do not know." (Humphrey 2002: 75)
• "So the question is, 'Does natural selection act on how it feels to introspect, or on the behavioral consequences of introspection?  If you decide on the later, then the subjective experience itself has no evolutionary function and remains quite unexplained." (SB: 158)

No Function for Consciousness

• Eliminative materialists (e.g., the Churchlands): there's no such thing as consciousness.
• once we understand the neural mechanisms and how they evolved
• that's the whole story ... there's no left over hard problem
• Functionalism.
•  e.g., self-monitoring intelligent agency has a function and is consequently evolvable
• and being self-monitoring and intelligent acting is all there is to being conscious
• Close but no cigar theories: "realizing that consciousness is a tricky problem" they concentrate on presumably related things "our, upright gait, our extraordinarily big brains, our unique capacity for language ... hoping that the nature of consciousness will become clearer along the way" (159)
  
• symbolic thought (Deacon, Donald, Mead)
• Deacon (1997): "the co-evolution of the brain and language gave rise to the "symbolic species"
• Donald (1991): "the co-evolution of human brains, culture and cognition"
• George Herbert Mead (1863-1931): "argued that while other animals may be conscious, only humans become self-conscious, and this self-consciousness is built up first from gestures and other non-symbolic interactions made possible by language.  For Mead, consciousness is fundamentally a social, not an individual, construction." (159)
• total paranoia (Claxton, Manson)
• Claxton: consciousness "came along with the developing ability of the brain to create ... transient states of 'super-activation'" in reacting to sudden emergencies." (Claxton, 1994: 133)
• Charles Manson (197?): "Total paranoia is total awareness."
• Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976): searched for evidence of any notion subjective consciousness in historical written records
  
• "There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad." (Jaynes, 1976: 69)
• warriors act "not from conscious plans, reasons or motives" but because the gods speak to them
• bicameral (two chambered)
• unconscious acts
• the "heard" voices of the gods (in place of consciousness)

Universal Darwinism

• Evolution needn't be biological "based on ... natural selection acting on genes" (160)
• General requirements: all that you need: Dawkins' "Universal Darwinism"
  
• variation
• selection
• heredity (replication)
• replication with "noise" (mutations) introduces new variation
  
• Nonbiological examples
• the immune system
• generate and test learning
• [artificial life]
• [genetic algorithms & evolutionary computing]
• Dennett's Tower of Generate and Test
• mind, tools, & memes selected in culture
• ideas, selected in imagination
• behavior, selected by learning
• creatures selected by love & death
  
• Edelman (1989): "Neural Darwinism" or "neural group selection"
• Calvin (1996): "describes the brain as a Darwin machine" (1996)
  

Memes and Minds

• "Memes are ... any kind of information that is copied from person to person"
• e.g., "ideas, skills, habits, stories"
• also including
• habits, e.g., eating with chopsticks
• songs & dances
• clothes & fashions
• and more
• Memes are replicators "copies with variation and selection"
• e.g., a joke (or any bit of folklore)
• e.g., books
• "[T]he whole of human culture can be seen as a vast new evolutionary process based on memes, and human creativity, and human creativity can be seen as analogous to biological creativity.  In this view, biological creatures and human inventions are both designed by the evolutionary algorithm.  Human beings are the meme machines that store, copy and recombine the memes." (Blackmore 1999)
• Memes v. Genes: Analogies and Disanalogies
• genes: stored in molecules of DNA and copied with extremely high fidelity
• memes: variously stored and copied with varying degrees of fidelity